Genres

[Alexander Kluge’s two books] are sobering inventories of a catastrophe, cool, dry and therefore more gripping.  A card index of all imaginable inhumanities.  Kluge’s books consist of excerpts from diaries, telegrams, official reports, sermons of…

Western Civilization

The uprising of the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto began in the spring of 1943 and lasted about twenty days. Of the thousands of Jews still in the ghetto when the uprising began perhaps a…

The Way It Looked in 1982

In my childhood I have suffered fear, hunger and humiliation when I passed from the Warsaw Ghetto, through labor camps, to Buchenwald.  Today, as a citizen of Israel, I cannot accept the systematic destruction of…

Analogies

If past behavior is any guide, Elie Wiesel must be having a fit. I’m not thinking here of the great loss to his Foundation from the audacious and criminal pilfering of Bernie Madoff. No, I…

To Olmert and Company

How many nanoseconds did it take your hasbara specialists to transform the “Gaza Massacre” into a heroic tale of self-defense against the Hamas terrorists? How many percentage points will this operation in Gaza gain your…

Deploying the Holocaust

Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood, by Idith Zertal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.  Cambridge Middle East Studies 21. 208 pages. Biographies to p. 216. Glossary to p. 222.  Bibliography to p. 230. Index…