More in ‘Elie Wiesel’

60secondrecap publishes quick video summaries of great books on its Website, and this week, it gave the full treatment to Elie Wiesel’s classic Holocaust memoir Night.
Definitely seems like a good way to introduce a middle-schooler to the book. If you’re reading this and over the age of 20 or 25 or so, and still haven’t ...

• James Hoge, the broadly respected editor of Foreign Affairs, will become the new head of Human Rights Watch. The group has been accused in the past of an anti-Israel bias. [Laura Rozen]
• Elie Wiesel says he “would not shed a tear” if Mahmoud Ahmadinejad died. [Haaretz]
• A dispatch describes the fledgling Jewish community of ...

• Did Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tip the U.S. hand? She said “the 1967 borders, with swaps, should be the focus of the negotiations over borders,” maybe revealing plans to use the Green Line as a basis for the final status. [NYT]
• While Europe and even Russia have toughened of late, China indicated that ...

Shabbat observance is something I prefer to do at home, with my family and friends. While traveling, I don’t seek a Chabad house for a Shabbat dinner, or blast out an email to see if a friend of a third cousin is in Beijing, or Tokyo, and wants to play host to a wandering Jew. ...

Given the remarkable successes of Elie Wiesel’s Night and The Diary of Anne Frank—the latter of which receives an exemplary close reading by Francine Prose in Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the After Life (HarperCollins, October), as discussed last week on Vox Tablet—publishers know that stories about the Nazis’ youngest, most vulnerable victims have ...

Poland summons up nightmare images for many Jews; the very word evokes the tragedies of Auschwitz-Birkenau and the Warsaw Ghetto. The latter receives long overdue, and nearly exhaustive treatment in The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to the Perished City (Yale, July), by two Warsaw-based historians, Barbara Engelking and Jacek Leociak. Given the extent and intensity of Jewish suffering on Polish soil in the mid-20th century, no wonder that many Jews associate the country withtsuris or that in Maus, Art Spiegelman represents Poles as pigs, the very trayfest of the trayf.

We noted yesterday that Jewish gravestones had been found on the golf course at Long Island’s Woodmere Club. Today, photographer Ahron D. Weiner presents his photographs of some of the stones. Our book critic Adam Kirsch reflects on Elie Wiesel’s Rashi, and the ways in which the influence of the 11th-century sage is still felt ...

The idea that there is a Jewish genius for commentary—more, that in some way commentary, or criticism, or interpretation, represents the truly Jewish way of engaging with literature, and even with the world—has appealed to many modern Jewish writers. And certainly there is no shortage of examples to support this idea. Georg Morris Cohen Brandes, the late-19th century Danish Jewish critic, was responsible for introducing the works of Nietzsche and Ibsen to Europe. Walter Benjamin, perhaps the most influential theorist of modernism, elevated criticism and commentary to a high art, even a metaphysical principle; to Benjamin, everything that exists, from language to the stars, is a kind of text waiting for its commentator.

• A proposed animal-welfare law in Israel would outlaw the import of products made from the fur of dogs, cats, or rabbits. Apparently, this would encompass shtreimels, hats worn by Hasidic Jews on special occasions. Knesset Member Menachem Eliezer Moses calls a ban “inconceivable,” despite the fact that synthetic shtreimels are perfectly kosher. [Arutz Sheva]
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