Face to Face with Elie Wiesel
This short review was originally published in the bulletin of the Center for Ethics and Social Policy in Berkeley, April 1993. My book, Elie Wiesel and the Politics of Moral Leadership, was published in spring 2001….
Category: Khurbn
A Nation of Words
Miriam Weinstein’s Yiddish: A Nation of Words is a compelling book. Go to Amazon.com and type in “Yiddish” and many books will come up whose titles are cheap, sentimental, ridiculous, goofy. Weinstein has a sense…
A Nobody with Whom You Should Get Acquainted
Dear Shimmelstoy After our conversation yesterday afternoon I wrote the following lines Thanks for your encouragement If you want to pass it on To some of your students Go right ahead Bella Levenshteyn He…
Lessons
The lesson of the Holocaust is the facility with which most people, put into a situation that does not contain a good choice, or renders such a good choice very costly, argue themselves away from…
Burning Children and the Duty to Resist
In May 1968 Jesuit priest Daniel Berrigan wrote a statement on behalf of the Catonsville Nine as to why they were performing an act of civil disobedience in protest of the Vietnam War. It reads,…
The Way It Looked in 1999
Oslo required us to forget and renounce our history of loss and dispossession by the very people who have taught everyone the importance of not forgetting the past. Thus, ironically, we are the victims of…
Compromismo (Touching a Nerve)
On a summer day in 1944 My mother was herded from a cattle car Along with the rest of its human cargo Which had been transported from Belgrade To the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen She…
The Roles That Made It Possible
Neither superhuman nor subhuman Neither God Nor animal Nor monster. But always simply Additional kinds of humans: The bomb droppers The capo The body burners The throat slashers The exterminators in the forest The scalpers…
Shema, Primo Levi
You who live secure In your warm houses Who return at evening to find Hot food and friendly faces: Consider whether this is a man, Who labours in the mud Who knows no peace Who…
On Segev’s The 7th Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust
The following is a short summary and commonplace passages with comments on Tom Segev’s book, The 7th Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust. It’s one of the many books I examined when writing my first…