Inexpressible, Expressible

Whether culmination or aberration of history, the Holocaust transcends history. Everything about it inspires fear and leads to despair. The dead are in possession of a secret that we, the living, are neither worthy of…

When Life Starts to Improve

Leo Tolstoy, Spiritual Writings, edited by Charles E. Moore Prophetic witness consists of human deeds of justice and kindness that attend to the unjust sources of human hurt and misery. It calls attention to the…

The Good News of Tablet!

Given some of my preoccupations over the decades, I am grateful to have recently discovered Alana Newhouse’s Tablet. The following are a few essays and interviews that focused my mindfulness and provoked my gratitude. Rokhl…

Remembrance of Teachers Past

Elie Wiesel, Somewhere a Master: Further Hasidic Portraits and Legends This is Elie Wiesel’s third of four installments thus far on his favorite Hasidic teachers, the ones whose tales enchanted him in his childhood, the…

Yiddish Writers

H. Leivick I have often felt that instead of writing my autobiography I would like to write the biography of my poems. I mean, tell the life story of some of my poems… Sholem Aleichem…

Activists

Hatred/2 by Hedy Epstein Throughout the 1960s, I became involved in local civil and human rights activities, as well as anti-Vietnam war protests. In the spring of 1970, it became public knowledge in the United…