Tag: Elie Wiesel

Remembering Shammai

Shabes morning I fix a period for reading My three “rabbis” recently deceased— Harold Bloom, whose extended family on both sides perished in Europe Every boy but one in George Steiner’s lycée lived after the…

Inspirations

[A Beggar in Jerusalem] is neither novel nor anti-novel, neither fiction nor autobiography, neither poem nor prose—it is all this together. — Elie Wiesel My idea of the ideal text is still the Talmud. I…

The Power of Footnotes

1. My idea of the ideal text is still the Talmud. I love the idea of parallel texts, with long, discursive footnotes and marginal commentary, texts commenting on texts. –Noam Chomsky, Mother Jones interview, 1987…

A Monument Made of Words

Isaac Bashevis Singer, In My Father’s Court June 1998 After we had left Warsaw (during the First World War), we continued to hear news of him from time to time.  One son died, a daughter…

Hasidism

You can take everything from me—the pillow from under my head, my house—but you cannot take God away from my heart. — Nahman of Bratslav Everything the true Hasid does or does not do mirrors…

Raising the Alarm, Or Not

I just finished the book Witness: Lessons from Elie Wiesel’s Classroom  by Ariel Burger and found this interview segment on Wiesel and Palestinian Rights. Burger quotes Wiesel as follows, which reminds  me of Israeli journalists Gideon Levy…

Remembering Is Not Enough

Hilene Flanzbaum, The Americanization of the Holocaust The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999 The following  note is from summer 1999 when I was reworking my dissertation to what would become my first book, Elie Wiesel…