This week’s winner is Leor Blumenthal, who was prompted by Liel Leibovitz’s “Arbiter” on the Star Wars movies to mount an intricate exegesis on the most controversial scene in them all: the meeting between Han Solo and Greedo in the Mos Eisley cantina (original, new edition). Blumenthal argues:

It is interesting that Liel raises the “Han shot first” ruckus without mentioning that al pi Halakha what Han did was absolutely moral. Greedo came to collect a debt. Han, a shomer sakhar in Jabba’s employ, was forced to jettison the cargo he was delivering for Jabba. Han insists to Greedo that he doesn’t have the cash to pay Jabba the debt, but will soon (once he gets back from ferrying the old man, boy and two droids to Alderaan). Greedo instead insists that he has the right to seize Han’s ship. When Han refuses (“Over my dead body!”) Greedo threatens to kill Han. At this point Greedo is a rodef, and even if he hasn’t pulled the trigger on his blaster pistol, the fact that he IS pointing one at Han, entitles Han to kill Greedo to save his life. But that is not good enough for the Lucas of 1997. :(

(Italics and links are mine; emoticon is his.)

This may not be the single best justification for Han shot first, but it’s certainly the most theological. Blumenthal gets a copy of Elie Wiesel’s Rashi, because the great Talmudist would have appreciated this argument.

Monomaniacal [Tablet Magazine]
Rashi [Nextbook Press]

The National Museum of the Jewish People, as the plans call it, would occupy a delicate structure tucked into a hidden courtyard between a new hotel in the hulking, turreted Old Post Office building and the equally imposing headquarters of the Internal Revenue Service next door. “We would be the tail wagging the dog,” said Julius Kaplan, a Washington lawyer who is chairman of the decade-old nonprofit devoted to the museum effort, in a phone interview last week. The museum’s website mentions support from prominent Jewish figures—Elie Wiesel, Itzhak Perlman—as well as less-obvious supporters like Pakistan’s former ambassador to Washington, Jamsheed Marker, who along with Wiesel and Perlman is listed as an honorary trustee. For the bid, Kaplan recruited Daniel Libeskind, the architect of the Berlin Jewish Museum, who imagined an angular building surrounded by a tiered garden that would include an elevated High Line-style bower over an arcade threaded between the two landmark buildings and out to the street, where visitors would be welcomed with a sign in Hebrew reading pardes—a word frequently interpreted to mean Eden.

What wonders might fill this particular Jewish paradise, should it come to fruition, are a little harder to discern. The project’s backers advertise a handful of existing public commitments—including a promise from Arlette Snyder, mother of Redskins owner Dan Snyder, to donate her late husband’s music memorabilia, described as “covering every genre from classical music to the Beastie Boys”—but the general curatorial approach seems to owe something to Field of Dreams: Build it, and they will donate. The museum will have to compete with the existing Judaica collections of Washington’s most august institutions, from the Smithsonian to the Library of Congress—and, for ephemera, with Philadelphia’s new National Museum of American Jewish History, which opened last year. “God forbid you create something mediocre and put it in Washington,” said Michael Berenbaum, who oversaw the creation of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum two decades ago and is now a professor of Jewish studies at American Jewish University in Los Angeles. “You either have to do something that is grand and world-class in terms of size, scope, and mandate, or you have to create a boutique museum, a small gem.”

The idea man behind the museum proposal is Ori Soltes, a lecturer in theology and fine arts at Georgetown University, who has been fighting for an independent Jewish museum in the capital since the late 1990s, when he was director of the small Judaica museum held by B’nai B’rith, a no-longer-displayed collection of donations made over the years by the organization’s patrons and items held in trust for other foundations. Soltes, who has a wild corona of salt-and-pepper curls and the didactic energy of a children’s show host, talks excitedly about multimedia or holographic installations that would allow visitors to bat against Sandy Koufax, and the museum project’s Web site mentions a similar idea for re-enacting chess matches played by Bobby Fischer—never mind the grandmaster’s later paranoid fantasies of being pursued by world Jewry. The list of proposed curatorial departments runs the gamut from art and literature to economics, media, and the law.

When we met earlier this month at a coffee shop in Georgetown, Soltes told me he also envisions space devoted to exhibits digitally recreating lost synagogues and temporary shows bolstered with public programs exploring the interplay between Jewish communities and the cultures into which they settled around the world, from Morocco or Poland or China to the United States. “We want to explore how the Jewish people have been involved in the societies where they’ve lived, which is everywhere,” Soltes said. “The job of the museum is to keep asking the question without an answer—what’s Jewish?”

Soltes cheerfully acknowledges that he and Kaplan don’t have much to start with by way of a permanent collection. Aside from the music memorabilia, announced commitments include an array of miniature menorahs collected by Kaplan, plus paintings by Jewish artists collected by Baron Oscar Ghez, the founder of Geneva’s Petit Palais Museum. But Soltes seems undaunted. “There is a lot of stuff out there,” Soltes told me. “People call me all the time saying they have stuff to give.”

There is an obvious prize: the B’nai B’rith’s now-homeless collection. In the 1990s, the Klutznick National Jewish Museum occupied the second floor of the B’nai B’rith’s former headquarters near Dupont Circle. It has not been formally displayed since B’nai B’rith sold that building, in 2002, and moved to smaller offices. But even before that, Soltes, who was director from 1991 until 1998, had ideas about the Klutznick collection’s potential as an independent attraction. He worked to raise the museum’s profile both in Washington and among Jewish institutions, joining museum associations and building an independent board to oversee dedicated fundraising efforts under the larger B’nai B’rith umbrella. One of those board members was Kaplan, a member of Washington’s Explorers’ Club who told me that, aside from representing Israel on trade matters in Washington, he’d had very little involvement in organized Jewish life prior to signing on with Soltes but had found himself captivated by a show at the Klutznick exploring Jewish influence on Moroccan culture. According to Soltes, he and Kaplan made repeated overtures to executives at B’nai B’rith in hopes of partnering on an independent museum, but the idea never gained traction. Gwen Zuares, chair of B’nai B’rith’s Center for Jewish Culture, said in an interview that the organization is actively pursuing discussions with potential partners for the Klutznick, but she declined to disclose details.

In any case, Kaplan says, his vision for what a Jewish museum in Washington could be has always been more expansive than simply repackaging the existing B’nai B’rith collection. “I’ve always felt from the beginning that the B’nai B’rith museum was an interesting undertaking, but it didn’t have the Weltanschauung, as the Germans would say, to complement the Holocaust museum,” he said in our phone conversation. “The Holocaust having a major presence in Washington only shows one side of the coin, the tragic side of Jewish history, and I thought the other side of the coin, the uplifting side of Jews’ contributions to world civilization, deserved equal footing.”

When the federal government moved early in the Bush Administration to redevelop the Old Post Office, Kaplan recognized the potential for a golden museum location in the courtyard. “I could not justify gobbling the entirety of the project, but I could see gobbling the site of the annex,” Kaplan told me. He struck up a partnership with Norman Groh, a Virginia-based hotel developer best known for building a $1,400-a-night suite at a Holiday Inn outside Washington in 1972. Groh brought Hyatt into the partnership. (Hyatt referred questions about the proposal to Groh, whom they described as its sponsor; Groh, when reached by telephone, declined to comment until after the government announces the winner of the bid.)

In 2003, Kaplan incorporated the nonprofit for the museum, then known as the National Museum of Jewish Heritage. Along with Kaplan and Soltes, the board included Janice Blumberg, who had been active in supporting the Klutznick at B’nai B’rith; Claude Ghez, son of the Swiss collector Baron Oscar Ghez; and Frank Abramoff, Jack Abramoff’s father, who had offered to help fundraise in California, where he lived. Jack Abramoff had tried to secure the Old Post Office site for one of his Native American tribal clients. That fact subsequently became the centerpiece of the federal government’s case against one of Abramoff’s associates, David Safavian, who was involved with the initial stages of the Old Post Office bid process as chief of staff of the Government Services Administration in the first Bush Administration. Once the Native American project foundered, Kaplan said, Jack Abramoff encouraged him to talk to his father about the museum. “He did mention to me that his father loved the idea of a Jewish museum,” Kaplan told me in our phone conversation. The former lobbyist was never involved in the Jewish museum project. “I wanted to be supportive, but it was a little far afield for me,” Jack Abramoff told me in a phone interview earlier this week. “I was never involved.”

The government solicited interest in the Old Post Office complex in 2005, but it never moved to a formal bid process, leaving the project in limbo. The next year, Claude Ghez and Frank Abramoff, who had been vice-president of the museum nonprofit’s board, both stepped down as directors, and the project’s funding dwindled to less than $6,000, according to tax records. Nevertheless, Kaplan and Soltes, by then emotionally invested in the Pennsylvania Avenue location, didn’t look elsewhere for space, even in the midst of the of the subsequent real-estate collapse. “We were waiting for Godot,” Soltes told me. “We felt that if we left this project, we’d be starting from scratch.”

The Old Post Office languished until earlier this year, when the District of Columbia’s delegate, Democrat Eleanor Holmes Norton, pushed the General Services Administration to prioritize its redevelopment in response to President Barack Obama’s request that the government privatize $8 billion in federal real-estate holdings by the end of 2012. Now there is nothing to do but wait. “I don’t have any intention of pursuing this further,” Kaplan told me. “I am going to be 78 years old and I don’t have another 12 years to devote to the museum’s creation.”

This kind of traumatic awakening comes to everyone, of course, but for a Jewish child learning about the Holocaust it comes early and in an especially personal form. In David Bezmozgis’ scandalous, compassionate story “An Animal to the Memory,” a Hebrew school student is punished for wrecking a display on Holocaust Remembrance Day; the story ends with the rabbi holding the child in a painful grip and shouting, “Now, maybe you understand what it is to be a Jew.” Not since Philip Roth’s “The Conversion of the Jews” has a writer so economically expressed the sense that initiation into Jewishness means the infliction of pain—a pain that can’t be rejected, like most parental impositions, as gratuitous or neurotic, but that history forces us to acknowledge is necessary and true.

To grow up into a world in which the Holocaust was possible is a difficult burden. No wonder, then, that readers have always been drawn to stories of children who grew up during the Holocaust itself. When it comes to exploitatively sentimental works like the movie Life Is Beautiful, the appeal of a child-centered story can seem cynical: The suffering of the innocent is a surefire way of delivering an emotional charge. But the most serious books about the Holocaust are also disproportionately about young people, from The Diary of Anne Frank to Imre Kertész’s Fatelessness to Louis Begley’s Wartime Lies. Even fraudulent memoirists like Benjamin Wilkomirski and Misha Defonseca pay a twisted tribute to the power of the genre by inventing Holocaust childhoods for themselves.

Two novels, above all, helped to establish the moral authority of the child’s perspective on the Holocaust. Night, by Elie Wiesel, was first published in France in 1958; seven years later, Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird appeared in the United States. Both writers were child survivors of the Holocaust—Wiesel was deported at 15 from Romania to Auschwitz, while Kosinski, born in 1933, lived in hiding with his family in Nazi-occupied Poland. Both men drew on these early experiences in their books, producing works that were widely read as factual autobiographies, even though they were technically novels and employed clearly novelistic techniques.

Yet as Ruth Franklin points out in her superb recent study A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction, the reputations of the two books, and of their authors, could not be more dramatically different today. Night marked the beginning of Wiesel’s long career as a public sage, a living reminder of the moral and political lessons of the Holocaust; in 1986, he won the Nobel Peace Prize. Thanks in part to its brevity and simplicity of style, Night has been a staple of high-school reading lists for decades. In 2006, the book won a new generation of readers when it was selected for Oprah’s Book Club, sitting atop the best-seller list for a year and a half.

Kosinski, on the other hand, fell dramatically from grace in the last decade of his life, dragging The Painted Bird down with him. Always a mysterious and theatrical man, he became embroiled in accusations that he had not lived the experiences in his book, despite his claims that “every incident is true.” What’s more, it began to be whispered that Kosinski had not even written his books, but employed teams of assistants to turn his Polish into stylish English prose. When Kosinski took his own life in 1991, it was seen less as a belated martyrdom—as in the case of another Holocaust writer, Primo Levi—than as the aftermath of scandal.

If someone handed you copies of Night and The Painted Bird and asked you to predict, strictly on the basis of reading them, which book’s author would end in sainthood and which in scandal, the answer would be all too easy. Wiesel’s book is lucid, convincing, heartbreaking, morally serious, and explicitly Jewish; Kosinski’s is shadowy, dreamlike, grossly exaggerated, bizarrely erotic, and leaves the Jewishness of its protagonist a standing mystery. Night, one might say, represents the superego of Holocaust fiction, while The Painted Bird is its roiling id. But this very difference is what makes it so revelatory to read the books side by side—and to discover how much they have in common as primers on a world defined by the Holocaust.

***

One of the chief ambitions of the modern novel was expressed by Stendhal, almost 200 years ago, in The Red and the Black: “A novel, gentlemen, is a mirror carried along a highway. Sometimes it reflects to your view the azure of the sky, sometimes the mire of the puddles on the road.” When he wrote this manifesto for realism, Stendhal was on the defensive; he was urging the reader who objected to his immoral story to blame not the novelist but the world he reflected, in which evil could flourish. When a survivor writes a novel about the Holocaust, however, the defense is no longer necessary: No one thinks to blame Wiesel or Kosinski for depicting the horrors they lived through. On the contrary, now it is the absolute, unblemished clarity of the mirror that becomes a moral imperative. The more detailed and unstylized picture a Holocaust novel presents, the more likely we are to trust it.

The real “end of the Holocaust,” he argues, is the transformation of it into a lesson about the “triumph of the human spirit” or some such affirmation. Rosenfeld, the founder and former director of the Jewish studies program at Indiana University, which has made itself a major center of Jewish publishing and learning, is a mainstream scholar who has seen the flaw in mainstream Holocaust discourse. He has made it his mission to rescue the Holocaust from the Faustian bargain Jews have made with history and memory, the Faustian bargain that results when we trade the specifics of memory, the Jewishness of the Holocaust, and the Jew-hatred that gave it its rationale and identity, for the weepy universalism of such phrases as “the long record of man’s inhumanity to man.”

The impulse to find the silver lining is relentless, though. Suffering and grief must be transformed into affirmation, and the bleak irrecoverable fate of the victims must be given a redemptive aspect for those of us alive. In fact it’s an insult to the dead to rob their graves to make ourselves feel better. One recent manifestation Rosenfeld has shrewdly noticed is the way there has been a subtle shift in the popular representation of the Holocaust—a shift in the attention once given to the murdered victims to comparatively uplifting stories of survivors, of the “righteous gentiles,” of the scarce “rescuers,” and the even scarcer “avengers,” e.g., Quentin Tarantino’s fake-glorious fictional crew.

Rosenfeld is not afraid to contend with the fact that, as he writes, “with new atrocities filling the news each day and only so much sympathy to go around, there are people who simply do not want to hear any more about the Jews and their sorrows. There are other dead to be buried, they say.” The sad, deplorable, but, he says, “unavoidable” consequence of what may be the necessary limits of human sympathy is that “the more successfully [the Holocaust] enters the cultural mainstream, the more commonplace it becomes. A less taxing version of a tragic history begins to emerge, still full of suffering, to be sure, but a suffering relieved of many of its weightiest moral and intellectual demands and, consequently easier to be … normalized.”

Normalized? The Holocaust as one more instance in the long chronicle of “man’s inhumanity to man”? Rosenfeld’s book offers a welcome contrarian take on the trend. Yes, we’ve had enough, as Rosenfeld points out, of museums that cumulatively obscure memory in a fog of well-meaning but misleading inspirational brotherhood-of-man rhetoric. We’ve had enough of films like the execrable Oscar-winning Life Is Beautiful and the well-intentioned but misguided Schindler’s List, with its sad lack of self-awareness that a happy ending, celebrating a Christian rescuer and some lucky Jewish survivors, is woefully off base. We’ve had enough of phony-memoir love stories, and we’ve had enough of the way a genuine tragic heroine and victim of Nazi death camps like Anne Frank is mendaciously turned into a spokeswoman for the “goodnesss of man.”

What we haven’t had enough of is a careful consideration of the implications of the Holocaust for the nature of human nature. As George Steiner told me (for my book, Explaining Hitler), “the Holocaust removed the re-insurance from human hope”—the psychic safety net we imagine marked the absolute depth of human nature. The Holocaust tore through that net heading for hell. Human nature could be—at the promptings of a charismatic and evil demagogue, religious hate, and so-called “scientific racism”—even worse than we imagined. No one wants to hear that. We want to hear uplifting stories about that nice Mr. Schindler. We want affirmations!

And the fact that it was not just one man but an entire continent that enthusiastically pitched in or stood by while 6 million were murdered: Doesn’t that call for us to spend a little time re-thinking what we still reverently speak of as “European civilization”? Or to investigate the roots of that European hatred? How much weight do the Holocaust museums give to the two millennia of Christian Jew-hatred, murderous pogroms, blood libels, and other degradations? Or do they prefer to focus on “righteous gentiles” in order to avoid offending their gentile hosts?

And for all their “reaching out” and “teachable moments,” how much do the Holocaust museums and Holocaust curricula connect the hatred of the recent past with contemporary exterminationist Jew-hatred, the vast numbers of people who deny the first, but hunger for a second, Holocaust? It’s a threat some fear even to contemplate—the potential destruction of the 5 million Jews of Israel with a single well-placed nuclear blast—a nightmarish but not unforseeable possibility to which Rosenfeld is unafraid to devote the final section of his book.

It’s something I speculated about in the Tablet Magazine excerpt from my book How the End Begins. It’s something spoken of eloquently by Imre Kertész, one of the writers Rosenfeld wishes to rescue from the “end of the Holocaust.” (Only two novels by this Hungarian survivor of Nazism and Stalinist oppression, a 2002 Nobel Prize winner, have been translated, a situation I would like to formally petition some serious-minded publisher to remedy forthwith.)

“Before Auschwitz,” Kertesz writes, “Auschwitz was unimaginable. That is no longer so today. Because Auschwitz in fact occurred, it has now been established in our imaginations as a firm possibility. What we are able to imagine, especially because it once was, can be again.” I wonder what our dedicated affirmationists who once disdainfully mocked concerns about a second Holocaust would say to Kertesz.

The glamorous former television journalist and prolific writer has since been thrust into the spotlight—a position she abdicated to plan a political career for her husband—as the international gaze focuses on her marriage and her unusually active support of her husband amidst accusations of rape.

Sinclair, who in April was France’s preferred choice for first lady, is the granddaughter of Paul Rosenberg, Picasso’s art dealer. A New York Magazine feature offers a thorough look at the couple’s lives since May and sheds some light on Sinclair, though probably not enough to quiet the interest in her as the DSK case continues to command attention. Some highlights: Strauss-Kahn, we learn, “was happiest at their ryad in the palm-grove district of Marrakech, to the north of the port city where he grew up as a French Jew.” Also, Sinclair named a son from an earlier marriage after Elie Wiesel, who is apparently a close friend.

The Womanizer’s Wife [NYMag]
Earlier: Bad For the Jews
BHL Compares DSK to Dreyfus

• President Obama will be speaking this coming Sunday at the annual AIPAC conference in Washington, D.C. [AP/WP]

• Skiing in summertime: In one of the largest such busts in the country’s history, two men were arrested in Israel with $60 million worth of cocaine. [AP/WP]

• In a nearly overwhelming confluence of Nextbook Press star power, tonight author Elie Wiesel will receive the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s first award, and author Deborah Lipstadt will speak. [WP]

• A new U.N. report on Iran’s nuclear program vindicates the Obama administration’s strategy of successfully pursuing multilateral sanctions, argues Matt Duss. [CAP]

• Tonight is Storahtelling’s B Mitzvah, celebrated at City Winery in Manhattan. Go give it a pocket watch! [Storahtelling]

Today in Jonathan Richman’s 60th (sixtieth!) birthday.

Don’t get excited: The title of Alvin Rosenfeld’s The End of the Holocaust (Indiana, April) isn’t meant to be taken literally. He recognizes that, if anything, the production of representations of and memorials to the Holocaust is accelerating. It’s just that, in his view, “the image of the Holocaust is continually being transfigured, and the several stages of its transfiguration, which one can trace throughout popular culture may contribute to a fictional subversion of the historical sense rather than a firm consolidation of accurate, verifiable knowledge.” In other words, Rosenfeld isn’t enthused that today’s teenagers are rather likely to have learned their World War II history from Quentin Tarantino. Yet it seems worth asking whether the Holocaust is different, in this sense, from any other historical event; has, say, the Spanish Civil War been exempt from such “transfiguration”?

***

Still, it’s undeniably true, that authors—Rosenfeld himself included—cannot seem to stop writing about the Holocaust, transfiguring it, adapting it to the particular medium or genre of their choosing. And, yes, this can be creepy. Lydia and Heather Munn offer How Huge the Night (Kregel, April), a Holocaust novel for Christian teens, in which Jews are saved by a Christian community, in France, who see the rejection of Nazism as fulfilling their faith: “Let us gather around Jesus Christ,” a pastor says to his flock, “and let us draw our thoughts and our words and our actions from his gospel, and only from his gospel. … Our duty as Christians is to resist the violence imposed on our consciousness, resist it by the weapons of the Spirit.” (Too bad this isn’t intended as a reference to Will Eisner.)

The Berlin Boxing Club (HarperTeen, May), Robert Sharenow’s second novel, also targets a particular subgroup of young adults; in this case, pugilism enthusiasts. In the book, an assimilated German Jewish teen trains in the sweet science with Max Schmeling and has to decide how much he can trust his mentor as the Nazis loom.

***

For the same reason that young adult authors occasionally write young adult Holocaust novels, photographers take some Holocaust pictures. Yuri Dojc’s Last Folio: Textures of Jewish Life in Slovakia (Indiana, April) contains the haunting photographs he took of decayed Jewish texts rotting in “an abandoned Jewish school in eastern Slovakia, where time had stood still since the day in 1942 when all those attending it were taken away to the camps.” Treating books as “survivors” and “witnesses,” the images are another unsettling example of what the literary scholar Amy Hungerford has characterized as “the Holocaust of texts.”

***

Rosenfeld’s book carries blurbs from Elie Wiesel and Cynthia Ozick; coincidentally, or perhaps not, so does Geoffrey Hartman’s The Third Pillar: Essays in Judaic Studies (Penn, April). The book includes essays that, by the author’s admission, are “neither erudite nor highly specialized,” but that demonstrate what happens when a literary critic, a Wordsworth specialist and adept of Derridian theory, takes seriously the Jewish textual tradition. Hartman sounds a little like Rosenfeld here when he cautions that “to make the Holocaust a source of Jewish identity, of a new Jewish particularism, is as dangerous as ritually over-assimilating it to other catastrophes”—but note that Hartman has excluded from this book his “writings on the subject of the Holocaust,” reserving those “for a further publication.”

***

One of Rosenfeld’s main concerns is that “it is not primarily from the work of historians that most people gain whatever knowledge they may acquire of the Third Reich and the Nazi crimes against the Jews.” Yet, of course, historians continue to pump out studies of the Holocaust that are available to anyone who wants them. To wit: Peter Hoffman, who has published widely on German resistance, offers Carl Goerdeler and the Jewish Question, 1933-1942 (Cambridge, April), which concentrates on the Leipzig mayor who opposed the persecution of Germany’s Jews and aided the resistance until being hanged for treason in 1945. Life and Loss in the Shadow of the Holocaust: A Jewish Family’s Untold Story (Cambridge, June), by Rebecca Boehling and Uta Larkey, draws upon the correspondence of a large family, the Kaufmanns and Steinbergs, members of which spent the war in Germany, America, and Palestine, to describe daily life in all its variety during and after the years of the genocide. Antero Holmila, a Holocaust researcher at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, who has published mostly in Finnish, contributes Reporting the Holocaust in the British, Swedish, and Finnish Press, 1945-50 (Palgrave Macmillan, June), which compares press coverage of the liberation of the concentration camps and the Nuremberg trials in England and Scandinavia.

***

Can we even distinguish between the work of historians and novelists? Not always, evidently: To produce the book that’s called The Druggist of Auschwitz: A Documentary Novel (FSG, April), Dieter Schlesak conducted interviews with survivors and perpetrators and combed through transcripts from the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial. Translated from German, Schlesak’s book isn’t quite as “unique” as its publisher claims (compare it to Heimrad Bäcker’s “documentary poems,” for one obvious parallel), but it does offer the most thorough study in English of Victor Capesius, the titular half-Jewish Nazi pharmacist, who was personally responsible for many deaths. The book is a reminder that some of the artists who represent the Holocaust do so not to subvert, but rather to embrace, the methods and sources of professional historians.

I was curious to see how Wiesel, the prolific author and frequent lecturer, would do as a singer. Wiesel has often said that some of his earliest memories are, in fact, melodies—the melodies that he heard growing up as a child in Sighet, Romania. He even earned a little cash directing choirs as a refugee in Paris after the war. But that was 60 years ago, and while Wiesel has continued to sing in private—at home and at family celebrations—time is not necessarily kind to the voice.

I was also moved by the stories Wiesel told between songs—stories of his mother singing to him in her kitchen; of his grandfather, a Vizhnitzer Hasid, welcoming the Sabbath in song; and of the meaningful musical experiences he continued to have both during and after the war.

But mostly, I was confused.

The phrase “in concert” carries with it a number of expectations, most of them musical. But Wiesel was quick to admit that there were probably much better singers in the room that night. On the other hand, he was accompanied by a small orchestra that included the keyboardist and arranger David Rosenthal, best known for his long association with Billy Joel; and by a 16-voice choir under the direction of Matthew Lazar. (Wiesel is honorary president of Lazar’s Zamir Choral Foundation.)

So, was this a concert or not?

The changes in tone were confusing, too. There was plenty of reminiscing, with Wiesel taking the familiar role of memoirist and raconteur; and he occasionally made the kind of moral entreaty which, taken together with his personal and literary history, has made him a kind of secular saint. But he also occasionally dipped into corny stage humor that, while innocuous, was nonetheless jarring. One minute one of the world’s foremost moral voices was imploring his fellow men not to stand idly by, with “arms folded,” in the face of widespread injustice and oppression. The next, he was making jokes: “Remember,” he  cracked, “in Yiddish, where there’s an ‘oy,’ there’s a ‘vey!’ ”

Like I said, I was confused. Confused enough to call concert producer Phil Ramone a couple of days later in the hope that he could help me better understand precisely what it was that I had witnessed.

Ramone is a legendary music producer who has racked up 14 Grammys working with everyone from Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen to Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles. To my immense relief, even he had a hard time describing Saturday’s event.

Ramone and Wiesel met and became friends just over a year ago and soon began talking about the possibility of recording Wiesel singing some of the songs that he had grown up with, as a musical gift for his own grandchildren. Eventually, they went into the studio to record a few tracks; and Ramone brought the results to Rosenthal, who added light orchestral backgrounds.

At that point, some of Wiesel’s other friends, including the noted film and television producer John Heyman, began asking Ramone if he thought there might be some kind of event in the making. Ramone, who in the interim had gone to see Wiesel lecture, thought there was; but he felt that it should be shot as a DVD, so that it would fully capture Wiesel’s personal charisma and his way of engaging with an audience.

But producing what eventually became Saturday’s event was no simple undertaking. For one thing, Wiesel is not Frank Sinatra, and figuring out how to present him on stage in a musical setting was not entirely straightforward.

“It’s daunting,” Ramone said after the fact. “What are you trying to do? Your instinct is to produce it not unlike doing a good musical night, but you can’t. It doesn’t engage that way.”

Even from a purely musical perspective, Ramone wasn’t sure how to proceed. The program consisted of 20 songs plucked from Wiesel’s memory and included everything from prayers like “Ani Maamin,” based on Maimonides’ 13 articles of faith (in the early 1970s, Wiesel wrote the libretto for a cantata by the same name by French composer Darius Milhaud), to Yiddish standards like “Rozhinkes mit Mandlen” and old Hasidic tunes such as “Shebshifleinu.” The evening also included a French children’s song (“À la Claire Fontaine”) and a Hungarian number that became a sort of anthem for Jewish concentration camp inmates (“Szól a Kakas Már”).

“There wasn’t any tradition for me to look at and say, ‘Oh, this would work,’ ” Ramone said. “You couldn’t stay in a liturgical mode, or a cappella.” Nor was there a clear pop or classical model to follow. The entire project had a searching, experimental quality to it, and no one, including its producer and its star, knew exactly how it would all turn out.

In the end, Ramone decided to keep things simple. He made the musical accompaniment as unobtrusive as possible, and did his best to ensure that Wiesel would feel as comfortable in front of the choir as he would have at an ordinary speaking event, where he tends to work off-the-cuff.

I think Ramone succeeded, which goes a long way toward explaining what it was I saw, and why I found it somewhat perplexing. At heart, the show remained true to Wiesel’s initial intention—to offer his musical memories as a gift to his grandchildren—even as he took the project to a much larger stage. The self-deprecating disclaimer concerning his vocal ability (and, yes, he did occasionally drift off key or beat his accompanists to the end of a phrase, though he also showed a real gift for traditional Jewish vocal ornamentation, especially on the Vizhnitzer tunes his grandfather taught him); the shifts in tone; the mishmash of tunes—these are only confusing in the context of an actual concert, a carefully planned evening of musical entertainment. They’re not so strange if one imagines them in the context of a family gathering, where one’s father or grandfather or uncle is telling anecdotes peppered with fragments of his favorite songs. That’s pretty much what we got at the 92nd Street Y, except the grandfather in question was a Holocaust-surviving Nobel Peace-Prize winner, and he burst into song a lot more often than zayde normally would—and with much better backing.

The entire performance was filmed, and Ramone plans to review the footage in January with an eye toward figuring out what to do with it next. As with the event itself, he’s keeping an open mind, with few preconceptions. “It’ll be handled very delicately once I’ve seen it and had a chance to see what its life can be like,” he said.

There will be no repeat performances, however; no out-of-town runs. Wiesel accomplished what he set out to do, preserving his personal musical heritage for his family, and he has no intention of going Judy Garland again. “I hope,” he told the crowd, “you do not expect to witness a late-life career change.”

Perhaps that’s for the best. Wiesel was a better singer than I expected, but his true talents lie elsewhere.

It’s a strange juncture in the history of moral education when a student can just as conveniently purchase a term paper for his or her Business Ethics class as sit down and write one. But well-meaning educators persist: For the past two decades, the Elie Wiesel Foundation has doled out annual prizes for student essays offering “rational arguments for ethical action,” which contribute to the tradition Wiesel locates in texts as varied as the Dead Sea Scrolls and Dostoevsky. Some of the winners appear in An Ethical Compass: Coming of Age in the 21st Century (Yale, November). Despite the fact that many students enter such contests less out of any depth of ethical concern and more in pursuit of the $5,000 prize, and in the hopes of seeing their names in print, the gathered essays seem nothing if not sincere—and, hey, one of Wiesel’s winners turned out to be Rachel Maddow!

***

The underlying premise of the Wiesel prize—that reading and writing can lead young people to ethical action—seems easy enough to dispute. (Don’t reading and writing just lead young people to the English Department, that alleged bastion of cultural relativism, giddy aestheticism, and lifelong penury?) Yet the vision of literature as morally uplifting has its share of advocates, from Oprah to child psychiatrist Robert Coles. Linda Silver, a veteran Jewish children’s librarian, agrees; she remarks that the hundreds of books she recommends in the thematically organized sections of The Best Jewish Books for Children and Teens (JPS, October) come in two flavors: “aesthetic” ones that “stimulate children’s imaginations” and “didactic” ones that “inculcate values”: “A tasty and nourishing Jewish reading diet,” Silver proclaims, “includes books of both kinds.” Yet this paragraph has itself illustrated just how shady inveterate readers and writers can be: Silver’s book appears in the same series as my own—and she gives me a kind shout-out in her introduction!—so mentioning it here constitutes at best a severe conflict of interest.

***

Some books for younger readers do undoubtedly, unavoidably, edify them. Esther M. Friesner’s Threads and Flames (Penguin, November, 10+), for one example, features a 13-year-old Jewish immigrant girl who takes a job at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in 1910. The book, whose author is a prolific sci-fi novelist, will convince its eager readers, one hopes, at the very least to think twice before accepting employment in sweatshops with insufficient fire safety precautions.

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Whether or not they read and write, no one could deny that the stories youths tell themselves matter, especially when they grow up in tense environments. Psychologist Phillip L. Hammack argues just this in Narrative and the Politics of Identity: The Cultural Psychology of Israeli and Palestinian Youth (Oxford, December): “social scientists, peace activists, and practitioners of conflict resolution must consider young Israeli and Palestinian lives as stories in process.” He criticizes programs like Seeds of Peace, though, for not sufficiently taking “into account … the structural violence that frames the experience of Israeli and Palestinian youth.”

One could understand Lorraine Lotzof Abramson’s My Race: A Jewish Girl Growing up Under Apartheid in South Africa (DBM, November) as a retrospective attempt to tell such a story, of childhood in a place rife with political conflict and structural violence. Born in South Africa in 1946, she grew up alongside apartheid, in a family of Ashkenazi immigrants who were uncomfortable with racist state policies but remained complicit by not actively protesting them. The solution she found to the ethical compromises necessary for life under Apartheid was, in a sense, to run away: A track star and winner of multiple gold medals at the 1965 Maccabi games, she also met her husband there, an American who was her ticket to a country where she wouldn’t feel unwillingly complicit in institutionalized racism.

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It’s the same old story: Literary scholars have in the last decade or so decided that literary transnationalism is all the rage, and now Jewish literature scholars are reminding them that modern Jewish literature is, as literary scholars still often say, “always already” transnational. To put this in plainer language: Could there be any literary tradition that has crossed more borders, and been more centrally constituted by those crossings, than what was written by modern Jews? In Modern Jewish Literatures: Intersections and Boundaries (Penn, December) a trio of editors—Sheila Jelen, Michael P. Kramer, and L. Scott Lerner—introduce 15 essays that emphasize texts’ “continual movement across borders,” their “separations and syntheses.”

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The examples raised in Jelen, Kramer, and Lerner’s collection don’t begin to exhaust the subject of Jewish literature’s transnationalism. Among their other virtues, the modernist novellas of Jacob Glatstein (a.k.a., Yankev Glatshteyn), which have now finally appeared in a reasonable translation titled The Glatstein Chronicles (Yale, November), demonstrate again that Jewish stories are always in transit. Indeed, the books’ original Yiddish titles, Ven Yash iz geforn and Ven Yash iz gekumen, refer simply to the travels of the protagonist, Yash: He “went”—to his native Poland, to see his dying mother—and then he “came back.” In the process, he records the voices and travels of Americans and Europeans in the interwar years.

Like Glatshteyn, Joseph Brodsky left the land of his birth but continued to write poetry in his mother tongue in the United States; unlike Glatshteyn, he had been formally expelled from his homeland, and he took home the Nobel Prize for his poems. A biography of the exiled poet—written in Russian by his friend, the late Dartmouth Slavic professor Lev Loseff—has been translated as Joseph Brodsky: A Literary Life (Yale, December). Brodsky identified as a Jew (“One hundred percent,” he said, “You can’t be more Jewish than I am”), but Loseff notes that “any ‘Jewish element’ found in his verse was roughly the same ‘Jewish element’ found in Western civilization—the Old Testament as received and interpreted by the Christian West.”

***

Shachar Pinsker’s innovative cultural history Literary Passports: The Making of Modernist Hebrew Fiction in Europe (Stanford, December) presents another pointed case of Jewish literary transnationalism, one that unsettles simplistic narratives about the rebirth of literary Hebrew among the farmers of the yishuv. Describing the flowering of Hebrew prose fiction in cities including London, Vienna, Odessa, Homel, and Berlin, Pinsker demonstrates that the revival of Hebrew as a modern phenomenon owed at least as much to the atmosphere of European cafés and bustling avenues as it did to, say, the experience of tilling soil on a kibbutz. Thus modern Hebrew is a language of the Diaspora, of crossed borders, just like Yiddish and, for that matter, English.

Seroy no doubt had in mind some of TNR’s more legendary hatchet jobs, including former lead critic James Wood’s influential takedown of “hysterical realism” in novels by Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace, and Salman Rushdie, and the notorious Dale Peck drive-by that began, “Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation.” But the practitioner who has best and most responsibly defended the high principles behind TNR’s house style has been Ruth Franklin, a younger critic who is a senior editor at the magazine and, as it happens, the author of the Franzen review.

Although it made the tabloids, Franklin’s take on Freedom is dog-bites-man: It is entirely coherent with the broader values she has stood for in her decade-plus of reviewing contemporary fiction. To begin with, there is the trademark TNR stubbornness. “We damn not with faint praise, but with hyperbole,” Franklin once wrote. As an antidote, she errs on the side of negativity, in part so that when she says she likes something—the novels of David Mitchell, for example—we know she likes it. Too many critics, she worries, are like the teenager who is friends with everyone and thereby ensures that no one knows exactly where one stands with him. In this thinking, the most popular kid in class is Dave Eggers and his “why-can’t-we-all-just-get-along approach to literary criticism,” as she put it, which he has enshrined in his journals, McSweeney’s and The Believer. These, according to Franklin, celebrate books rather than critique them, and thereby do writers and readers a disservice.

If Franklin was generally less likely to get caught up in Franzen-frenzy, Freedom specifically embodies literary priorities that she rates lower than most. It is, Franklin accurately observed, a “Way We Live Now novel, consummately of its moment,” intricately immersed in the details of current American life. For many critics, this was a selling point. For Franklin, the novel’s faithful rendering of superficial contemporary truths crowded out the deeper, more human truths that she most urgently seeks. Franzen’s realism is “just a transcription of reality,” she complained. “He substitutes the details for the big picture, a hyper-realistic portraiture for genuine psychological insight.” By contrast, she can love David Mitchell’s novels despite what may seem like their unharnessed gimmickry—his Cloud Atlas consists of six obliquely related stories that span from medieval times to the future—because, as she sees it, “on their most fundamental level all his books are concerned with the connections between human beings.”

Now, Franklin has published her first book, A Thousand Darknesses. It’s about Holocaust literature, which might at first seem odd; indeed, her extensive writings on Holocaust literature, out of which this book grew, might themselves have seemed odd over the past several years. For someone who picks fights with Franzen, Eggers, Nicole Krauss, Zadie Smith, Gary Shteyngart, and more of the most prominent contemporary literary novelists, publishing criticism and then a book about survivor memoirs and secondary works seems beside the point at best. But her Holocaust criticism has in fact been totally in sync with her other criticism, and A Thousand Darknesses is precisely Franklin’s attempt to advance her larger, hedgehog-like argument about what art and criticism should do. What seems on its cover almost a niche, scholarly work actually confirms Franklin’s status as one of our most important critics under 40.

* * *

Tim O’Brien, himself a witness-author (he is a novelist who served in Vietnam), once wrote, “That’s a true war story that never happened.” Franklin has the same sort of higher “true” in mind when she considers Holocaust literature. Against Theodor Adorno’s famous dictum that “to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric,” she lays out why creating imaginative art—the sort of art that shows you why it shares its root with “artifice”—is exactly the response Auschwitz demands. And against A. Alvarez’s assertion in Commentary that Night is “certainly beyond criticism,” she demonstrates that respectful but honest criticism is our duty to Night and other books like it. (It turns out that Commentary’s unquestioning appreciation of Shoah lit shares much with The Believer’s unquestioning appreciation of hip lit.)

Franklin begins by proving that most of what we think of as objective, plainspoken, and truthful documentation of the Holocaust was actually consciously and artistically crafted by talented, imaginative authors to depict transcendent human truths at the expense of literal ones. This even goes for the two giants of the genre, Wiesel’s Night and Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man.

Levi’s first tome (frequently translated as Survival in Auschwitz) is, Franklin argues, “a fundamentally literary book, with a highly stylized use of language;” the Italian chemist’s very real experience in Auschwitz underwent a “process of fictionalization” on its way from real-life to the page. And why not? “Why should he not exploit his creative freedom to do with his characters what he will,” she asks, “to alter them intentionally—not unconsciously—in ways that will make his narrative more effective?” Late in life, Levi confirmed that he was aware that, even as he was living his extreme life, he hoped to turn that life into something more: “The idea of having to survive in order to tell what I had seen,” she quotes him, “obsessed me night and day.”

In contrast to Levi, in his later years Wiesel has appointed himself the High Arbiter of truth in Holocaust memoirs, “guarding the Temple against those who would desecrate it.” Yet Franklin shows that Wiesel’s first and most influential work certainly wouldn’t pass his own authenticity test. There is its style: “Every sentence feels weighted and deliberate, every episode carefully chosen and delineated,” she writes. “It is also disarmingly brief: It can be carried in a pocket and read in an hour. One has the sense of merciless experience mercilessly distilled to its essence.” There is its careful, learned, artistic construction: Franklin cites the critic Lawrence Langer’s ingenious insight that Night functions as a reverse Bildungsroman, in which “the youthful protagonist becomes an initiate into death rather than in life.” And then there are the details: According to Franklin, “Night balances unsteadily between fidelity to the events it portrays and the making of literature. The book’s poetic austerity comes at a cost to the literal truth.” Franklin documents that the narrator’s mentor, Moishe the Beadle, is a fabricated composite character, and that the narrator’s central interior struggle—his loss of faith in God—is made-up (Wiesel has attested that he believed in God even after the war); in short, Franklin proves that the narrator of Night is not Wiesel. Wiesel might take this as an accusation. Franklin intends it as a compliment.

The heart of A Thousand Darknesses is the chapter on Wolfgang Koeppen’s 1992 book Jakob Littner’s Notes From a Hole in the Ground. Here’s the story: Jakob Littner, a Polish Jew, had been a stamp dealer in Munich until being expelled in 1938; continually kicked eastward, he eventually had to hide for nine months in the titular hole in the ground in eastern Poland, from which he was rescued by Soviet troops in 1944. After the war, he submitted a memoir of his experience to a German publisher, but it was deemed of insufficient literary quality, and the job of adapting it was given to an exceedingly minor German novelist named Wolfgang Koeppen. Koeppen rewrote the manuscript, keeping its first-person voice, and the publisher brought the result out in 1948 as Notes From a Hole in the Ground, by Jakob Littner—Koeppen’s name appeared nowhere. The work was assumed to be a nonfiction memoir, a piece of testimony authored by the person who underwent the experiences depicted (much as Night is received). However, nearly a half-century later, in 1992, the book was published in a new edition, this time as a novel called Jakob Littner’s Notes From a Hole in the Ground, by Wolfgang Koeppen. “The reading public was being asked to accept,” Franklin explains, “that the novelist Wolfgang Koeppen”—by this time, he was a novelist of some notoriety—“was the true author of a book that had been believed to be an authentic Holocaust memoir and was now reclassified as a novel.” Most readers came to believe Littner’s story was fictional! It wasn’t until 1995, when an American professor pointed to Littner’s original manuscript (which had been published in 1985), that people understood what was going on. Koeppen’s 1992 work, Franklin concludes, “appears to be the first time that a text believed to be fiction turned out to be based on fact.”

This remarkable story is an immaculate microcosm of Franklin’s point. First, you have the uproar over whether Koeppen’s text is a novel or a memoir—a fictional or factual account—when the reality reveals how useless that dichotomy is. And then you have the question of who had his priorities right: Littner’s champions, committed to getting every last fact about Littner’s experience correct, or Koeppen and his champions, committed to best conveying what “happened,” in a broader sense? “His purpose,” Franklin writes in defense of Koeppen, “was to write an artistically coherent text, not a news report.” And here is the crux: Koeppen’s work, nearly all agree, is artistically superior to Littner’s. Some would say that doesn’t matter—that Littner’s fealty to what literally happened to him counts the most. But Franklin is persuasive that Koeppen’s more moving and beautiful work—his true war story that didn’t quite happen that way—is more valuable.

In 2006, in Slate magazine, Franklin considered Daniel Mendelsohn’s best-selling The Lost. This journalistic memoir found the author, a premier American literary and theater critic, retracing the steps and discovering the stories of his great-uncle, great-aunt, and four cousins, all of whom perished. Mendelsohn, Franklin wrote, was obsessed with uncovering all the facts and fetishized those facts, as if knowing the stories meant understanding the lives. The Lost was therefore an exact antithesis of Franklin’s program: “Mendelsohn goes too far,” she opined, “in his insistence on the primacy of factual evidence over all other ways of conjuring the past—particularly art.” Of Mendelsohn’s relations, she asks, “What is more important: That we know what happened during the Holocaust (whether Shmiel and his family were shot or gassed, for instance), or that we try, in whatever hopelessly limited way, to understand what occurred?”

If Mendelsohn is Franklin’s foil, Paul Celan is her prototype. In a 2000 New Republic essay, Franklin examined the work of the Jewish poet—who spent time in labor camps and whose parents were murdered by the Nazis—and argued that his verse teaches us no more nor less about suffering than that of a poet he translated, Emily Dickinson. It seems a remarkable claim: Dickinson famously rarely left her house; Celan’s knowledge of suffering came from some of the worst suffering of all. Yet “the recluse in genteel Amherst could teach the survivor of l’univers concentrationnaire something about death,” Franklin says. She adds, in what would have been a good epigraph for A Thousand Darknesses, “Art really is that strong.”

* * *

For Franklin, there is no frigate like a book, so long, like in Dickinson, as it “Bears a Human soul.” And like Dickinson’s stylized, unnatural verse, the hardiest frigates are artistic, because art, more than history or journalism or science or any other means of conveying information, invites what Franklin has called “imaginative empathy”—the ability to feel the human situations depicted rather than just know their basic information. So, Franklin thinks Piotr Rawicz’s unlikely, almost Roth-ian novel Blood from the Sky is valuable because of its insistence that its content is the opposite of unique: “The events that he describes,” Rawicz says of his narrator, who is only implicitly a survivor, “could crop up in any place, at any time, in the mind of any man, planet, mineral.” That insistence, according to Franklin, allows the reader “to empathize imaginatively, to engage with and accept the story on a deeper psychic level than is experienced by the reader of history.” On the other hand from Rawicz is the “totalitarian” (her word) insistence of Wiesel and others on total fealty to the facts and on the Holocaust’s uniqueness and universal centrality; on the other hand also is Mendelsohn’s factual overload; and on the other hand also is Franzen, who chronicles the facts of who we are without adding to our knowledge of who we are, and is therefore, in Franklin’s formulation, “all mirror and no lamp.”

You could argue that Franklin’s self-conscious focus on the Holocaust canon actually undercuts her central argument, which is that these books are like any other books, if perhaps more so. As she wrote of Celan, “The Holocaust did not make great artists out of ordinary Jews; it provided the impetus for those who were already great souls to express themselves in art” (one thinks here of Anne Frank). Franklin’s meditations on how “every act of memory is also an act of narrative,” and that “the very act of telling the story must falsify it because to tell it implies that it has some kind of internal logic” feel irrelevant, even trite. But Franklin’s focus on the Holocaust is nonetheless useful. She has traveled there to trumpet her argument about art for the same reason that Dante traveled to Hell and Heaven to trumpet his argument about human nature: It is the loudest, most extreme, and therefore most obvious stage.

Which is why it is good to know that Franklin will fight for the same values on more mundane stages, too. Earlier this year, she wondered why disagreements between critics over works of art are treated by everyone—the critics included—as polite and unimportant differences, rather than as seismic, bloody quarrels that result from a clash of vital first principles. “Few of us,” she pointed out, “when encountering an opinion of a work of art diametrically opposed to our own, are magnanimous enough to declare the merits of both positions and call it a draw. No: We believe that our position is right.” In the age of The Believer’s celebratory criticism and the Internet’s dominant “new niceness,” it felt quenching to read, “A taste judgment, after all, is a kind of value judgment, even if we can’t always articulate those values exactly.” Franklin was not discussing Holocaust literature, or even Jonathan Franzen. The “work of art” under examination was Come Fly Away, the new Frank Sinatra jukebox musical.

The flotilla episode is fraught with complexities and ironies on both sides. While the Turkish-led mission focused on a grave human rights crisis—Israel’s oppressive treatment of Gaza’s Palestinians—Turkey’s righteous indignation toward Israel both oversimplifies Israel’s distress about Hamas and seems glaringly hypocritical in view of its own human-rights problems. Those problems, which include Turkey’s repressive and violent treatment of its large Kurdish population, some 15 million or more, and its record of legal detention, imprisonment, and torture of Turkish intellectuals, journalists, and political activists, constitutes one of the world’s worst human rights records, as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch reports repeatedly show, over the past 20 years. Add to that Turkey’s occupation of Northern Cyprus in violation of international law and its international campaign to falsify the history of its genocide of the Armenians in 1915, and the ironies multiply.

While there remains a narrative among opinion-makers like New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman that frames Turkey as an exemplary friend and a real democracy, Jews should wrestle with some truths about past and present realities. Jews, like Christians, lived as designated infidels under the Ottomans, often under harsh and repressive laws; Zionists were jailed and killed outright by the Turkish government through the end of World War I (Palestine was under Ottoman rule then). The U.S. ambassador to Turkey from 1913 to 1916, an American Jew, Henry Morgenthau, said more than once that he feared that the fate of the Armenians at the hands of the Turks awaited the Jews next. It remains uncomfortable for Jews to recall that Turkey supplied the Nazis with large amounts of chromium during World War II, a mineral that was used, among other things, for killing in concentration camps. And today a virulent anti-Semitism has spread throughout Turkey so that recently a banner of the Islamic Saadet Party read: “Legendary leader Hitler, our patience is running out, we need your spirit.”

It’s a strange irony that in recent decades Israeli and Jewish diasporan groups have colluded with Turkey’s aggressive policy of denying and rewriting the history of the Armenian Genocide. In this equation the Armenian past has become a bargaining chip between Turkey and Israel, which have a regional partnership based on reciprocal needs. Turkey is an important source of Israel’s water supply and at least until recently, had been a friendly Muslim ally in a hostile region. Israel supplies Turkey with high-powered weapons, and the lucrative military manufacturing deals are important to Israel’s economy.

In 1982—by threatening the lives and livelihoods of Jews in Turkey—Turkey pressured the Israeli government to stop a genocide studies conference in Tel Aviv, at which a group of scholars were giving papers on the Armenian Genocide. As a result the Israeli government pulled out its support, Elie Wiesel decided he could not participate, and the conference was moved to an out-of-the-way location and was greatly diminished. In the 1990s, two Armenian documentaries that were to be aired on Israeli TV—one of them about the Armenian community of Jerusalem—were canceled at the last minute because of Turkish pressure. From 1989 on, Jewish-American organizations have worked at Ankara’s request to help stop a simple, non-binding Armenian Genocide resolution from passing in the U.S. Congress. When former Israeli Education Minister Yossi Sarid declared 10 years ago that he wanted to institute a new history curriculum with a chapter on genocide that would have “a broad reference to the Armenian genocide,” he was rebuked by his government and shortly thereafter left office.

In recent years, the Israeli government has mimicked at times the Turkish government’s propaganda about 1915. Shimon Peres, then Israel’s foreign minister, went as far as to say: “We reject attempts to create a similarity between the Holocaust and the Armenian allegations. Nothing similar to the Holocaust occurred. What the Armenians went through is a tragedy, but not genocide.” Peres’ crude denial elicited angry responses from Israeli scholars, and Israel Charny, the director of the Institute on Genocide in Jerusalem, crystallized the anger of many when he replied: “As a Jew and an Israeli I am ashamed of the extent to which you have now entered into the range of actual denial of the Armenian Genocide, comparable to denials of the Holocaust.”

The question remains: Is aiding Turkey’s denial of a genocidal past something Israel can continue to do? And at what cost? Amos Elon, writing in Haaretz about the “hypocrisy, opportunism, and moral trepidation” of Israeli collusion with Turkey, put it well when he asked: “But where is the boundary between the natural chauvinism of exploitation and the cheap opportunism of hypocrisy? What happens when the survivors of one Holocaust make political deals over the bitter memory of the survivors of another Holocaust?”

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While political events provide opportunities for moments of reform, change, or introspection, it is not crass opportunism, I believe, that should dictate a change in Israeli policy on the Armenian Genocide. Rather, might this be a time—when the ironies of history have surfaced in the wake of the flotilla episode—for Israel and some Jewish diasporan organizations to rethink the moral concession Israel has made in this ethical arena—not as revenge against Turkey, but as thoughtful reflection on painful truths?

Given Turkey’s relentless campaign to deny the Armenian Genocide and insinuate its own extreme national narrative into democratic societies around the world, Israel’s call for the genocide’s proper and long overdue recognition would have important ethical meaning. It would, among other things, be a redress to genocide denial in general. As scholars have noted, denial is the final stage of genocide. The distinguished Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt has written that “denial of genocide, whether that of the Turks against the Armenians or the Nazis against the Jews … strives to reshape history in order to demonize the victims and rehabilitate the perpetrators.”

Recognizing the Armenian Genocide would allow Israel to embrace the deeply rooted relationship between Jews and Armenians in the modern age. When Hitler exhorted his military advisers eight days before invading Poland in 1939, “Who today, after all, speaks of the annihilation of the Armenians?” he made it clear that he was both inspired by what the Young Turk government had done to the Armenians in 1915 and also noted that because the memory of what had been the most well-reported human rights catastrophe of the first quarter of the 20th century had been washed away, it was easier to commit genocide again.

Hitler learned a good deal from the genocide of the Armenians because Germany was Turkey’s wartime ally, and there was a great deal of documentation from German foreign officers and other German personnel in Turkey at the time. There are, of course, parallels—in bureaucratic organization, killing squad implementation, race ideology, and more—between the two events. Yet what ties Jews to Armenians even more deeply is the powerful role Jews have played in bearing witness to and later defining Turkey’s genocide.

Ambassador Henry Morgenthau’s life remains a crucial part of the history of rescue and resistance during the Armenian Genocide. As U.S. ambassador to Turkey, he had the courage to step outside his prescribed role as ambassador and confront Pashas Talaat and Enver—the two major architects of the plan; he implored both the U.S. and German governments to intercede and stop the mass killing of the Armenian population; and he was a primary force in helping to organize the first major relief campaign for the Armenians in the United States.

In the end Morgenthau would lose his job because of his stance on the Armenians. After leaving Turkey in 1916 and noting that it would remain “a place of unutterable horror” for him, he included in his acclaimed World War I memoir of 1918, Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story, the first full narrative about the Armenian Genocide in English.

Franz Werfel, the Austrian Jewish novelist who escaped Hitler’s death list by a hair in 1934, wrote the first major novel about the Armenian Genocide, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, which depicted Armenian resistance to massacre in a small mountain village; it was also a novel that was a specific warning to the Jews of Europe about what might happen to them. The Nazis banned and burned the book in 1934, but the novel would inspire Jewish resistance during the Holocaust and became an important text in the educational curriculum for Jews in Palestine and then Israel.

Raphael Lemkin, the Polish Jewish legal scholar who coined the word genocide, was the first to use the term Armenian Genocide in the early 1940s—noting that it was the precise term for intended group destruction of the Armenians in 1915. He underscored that the concept “genocide” derived from his understanding of the acts committed against the Armenians in 1915 and against the Jews in the 1940s: “Examples of genocide,” he wrote in 1949, “are the destruction of the Armenians in the first World War, the destruction of the Jews in the second World War.” He also noted in his autobiography that his study of the Armenian massacres was a turning point in his life’s work.

In the modern era, the contributions to the Armenian Genocide discourse made by Jewish scholars both in Israel and worldwide has been extraordinary, and a list would be long and include Elie Wiesel, Robert Jay Lifton, Deborah Lipstadt, Robert Melson, Jay Winter, the documentary filmmaker Andrew Goldberg, Israeli scholars Yehuda Bauer, Israel Charny, and Yair Auron, who wrote The Banality of Denial: Israel and the Armenian Genocide. Recently, the Center For Jewish History and the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York put on brilliant exhibitions on the lives of both Raphael Lemkin and Henry Morgenthau—in which the Armenian genocide figured significantly.

Given this long-standing record of Jewish engagement and intellectual achievement concerning the Armenian Genocide, and the deep ties between the two cultures—it would seem an organic thing for Israel to finally say: The game is over. The truth of history, the meaning of genocide, the importance of ethical memory is a defining part of Jewish intellectual tradition and identity. And, in the Armenian case, the two genocidal histories commingle in deep and historical ways. As for fear of Turkey? The other 20 countries (including France, Italy, Sweden, Poland, Greece, and Canada) that have passed Armenian Genocide resolutions have witnessed Turkey’s initial diplomatic anger, an ambassador recalled for a short time, and then it’s been back to business as usual—proving that the hysteria passes and life goes on.

The Israeli government could recognize the Armenian Genocide by honoring the words of the great founding genocide scholar Lemkin—a Holocaust survivor who lost 49 members of his own family to the Nazis. In August 1950, Lemkin wrote to a colleague: “Let us not forget that the heat of this month is less unbearable to us than the heat of the ovens of Auschwitz and Dachau and more lenient than the murderous heat in the desert of Aleppo which burned to death the bodies of hundreds of thousands of Christian Armenian victims of genocide in 1915.”

As for Armenians, in the midst of this, they look on with bewilderment, anger, bitterness. For the sizable meaning and historical significance of the genocide committed against them, they feel endlessly embattled in the effort to preserve the truthful memory of what happened to them. It seems to most Armenians that the accurate memory of their history is an ethical necessity, a minimal thing to ask others to affirm in the face of the continued assault on historical truth by Turkey. Israel’s affirmation would be of distinct ethical importance given the common experience the two peoples have shared. For Israel, colluding with a denialism is too painfully ironic.

Peter Balakian, the Donald M. and Constance H. Rebar Professor of the Humanities at Colgate University, is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response, among other books.

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Like Mad Men itself, the modern American advertising industry wouldn’t exist, at least not in its current form, without a few key Jewish innovators. As Jeffrey Cruikshank and Arthur Schultz demonstrate in The Man Who Sold America: The Amazing (but True!) Story of Albert D. Lasker and the Creation of the Advertising Century (Harvard Business Review, August), a conflicted, German-born son of a Texas banker discovered how to hook Americans on Palmolive soap, Quaker Oats, Sunkist orange juice, and Kotex tampons—and went on, as a major philanthropist, to support not only medical research but also the American Jewish Committee and a farm in Pennsylvania where Jewish immigrants could learn agricultural skills.

***

No one has had to work very hard to sell Jews tickets to musicals: As anyone who has seen Spamalot knows, “You won’t succeed on Broadway if you haven’t got any Jews.” While Larry Stempel’s heroically ambitious, 800-page Showtime: A History of the Broadway Musical Theater (Norton, September) relates the ins and outs of an oddly resilient cultural form from the mid-19th century to the present, including everything from minstrelsy to light opera to Bob Fosse and much more, it offers especially rich coverage of the chosen people of the Great White Way. Stempel goes beyond the familiar names—of which there are a whole lot, between the Gershwins and Rodgers and Hart and Hammerstein and Sondheim—to cover equally fascinating characters like Weber and Fields, Rudolf Friml, and Betty Comden.

***

Jews haven’t been important only onstage and behind the scenes, of course, but also as reviewers who can sink a show with a pan or ensure its success with a rave: most notably, Frank Rich at the Times. Like Rich, the theater critic at the center of Elie Wiesel’s latest novel, The Sonderberg Case (Knopf, August), has moved on from the culture beat to weightier matters: specifically, covering the trial of a young German living in the United States who has been accused of murdering his uncle. This leads him to ponder exactly the questions one would expect in an Elie Wiesel novel about Germans and murder.

Asked, upon the book’s original publication in French in 2008, why he still writes in that language after decades of living in the United States, Wiesel responded that, for him, “le français est la langue de l’intelligence.” That enthusiasm for the French language fits into a surprisingly long Jewish tradition: As Kirsten Fudeman reveals in Vernacular Voices: Language and Identity in Medieval French Jewish Communities (Penn, June), medieval Jews spoke French ardently, writing it in Hebrew characters when they committed it to paper; some even continued to do so, like Wiesel, after having taken up residence in non-Francophone countries, such as England.

***

Future scholars investigating the Jewish vernacular of our time will find few resources as rich as Sam Hoffman’s Internet site Old Jews Telling Jokes, which makes its inevitable, inexplicable entry into old media as the book Old Jews Telling Jokes (Villard, September), co-edited by Hoffman and Eric Spiegelman. Transforming a perfect Web project into printed matter may be a pointless exercise—even more contrary to the spirit of the original site than the average blog-to-book fiasco—but, in all fairness, there are probably still a few Jews reading jokes strictly offline.

***

The sensibility that distinguishes Michael Wex’s best-selling guides to Yiddish language and culture—Born to Kvetch, Just Say Nu, How to Be a Mentsh—combines the sincere cornball humor of Old Jews Telling Jokes with the erudition of a sociolinguist. In Wex’s new novel, The Frumkiss Family Business (Random, August), he sets out to do for Toronto’s Jews what Mordecai Richler’s fictions did for Montreal’s and Philip Roth’s for Newark’s: paint their portraits so acutely, so knowingly, so as to inspire their apoplectic rage. In fact, despite Toronto’s large Jewish population, surprisingly few fictions have focused on the city’s Jews, with David Bezmozgis, Nessa Rapoport, and Rick Salutin providing the exceptions that prove the rule.

Brooklyn has the opposite problem: How can you say something interesting about a Jewish childhood in that fabled borough when so many masters, not to mention schlock-meisters, have gotten there first? Martin Lemelman answers this question with formal innovation: His Two Cents Plain: My Brooklyn Boyhood (Bloomsbury, August)—which borrows its title from Harry Golden’s best-selling 1959 nostalgic take on Jewish life on the Lower East Side—combines elements of the graphic novel with photographs and found objects, as well as sections of prose memoir, to capture the decline of Brownsville in the postwar decades.

***

Why settle for just Brooklyn or just Toronto, though, when you can have all of Jewish experience, throughout human history, in a single volume. Marek Halter’s The Jewish Odyssey: An Illustrated History (Flammarion, August) promises to address the journey of Jews and Judaism from ancient Mesopotamia to the present, without forgetting such figures as Trotsky, Kafka, and Bob Dylan—plus lots of pictures!—in 224 pages. This is a project that should leave many readers feeling like Shammai, when asked to teach the Torah to a man standing on one leg: How can you cover that much ground, that quickly, without serious distortion?

The main action of Imagining Madoff—playing at Stageworks Hudson in Hudson, New York—takes place during a long, scotch-soaked, pre-recession evening in the study of Solomon Galkin, a Holocaust survivor, poet, and Jewish community leader who bears a more-than-passing resemblance to a certain Nobel laureate. Madoff, as imagined by Margolin, manages the funds of the Manhattan synagogue where Galkin (Howard Green) is treasurer; now Galkin, dazzled with the results, has summoned the magician to his home, hoping Madoff will take on his personal investments as well. The men banter easily, and their business meeting becomes a rambling debate over money, morality, Judaism, the Holocaust, and sex, with Madoff playing the whip-smart cynic to Galkin’s erudite moralist. What Galkin doesn’t know is that, like the hapless mortals of religious allegory who try to out-reason the Devil (as in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov) or Death (as in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal), his interlocutor holds a stacked deck—and Galkin’s fate—in his hands.

In Margolin’s telling, Madoff (played wonderfully by Mark Margolis) may not literally be Satan, but like the devils of literature, he can be charming, sadistic, and profound at the same time. Sitting in his prison cell, telling his story to a biographer (the scene in Galkin’s study is actually an extended flashback), he makes what may sound like a laughably outrageous claim: “I didn’t really care that much about the money.” But perhaps it’s not so outrageous. Serial killers, we know from the movies, are motivated less by practicality than by perversity—even, like Hannibal Lecter, by refined aesthetics—so, why can’t the same be true of serial extortionists? “There was the music of it,” Madoff says wistfully. The dollars don’t just flash before his eyes; he waltzes with them. Later, he remembers a dream in which his penis is a vagina and his vagina is a wallet. The play’s third character, a former Madoff secretary whom we periodically see testifying before the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, offers the deliciously creepy fact that in 10 years, she never saw her former boss get up to go to the bathroom.

Most devilishly of all, Madoff as portrayed by Margolin is a kind of unconscientious objector to the moral universe presided over by the god of Abraham, where piety and obedience are rewarded and hubris is shunned. Galkin, then, is his natural enemy: a man who has seen hell and, instead of capitulating to its amoral code, has embraced Torah, ethics, and the Jewish people. He also happens to be a bit of a sap. Prattling about God and Sandy Koufax in his plush study, he comes across as self-satisfied and somewhat soft in the head. Madoff repeatedly attempts to convince Galkin that the latter’s beloved Talmudic riddles are not paths to higher wisdom but to complacency. Galkin will have none of it: For him, the very fact that a financial sorcerer is managing his synagogue’s funds is evidence of divine favor. “A lot of people ask me: Who is this Madoff? How does he make these miracles with money?” he says. “And I tell them: No one knows! That’s what makes it a miracle!”

Galkin, in short, is Madoff’s perfect mark: His belief in providence and in the goodness of fellow Jews makes him easy to exploit, and that, in turn, means Madoff wins their philosophical debate. His ability to betray his own people reveals the limits of Galkin’s moral imagination. “I wanted to rip up the picture he had of the world,” Madoff tells us. “His picture of the world as a place where some men are purely moral. I wanted to say, ‘Wake up, asshole! Wake up!’ It’s a danger to the world, that picture, that idea of moral men. With that picture in your mind you’ll be murdered in your sleep.”

Margolin’s most disturbing insinuation, as voiced through Madoff—the one, perhaps, that Wiesel found most obscene—is that Galkin’s credulousness mirrors that of the proverbial good Germans, who trusted that a charismatic countryman would not lead them toward catastrophe. “Wouldn’t you, wouldn’t any man, still follow the leader blindly without knowing where he was going?” Madoff demands. Galkin will not entertain the possibility that despite his hard-won moral insights, he too is capable of “just following orders”; Madoff, meanwhile, never seems to consider that such a consummately human failing deserves sympathy rather than contempt.

In the end, the only character willing to consider the possibility that she has erred is the one without a bone to pick about the essential moral character of the world. “I never asked many questions,” Madoff’s secretary tells the SEC guiltily at the beginning of the play. By its end, she has charged herself more harshly than a judge, earthly or celestial, ever would. “I committed a crime,” she says, “and I didn’t even know it.”

Hilberg’s pioneering work established a methodological orthodoxy with regard to survivor testimony that was long adhered to by historians looking to establish a credible and unassailable historical record of Nazi crimes.

Christopher Browning was still operating within the boundaries Hilberg had set when he chose to focus on the slow brutalization of a single battalion of German soldiers in his pathbreaking 1992 book Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland.

But, more recently, while studying a 1972 German court case that acquitted a Nazi police chief on all charges related to his role in the liquidation of a small Jewish ghetto in central Poland, Browning was outraged.

He was struck by the presiding judge’s chilling dismissal of some 100 eyewitness testimonies by the ghetto’s survivors who attested to the defendant’s memorable savagery. The judge dryly noted, “As a matter of principle … eyewitness testimony was ‘the most unreliable form of evidence’ with which the judicial process had to deal.” Compounding the insult was the fact that virtually no other documentary or evidentiary material existed in this case.

In his latest book, Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave Labor Camp, Browning offers a corrective—one that represents a shift away from the field’s long-held eschewal of survivor testimony. “The history of the Holocaust,” Browning has concluded, “cannot be written solely as either perpetrator history or history from above.”

Remember Survival offers an account woven out of 292 testimonies by survivors of the Starachowice slave labor camp, whose principal security officer, not coincidentally, was the same Nazi police chief exonerated in that 1972 decision by the German court.

In reflecting upon the 292, Browning remarks: “Among the survivors of the Starachowice camps, there is no Primo Levi or Elie Wiesel.” For the most part, these are ordinary survivors, some with limited verbal skills or disjointed narratives. But Browning is scrupulous in preserving the dignity and integrity, if not always endorsing the accuracy, of their accounts.

Complicating survivor testimony, Browning believes, are five discrete categories of memory, whose boundaries sometimes shift. The largest obstacle to their usefulness as judicial testimony is the tendency by some survivors to incorporate postwar Holocaust tropes into their personal narratives.

Thus, for example, although the historical record indicates that they were not subject to the usual selection process upon arriving in Auschwitz-Birkenau in July 1944, many of the Starachowice survivors vividly “recalled” a selection by Dr. Mengele, whose ubiquity and notoriety were largely nurtured in postwar Holocaust literature and film.

But Browning allows for “authenticity” as well as “factual accuracy” in the survivor testimony. He wisely notes that all evidence is problematic but rather than discarding evidentiary testimony wholesale the problems can be managed by a competent historian. In this case, he speculates that the survivors likely fused the memory of subsequent selections by SS officials, including Mengele, with their traumatic arrival at Auschwitz.

When I picked up Remembering Survival, my interest was not strictly academic. My late mother, Anna Perl Freilich, is among the 292 Starachowice testimonies, and I read the book closely, hunting for more pieces to the overwhelming and confusing jigsaw puzzle that had always constituted her wartime experiences. What I gleaned were not only more shards from a fractured story, but a vital context that endowed those fragments with new meaning.

Ironically, it is Hilberg whom Browning quotes in claiming that what he has attempted to do in this micro-history of the Starachowice factory slave labor camp is to “cast a bright light on a small stage,” and he has largely succeeded. Thrown into stark relief, in particular, are the internal dynamics of the camp and the moral matrix within which the survivors operated.

There were other camps that exploited Jewish labor vital to the German war effort, but the Starachowice labor camp was unusual in at least one respect, one that contributed to the relatively high survival rate of its inmates. Following the 1939 nationalization of the munitions factory on its site, the daily operation of Starachowice was conducted not by the SS, but by “bribable” civilian factory managers.

The Jewish slave laborers were the legal property of the SS, and the new German factory owners paid a per capita fee to the SS for their use. This afforded the SS a more limited day-to-day role in Starachowice than it had in other slave labor camps that used Jewish workers, notwithstanding the brutality of individual Nazis, who oversaw the camp’s security.

Starachowice’s atypical survival rate was rooted in another, more complex, circumstance. In its cynical attempt to “divide and control,” the Nazi administration that ran the security apparatus of the camp appointed a Jewish lagerrat, a parallel to the concentration camps’ infamous kapo system, placing “privileged” Jewish prisoners in charge of Starachowice’s internal affairs.  The lagerrat was supplemented by a Jewish-administered lagerpolizei.

Starachowice’s corrupt and often cruel lagerrat and lagerpolizei were as morally controversial as the ghetto-based Judenräte, or Jewish councils, but they were also paradoxically instrumental in the relatively high survival rate of the Jewish slave labor force.

Though collectively reviled in the survivors’ testimonies for abetting German policies, some credited their own survival to crucial and inexplicable acts of mercy by individual members of the lagerpolizei.

My mother, for example, fell victim to the typhus epidemic that raged in Starachowice during the winter of 1942-43. Too weak to leave her bed to attend the mandatory prisoner roll call, she had resigned herself to the consequences.

But in a story that I heard over and over during my childhood, and that is recounted in Remembering Survival, it was one of the lagerpolizei, a landsman from her hometown of Szydlowiec, Szmul Szczesliwy, who burst into her barracks, rallied her to her feet, yanked on her clothes, helped her to the roll call, and insisted that other landsleit carry her to work. Those who remained behind were massacred in their beds.

As Browning notes, a member of the lagerrat, Rachmil Wolfowicz, was “detested” by many. But he is recalled by my uncle, the Yiddish journalist Joseph Friedenson—another Starachowice survivor interviewed by Browning—simply as a cousin by marriage whose mother’s privileged job in the camp kitchen enabled Friedenson, his wife Gitele and my mother (Gitele’s cousin) to receive occasional life-saving supplements to their near-starvation diets.

This web of idiosyncratic stories helps to reconstruct the tortured ethical universe that reigned in Starachowice, where the Jewish prisoners were continually presented with what Lawrence Langer referred to as a series of “choiceless choices” in their struggle to stay alive and where they established a makeshift moral code in the face of a heartless and single-minded enemy.

The interdependence of this battered community of slave laborers, many of whom were fortunate to be imprisoned with relatives or townsmen, is vividly portrayed. Tragically, as one survivor notes, “if you helped one person, it was usually at the expense of another.”

But Browning cautions against moralizing; what he emphasizes is that it was almost impossible to stay alive solely through one’s own agency. He credits, among other factors, the Starachowice slave laborers’ desperate commitment to the lives of those closest to them by blood or geography for their unusually high survival rate. It also provided a way for them to unwittingly thwart the Nazi plan for total Jewish annihilation.

In one of the book’s most gripping chapters, Browning describes the 1944 cattle-car ride from Starachowice to Auschwitz-Birkenau. When the doors were opened on arrival, a preponderance of the labor camp’s surviving lagerrat and lagerpolizei—all of whom were concentrated in the first car—were found dead in a heap.

Had they perished from the hardships and privations of the cattle-car ride, or were they the victims of revenge killings by their fellow prisoners? Though it’s impossible to be sure, Browning is convinced that it’s the latter.

If fellow prisoners had killed them, it was likely a group of Lublin survivors who had arrived at Starachowice rather late in the game. Geographic outliers at the bottom of the camp hierarchy, they had systematically been denied the advantages of the veteran Starachowice slave laborers, and they may have decided to settle a score. To his credit, Browning neither flinches in exploring this scenario nor offers facile moral judgments about this tragic possibility.

Now, some 40 years after the scandalous verdict of a German court, not only has Browning proved that survivor testimony is “useful” to Holocaust historiography but that it is vital. It also grants survivors a degree of justice that they have long been denied.

In a measure of the emotional resonance his book has had among Starachowice survivors, my uncle, Joseph Friedenson, remarks of Browning, “For someone who didn’t see the Nazis in action, he manages to capture the tragedy as if he were there; as if he were a witness, just like me.”

In his sensitive and careful use of In his sensitive and careful use of their testimonies, Browning has not simply made a sentimental concession to these ordinary survivors, he has enriched the historical record. Even as he reinforces the evidence of Nazi crimes, Browning provides a critical window into the daily life and mores of the Jewish prisoners. Like any good historian, he sifts through and weighs conflicting testimonies and carefully contextualizes them. Above all, he listens.

Toby Perl Freilich is a freelance filmmaker in New York and Jerusalem currently completing a documentary about Israel’s kibbutz movement.

• What exactly are the U.N. soldiers in southern Lebanon supposed to do? No one is actually sure, and Hezbollah is exploiting the confusion. [LAT]

• Israel’s “Iron Dome” rocket-defense system is ready and will be deployed starting in Sderot this fall. [NYT]

• An update on the play that imagines a meeting between Elie Wiesel and Bernard Madoff, which opens upstate later this week. [NYT]

• A womens’ group periodically drives Palestinian children from the West Bank to an Israeli town on the Mediterranean coast in order to give them a day at the beach. [WP]

• Head-Jew-in-charge (and contributing editor) Jeffrey Goldberg nominates editor-in-chief Alana Newhouse to be his replacement following her essay on the Rotem Bill. [Atlantic]

“I think this is something worth protesting for,” says 26-year-old Uri, who travelled to a recent demonstration at Sheikh Jarrah from kibbutz Nir Eliyahu, near Netanya, north of Tel Aviv. “There is this particular situation in Sheikh Jarrah, where people are being evicted from their homes. But it is a symbol, too, of the struggle against the occupation and the criminal racism here in Jerusalem.”

Uri and other demonstrators—many of whom requested their last names not be used—are in Sheikh Jarrah to protest the eviction of Palestinian families. The neighborhood—home to some 2,700 Palestinians, many from the families of 1948 refugees housed here in 1956 by the U.N. Relief and Works Agency and the Jordanian government—sits just north of the Old City. It was annexed by Israel in 1967, a move the international community does not recognize. Despite decades of neglect, though, Sheikh Jarrah has not lost its elegant charm, with such historic landmarks as Orient House and the American Colony Hotel.

In August 2009, 53 Palestinians, including 20 children, were forced out of their homes by Israeli authorities, who handed over the seized property to Jewish settlers devoted to Shimon HaTzadik, whose tomb is nearby. The settlers had obtained a court order declaring the land belonged to Jews prior to 1948.

Many similar property cases are pending. In November 2008, the Jerusalem District Court decided that a Palestinian family named al-Kurdi lived on property that historically belonged to the Sephardic Community Committee, and the court evicted the family. The al-Kurdis now live in a tent opposite their former home, which they had inhabited for 52 years. Another 28 Palestinian families—400 people in total—are at risk of forced eviction as more cases work through the Israeli legal system.

Together, these cases look like a concerted campaign to create a Jewish settlement in this Palestinian neighborhood, which settler organizations have stated as their aim, announcing plans to build a 200-unit apartment block in the area. Palestinian residents face tensions in their own homes as new Jewish neighbors—and their supporters—routinely provoke and harass them. Incidents logged by protestors range from taunting and insulting Palestinians to physical attack. In December of last year, campaigners say, a Jewish settler at Sheikh Jarrah was caught on film slamming a rock into a Palestinian’s head. In another incident a month earlier, a group of Jewish settlers bearing a water hose stormed a Palestinian home and flooded it.

Demonstrations against this campaign of intimidation began quietly. “After the evictions, around August, we noticed that some of the settlers and people going to pray at the tomb of Shimon HaTzadik were harassing Palestinians—every day, but in particular on Fridays,” says Maya Wind, one of the first Israelis to get involved with demonstrations in the area. “We thought it would be helpful to just turn up at those hours, to offer some protection.” At first, a few dozen people showed up. They brought friends. Eventually, the protest crowds swelled to around 100, mostly Israeli and international demonstrators. Then the police intervened.

“They started to arrest us in a very violent manner,” says Wind, who is 20 and lives in Jerusalem. Those arrests, including of the head of Israel’s Association for Civil Rights, were heavily reported in Israeli media. Wind says many more people came to the demonstration to defend freedom of speech and democracy. At one point, in March, an estimated 5,000 demonstrators turned up.

This progression of events formed the green shoots of an Israeli left-wing movement that has been struggling to find its voice since the Israeli assault on Gaza in December 2008. The acts of Jewish settlers in Sheikh Jarrah spurred this small, marginalized, and increasingly despairing population back out onto the streets. As Yuval, a 26-year-old student from Jerusalem and regular at the weekly protests says: “Another Hebron is flowering next to my home.”

***

The protests in Sheikh Jarrah are organized at weekly meetings between roughly equal numbers of Israeli activists and local Palestinian residents. “We are building a relationship based on trust and working together,” says Sara Benninga, 27, who lives in Jerusalem and has been involved in this campaign for a year. “Both sides are very careful and very sensitive to the needs of the other—we know the history of the conflict in Israel and we know that these relationships can end very easily.”

Observers say that the torch-bearers of this protest are a new, young generation of Israelis. “Without the driving force of young, local people in their early 20s, these demonstrations could not have happened,” says Didi Remez, an Israeli communications consultant specializing in non-profits and human rights organizations, who also runs the news-analysis blog Coteret. But if the movement is galvanized by young hearts, it is also being endorsed by older minds—and one of those, the novelist David Grossman, recently spoke at one of the weekly protests to urge an increased opposition to the Israelis’ occupation in all its manifestations.

“What’s happening here is only the tip of the iceberg,” he told the crowd in Sheikh Jarrah. “It’s only one example of what has been happening in the Occupied Territories for more than 40 years. I think that we are all beginning to grasp—even those who maybe don’t really want to—how 43 years ago, by turning a blind eye, by actively or passively cooperating, we actually cultivated a kind of carnivorous plant that is slowly devouring us, consuming every good part within us, making the country we live in a place that is not good to live in. Not good not only if you are an Arab citizen of Israel, and certainly if you are a Palestinian resident of the Territories—not good also for every Jewish Israeli person who wants to live here, who cherishes some hope to be in a place where humans are respected as humans, where your rights are treated as a given, where humanity, morality, and civil rights are not dirty words, not something from the bleeding-heart left.”

Indeed, though the demolition of Palestinian homes is an ugly routine in East Jerusalem, the evictions at Sheikh Jarrah are a new twist, representing the first time the court has wound back to 1948, honoring land deeds claimed to originate before the establishment of the Israeli state. That has clanged warning bells for some Israelis.

“Where do you draw the line?” asks a Sheikh Jarrah demonstrator, Michael Rahat, 55, a teacher from Jerusalem. “If a Jew is allowed to throw an Arab out of a home he claims belonged once to Jews, why can’t you evict Jews from homes in Baka and Talbieh”—that once belonged to Palestinians—“and house Palestinian refugees there?”

For the many Jerusalemites who are a part of these protests, a keen sense of worsening local politics is informing their attendance. Yael, a 21-year-old student from Jerusalem and a regular at the demonstration says: “This is about the future of Jerusalem, and the future of Israel and Palestine.” Her protest is against the practice, she says, of “trying to build facts on this street, on the ground—without negotiation or anything, to make as many neighborhoods Jewish so that most of Jerusalem will stay in our hands.”

The chants and placards on the streets of Sheikh Jarrah insist that Jerusalem is a Palestinian city no less than it is Israeli, which is a direct affront to the “eternal and undivided capital” ideology. But while Palestinians are equal partners in organizing the campaign, they do not have an equal presence at the mostly Jewish-Israeli demonstrations. Sara Benninga offers an explanation. “There is a big difference between being an Arab and a Jew in terms of how you get treated by the police and court,” she says. She claims that Palestinians in Sheikh Jarrah have been arrested purely on the basis of a nod and a pointed finger from Jewish settlers in the area. In mid-March, one of the Palestinian campaigners, Saleh Diab, was detained for nine days and then released—the judge reprimanded police, finding no evidence for the assault charges mounted against him. In such a climate, Palestinians who take to the streets risk being targeted by police. Hassan, a Palestinian watching a recent protest at Sheikh Jarrah from the sidelines, said: “We would like to be demonstrating with them, but this is not for us, not for Arabs. We are not supposed to be there.”

In the face of U.S. pressure to freeze settlement activity as a means to ease a return to negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians, the Netanyahu government has constantly asserted an exception for Jerusalem. In December 2009, Israel announced plans to build nearly 700 new homes in East Jerusalem, and last March, during one of Vice President Joe Biden’s visits, unveiled further plans to build 1,600 more housing units.

Elie Wiesel has declared Jerusalem to be above politics. In a full-page ad that appeared in major U.S. newspapers, he wrote that Jerusalem “belongs to the Jewish people and is much more than a city, it is what binds one Jew to another in a way that remains hard to explain.” He then added that anyone, Muslim, Christian or Jewish, should be permitted to build freely anywhere in Jerusalem and proposed an indefinite postponement to negotiations over the city. The response from Israel challenged what was viewed as a rosy-eyed and removed appreciation of the Israeli brand. “For more than a generation now the earthly city we call home has been crumbling under the weight of its own idealization,” read the letter signed by 100 Israeli peace activist, many of them engaged in the protests at Sheikh Jarrah.

“As true Jerusalemites,” the letter continues, “we cannot stand by and watch our beloved city, parts of which are utterly neglected, being used as a springboard for crafty politicians and sentimental populists who claim Jerusalem is above politics and negotiation.”

Rachel Shabi, the author of We Look Like the Enemy: The Hidden Story of Israel’s Jews from Arab Lands, is based in Jerusalem.

The central irony is that the head of the theater (which is funded by the Washington, D.C., Jewish Community Center) has been known for pushing the envelope—he staged a controversial play about slain pro-Palestinian activist Rachel Corrie, for example. Additionally, a rewrite of the script, in which Wiesel’s character was slightly altered (and no longer called Elie Wiesel), probably removed all grounds for legal action. Still, fear of the hassle that a lawsuit brings—as well as, just maybe, Artistic Director Ari Roth’s personal relationship with Wiesel—led Theater J to nix the world premiere, which will now take place this summer in upstate New York. (Roth has also pledged to stage the revised version of the play next year.)

As originally written, the play had only three characters: Madoff; Wiesel; and Madoff’s secretary. Yet, according to playwright Deborah Margolin, these figures, and particularly Wiesel, were primarily allegorical. Madoff stood for, well, all the bad stuff Madoff stands for; Wiesel stood for moral force. “A recurring element in the play,” WCP notes, “is Wiesel’s insistence that Madoff handle his personal assets as well as those of the foundation; by play’s end, Madoff has yet to agree, a poignant ellipsis that mirrors Madoff’s desire and inability to confess his sins to Wiesel.”

However, having received an advance copy of the script, Wiesel—whose foundation lost $15 million to Madoff, and who personally lost over $1 million—called it “obscene” and “defamatory,” prompting Margolin to change his character’s name. In the new version—which is the one being produced upstate—the character, a Long Island rabbi, is described as “Novelist, holocaust survivor, humanitarian, professor, lifelong witness,” which should sound familiar.

“Wiesel is part of the family,” Roth told WCP. He meant this figuratively, of course, except maybe not exclusively: His mother, who was hidden from the Nazis during World War II, has been friends with Wiesel for half a century. Though the altered version of the play almost certainly removed the chance that a court would find for Wiesel, “that wasn’t enough for Roth, who felt,” the paper reports, “that the gray areas of the law could land him in court—a place he’d willingly go to defend some sorts of creative freedom, but not the right to offend Elie Wiesel.”

Who’s Afraid of Elie Wiesel? [Washington City Paper]
Earlier: Madoff Play With Wiesel Scene Still On

Well, if you still want to see the play—which is called Imagining Madoff, and was written by Deborah Margolin—you can check it out at Stageworks Hudson, a couple hours’ drive north of New York City.

Also, the NPR show All Things Considered did a brief segment on the legal legitimacy of Wiesel’s objection.

Theater Cancels Play With Wiesel Character [NYT]
When Truth Meets Fiction, Lawyers Intervene [NPR]

• A planned Ashkelon, Israel, hospital is not to be built on a onetime Jewish cemetery, as angry ultra-Orthodox alleged. Turns out, the ancient cemetery was pagan! Build away! [AP/Haaretz]

• Harold Bloom’s big essay on British anti-Semitism provoked a huge number of letters in response, and you can read them now. [Paper Cuts]

• The Forward was at DAWN 2010! [Arty Semite]

• “Great Jewish Moments in Law & Order.” Well played. [Heeb]

• Mel Gibson tells us how he really feels:

• Before departing New York, President Ahmadinejad pledged that new sanctions wouldn’t halt Iran’s nuclear development—though they will, he added, kill any chance at reconciliation with the United States. [WSJ]

• Both Egypt and Jordan argued that a nuclear-free Mideast, which a 1995 U.N. resolution calls for, would make dealing with Iran easier. The only (unofficially) nuclear state in the Mideast is, of course, Israel. [JPost]

• President Obama had lunch at the White House with Elie Wiesel yesterday, in what is being seens as the most blatant symbol yet of the administration’s “charm offensive” toward American Jews and Israelis. [NYT]

• More charm: An Obama national security official assured the Anti-Defamation League that the administration does not overly “link” the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to others in the region. [Jeffrey Goldberg]

• Israel reportedly tried and failed to convince Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz to make aliyah and serve as Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations. [JTA/Forward]

• Netanyahu and Egyptian President Mubarak talk about the talks. Oh, and everyone is lowering expectations. [NYT]

• Tacit U.S. acceptance of Israeli nuclear weapons despite the Mideast’s ostensibly being a nuke-free zone has made it more difficult to fight Iranian and also Egyptian proliferation. [WP]

• Three assailants vandalized a synagogue in Nîmes, France, and hurled tear gas at a senior Jewish man, on Sunday. This was two days after a Jewish man was stabbed in front of a synagogue in downtown Strasbourg. [NYT]

• In a column critical of Obama, Jackson Diehl notes, regarding Israel (and Afghanistan), “Quiet diplomacy by the administration’s special envoys … has achieved what presidential lectures did not.” [WP]

• Elie Wiesel will have lunch at the White House today. And you thought the “charm offensive” was just a series of coincidences! [JTA]

What is the solution? Pressure will not produce a solution. Is there a solution? There must be, there will be. Why tackle the most complex and sensitive problem prematurely? Why not first take steps which will allow the Israeli and Palestinian communities to find ways to live together in an atmosphere of security. Why not leave the most difficult, the most sensitive issue, for such a time?

The ad appeared the same week as the article “The Living and the Dead” by New York Times columnist Roger Cohen, who extolled the virtues of examining history and the dead before making decisions in the present day (the International Herald Tribune ran them the same day). He provocatively categorized the dead as the “majority” and the living a “minority.”

In his Talking Points Memo, Bernard Avishai featured a response crafted by his wife, Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, blasting both authors. Where Ezrahi had expected Wiesel to take a stand against the oppression Israelis are inflicting on displaced Palestinians, instead, she noted with derision, he rooted for the dead over the living by lauding history while glossing over present day issues, fulfilling Cohen’s statement that the dead are the chosen ones:

Not only do the settlers here and all over the West Bank undermine the very legitimacy of Israel’s existence (if Jews have a right to land owned across the Green Line before the War of Independence, then surely so do those thousands of Palestinians who were displaced from West Jerusalem—including, presumably, the very house from which I write these words), but they consign all of us, sooner rather than later, to join the phalanx of the dead who died because people like Wiesel prefer mythical references to History and Eschatology over the real people who want to live together in peace.

Elie Wiesel’s Jerusalem [TPM]
Elie Wiesel: Jerusalem is Above Politics [Arutz 7]
The Living and the Dead [NYT]

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 read it, though, you may just want to go pick the thing up and get it over with. It’s required reading in every sense.

Final question: 60secondrecap’s brief written summary argues, “the pinprick of light in all the darkness is that Eliezer does survive to tell his story—and to testify to the remarkable strength of the human spirit.” While the dominant fact of Night is simply its existence—the fact that someone lived through this and then told us about it will never cease to be remarkable—I don’t recall the book as arguing for the triumph of the human spirit, at least in the normal way. One of the book’s more poignant (if ultimately lesser) tragedies is that young Eliezer grows up enamored with Judaism and God—and particularly Kabbalah—yet by the end of the book finds it essentially impossible to be a believer. Even more than depicting the triumph of the human spirit, Night chronicles how a relatively ordinary person can manage simply to stay alive, to maintain the very basics of physical and mental health, in the face of absolute hardship—and, of course, absolute evil.

If you have a different opinion, though, please leave a comment. Or you can also record your own video response and leave it on the 60secondrecap site (a very cool touch!).

Oh, and if you’re a fan of Wiesel’s, may I recommend his brief Nextbook Press book on his own ancestor, the Talmudic scholar Rashi?

Night [60secondrecap]
Related: Rashi [Nextbook Press]

I was attending the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the annual gathering of the world’s great and good. It’s hard to think of a more godless gathering than the WEF. It’s in Switzerland, which generally frowns upon public displays of religiosity, and frowns upon non-Christian displays of religiosity in particular. (Its citizens recently approved a referendum banning the construction of minarets, thus forestalling any efforts to add to the four already there.) Davos is a resort devoted to sybaritic pursuits—skiing, eating, drinking. Walk up and down the main street, Promenade, and you’ll notice far more chocolatiers and luxury retailers than churches. As an ecumenical gathering devoted to reason, free trade, and the pursuit of profits and earthly improvement, the WEF is, if not hostile to religion, aggressively indifferent to it. In the Congress Center, the main hub of activity, signs point to a Prayer Room—a small chamber with an arrow pointing to Mecca. In three years I’ve never seen anybody go in or out of it. Davos Man doesn’t read the bible; he reads the Financial Times. Of course, religion and religious figures always occupy a few slots on the program—there’s always a panel involving a rabbi, a priest, and an imam. But religious figures come for the express purpose of breaking bread with people who don’t adhere to their faith.

Up there in the mountains at Davos, even the most deeply held clashes are set aside for a few days. Because there are few places to sit in the Congress Center, one day I found myself across from an Israeli industrialist, wearing blue jeans and blazer, who was sitting knee-to-knee with a correspondent from Lebanese media company An-Nahar, tapping on his laptop. This conviviality has limits, as Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan demonstrated last year when he stomped out of a session with Shimon Peres. This year, normal order was restored. I attended one lunch where Peres, an echt Davos Man, sat at the same table with Palestinian Prime Minister Salem Fayyed, whom Peres later called “the Palestinians’ first Ben-Gurionist.”

In other words, the idea of segregating yourself along with coreligionists is contrary to the spirit of Davos. But it was Friday night, I was exhausted after three days of listening and writing, and a friend suggested I tag along to the Davos Shabbat dinner. The thought of institutional Swiss glatt kosher—a kind of harmonic convergence of dubious cuisines—wasn’t appealing. But as my eyes scanned from Elie Wiesel, his hands swaying gently, to Shimon Peres, to the 20-something social-media executive who led us in “Yerushalayim Shel Zahav,” to the other 15-odd tables filled with many faces I recognized, the food turned out to be secondary to the experience.

My table represented something of a cross section of Davos: the editor of Foreign Policy, two venture capitalists, a London-based executive at Google, the head of a large French industrial concern, a young management consultant. One table over was what I called the adult table—the head of one of the world’s largest private equity firms, an undersecretary of state, one of the best-known Jewish philanthropists. In many ways, it was a typical Davos event—high-level chattering, the exchanging of business cards.

But it was also highly atypical. Amid the ecumenicism, it was a bit jarring to see signs not just of sectarianism, but of my peculiar sectarianism. Black suits are common in Davos. Black yarmulkes are not. After the singing, and a Kiddush led by Jacob Frenkel, Israel’s former central banker, the chief rabbi of Tel Aviv and chairman of Yad Vashem, Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, gave a fiery, impassioned davar torah on the week’s portion, B’shalach. It tells the story of Amalek, who rose up to harry the stateless, friendless Jews on their way out of Egypt. (I can say with some certainty that this is probably the first time the story of Amalek has been told at Davos.) Sitting on European soil, in the German-speaking portion of Switzerland, amid Holocaust survivors, the story has its own resonance. Lau, the only member of his family to survive the camps, spoke of being liberated from Buchenwald on the same day Elie Wiesel was, in 1945. And he spoke with amazement at the fact that, within three years of that date, Israel rose as an independent state.

Of course, the tale of Amalek has a certain timeless aspect to it. In every generation, there are those who rise up and seek to destroy Israel. And in certain precincts—the United Nations, for example—Jews and Israel are intentionally marginalized. But at this gathering of the world’s economic and business powers, that wasn’t the case. To the contrary. Across the room was Stanley Fischer, the Zambian-born economist who is now in charge of Israel’s central bank. He’s been lionized for helping guide Israel’s economy has come through the global financial crisis largely unscathed. Many Fortune 500 companies have outposts in Israel, which sports its own roster of highly respected international firms in hot areas like technology and alternative energy. In the realms of business, economics, technology, diplomacy—the core strengths of Davos Man—Jews are thoroughly integrated into the establishment. Time was, to make it in the fields that were most highly represented here—the Fortune 500, academia, diplomacy, blue-chip investment, haute banking, economics departments of top universities—Jews had to downplay their Jewishness. Part of getting into the establishment meant leaving behind the challah and the songs sung in minor keys. It meant going to the cocktail party or client meeting on Friday night instead of eating chicken. No longer.

I’m extremely glad I went. The dinner broke up at about 10, and most of the crowd filtered over to the central event of the week—the Google party. My one regret is that I left the yarmulke with the World Economic Forum inscription on it behind.

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 the power to move contemporary readers like nothing else. And, sadly, there was no dearth of children and teens who suffered or died at the hands of the Third Reich, each of them with a story as heartbreaking as it is appalling.

Rita Lurie’s family paid a non-Jewish Pole to hide them in an attic on his farm during the war. Unlike Anne Frank, Rita managed to survive, though she saw her brother and mother die in hiding, and she watched as two other relatives were shot. Lurie and her daughter, Leslie Gilbert-Lurie, a former lawyer and television executive, describe her experiences, and the continuing fallout of those traumas decades later, in Bending Toward the Sun: A Mother and Daughter Memoir (Harper, September).

Janusz Korczak dedicated his life to caring for abandoned Jewish children, long before the Nazis set their sights on Poland. He founded a revolutionary orphanage in Warsaw in 1912—a little ways up Krochmalna Street from the house in which Isaac Bashevis Singer grew up—in which children administrated their own government, legal system, and media. When the Nazis deported the orphanage’s children to Treblinka, Korczak insisted on staying with them to the end. Tomek Bogacki, a Polish-born artist and children’s book author, presents Korczak’s bravery for an audience around the same age as his charges, in The Champion of Children: The Story of Janusz Korczak (FSG, September, ages 9–12).

Hannelore Brenner’s The Girls of Room 28: Friendship, Hope, and Survival in Therensienstadt (Schocken, September) meanwhile focuses on a group of Jewish women who met in the Theresienstadt camp between 1942 and 1944, when they were teenagers. Living today in England, Israel, Germany, the Czech Republic, and the U.S., these survivors now gather once a year to reaffirm their fellowship, and they have contributed their diaries, drawings, and recollections to Brenner’s tribute volume.

The camp, near Prague, where Brenner’s subjects were imprisoned functioned both as a sort of Potemkin Village to appease the Red Cross and as a way station for Jews en route to their extermination. Further insights into the camp’s operation and atmosphere can be found in the diary kept by Philipp Manes, a Berlin furrier, during the two years he spent there before his murder in Auschwitz. As If It Were Life: A WWII Diary from the Theresienstadt Ghetto (Palgrave Macmillan, November), Manes’s diary, like Brenner’s book, depicts the cultural vibrancy that Jews heroically kept alive in Theresienstadt—among other things, inmates wrote and staged a “children’s opera,” Brundibar—as well as the bitterness of living at the whim of the Nazis in a showpiece ghetto.

Even after eluding the carnage of Hitler’s Europe, some Jewish adolescents found themselves jailed again, like the four orphaned protagonists of Anita Diamant’s novel Day After Night (Scribner, September). The novel takes place in 1945, and each of Diamant’s heroines has followed a different path through the Holocaust, dramatizing the variety of its horrors: one, like Rita Lurie, hid out in a barn, another survived the camps, a third battled with the partisans, and the fourth waited out the war turning tricks in a Parisian brothel. Drawn, like many of the women featured in Girls of Room 28, to the Land of Israel—whether through ideology or desperation—these girls wind up in Atlit, a camp for illegal immigrants established by the British rulers of Palestine.

Many of the young European Jews who escaped to the U.S. before the onset of the war found themselves in ideal positions to fight in the Allied military: fluent in German, familiar with strategic locations, they were, most importantly, extraordinarily motivated to risk their lives to defeat the Nazis. Two new popular histories—Patrick K. O’Donnell’s They Dared Return: An Epic Story of Jewish Refugees Who Escaped Nazi Germany, but Returned for Vengeance (Da Capo, October) and Steven Karras’s The Enemy I Knew: German Jews in the Allied Military in World War II (Zenith, October)—tell the tales of such soldiers. Karras’s book adapts material from his 1999 documentary, About Face, but the film that best explains why two volumes on this subject would be published almost simultaneously this fall is Quentin Tarantino’s Inlglourious Basterds, the world-wide earnings of which recently topped $230 million. At least until a Basterds tie-in book appears (apart from Tarantino’s screenplay, which has floated around the web for years, and has been available for purchase since August), Karras, O’Donnell, and their editors can hope to profit from a burgeoning market for military dramas of Jewish revenge.

On the subject of Hollywood tie-ins: as Joel and Ethan Coen’s A Serious Man fills movie theaters with the sound of Yiddish, fans of their remarkable oeuvre may be interested to discover the uses to which their films have been put in a couple of new books. Cultural studies scholars can turn anything into analytical fodder, so no one should be surprised by The Year’s Work in Lebowski Studies (Indiana, November), edited by professors Edward P. Comentale and Aaron Jaffe. It contains essays titled “The Big Lebowski and Paul de Man: Historicizing Irony and Ironizing Historicism,” “No Literal Connection: Mass Commodification, U.S. Militarism, and the Oil Industry in The Big Lebowski,” and “Abiding (as) Animal: Marmot, Pomeranian, Whale, Dude,” among others—and, yes, both the editors and authors seem well aware that what they’re doing is at least a little ridiculous. Less self-conscious is Cathleen Falsani’s The Dude Abides: The Gospel According to the Coen Brothers (Zondervan, October), which sets out “to uncover what the overarching spiritual messages of their films—their ‘gospel,’ if you will—might be.” Notwithstanding the “Foreword” Falsani has wrangled from a Montana rabbi who calls her, absurdly, “the Rashi to the Coens’ scripture,” not much insight into the filmmakers’ religion or ethnicity can be expected from The Dudes Abides. Falsani’s evangelical publisher aims primarily to “glorify Jesus Christ” (and includes in its catalog such literary gems as How Jewish Is Christianity, in which one thoughtful contributor worries that the spread of Messianic synagogues might undermine efforts of bona fide Christian churches to “reach out to the Jewish people in evangelism and discipleship”). Might evangelical Christians cull spiritual wisdom from Fargo and Barton Fink? The idea recalls a saying of that great Jewish sage, Walter Sobchak: “Donny, you’re out of your element.”

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 with tsuris or that in Maus, Art Spiegelman represents Poles as pigs, the very trayfest of the trayf.

Yet recall that Jews lived in Poland for an entire millennium, and Jewish culture of various sorts often flourished there. For one example, Alex Storozynski relates, in The Peasant Prince: Thaddeus Kosciuszko and the Age of Revolution (St. Martin’s/Dunne, May), how Berek Joselewicz organized the first modern all-Jewish military unit in 1794 at the behest of Kosciuszko, a Polish veteran of the American revolution, to fight for Poland’s independence and for the rights of the weak and downtrodden.

Kosciuszko originally fled to America as a young man after his courtship of an aristocratic girl earned him her father’s disdain. “Pigeons are not meant for sparrows,” the displeased lord opined, explaining his refusal. Is it just coincidence that Brigid Pasulka’s A Long, Long Time Ago & Essentially True (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, August)—a Jonathan Safran Foer-esque debut novel of 20th-century Polish life—features a protagonist called ”the Pigeon,“ who, in Kosciuszko-like fashion, joins the Resistance in World War II and defends Jews, including his sister-in-law? Perhaps Spiegelman should have represented righteous, Jew-saving Poles as Columbidae in his Holocaust comic.

Gertruda Bablinska, one such virtuous Polish Catholic, served as the nanny of a wealthy Jewish toddler during the Holocaust. When the boy’s father emigrated and his mother suffered a stroke, Bablinska promised to transport her young charge to Palestine; they sailed on the SS Exodus. Ram Oren, author of Israel’s most popular potboilers, spun their story into a 2008 Hebrew bestseller, now translated as Gertruda’s Oath: A Child, A Promise, and a Heroic Escape During World War II (Doubleday Religious, August).

The boy Bablinska saved, Michael Stolowitzky, is now a 72-year-old New Yorker who has served as President and CEO of the American Tourism Society, which promotes the “understanding and acceptance between cultures” produced by vacation travel. Better that, certainly, than the career path chosen by Max Eisenhardt, a fictional Auschwitz survivor whose ability to manipulate magnetic fields earns him the alias Magneto. The archnemesis of the X-Men, a team of comic book superheroes, and the antagonist in their blockbuster film series, Magneto also stars in X-Men: Magneto Testament (Marvel, June), a graphic novel that compiles a 5-part miniseries by Greg Pak and Carmine Di Giandomenico, that details the villain’s childhood experiences during the Holocaust.

How a survivor responds to his traumas likewise drives British music critic Norman Lebrecht’s second novel, The Game of Opposites (Pantheon, July). Having escaped a labor camp during the war, and then elected mayor of a nearby town, how should Paul Miller respond to the reappearance of the camp commander? Like Magneto’s embrace of violently pro-mutant politics, Paul’s dilemma can be read as a parable for psychological concerns—revenge, forget, or forgive?—always pressing in the real world.

One of the healthiest responses to trauma is to tell one’s story, and few Holocaust survivors have been as prolific in doing so as Elie Wiesel. His most recent publication, Rashi (from Tablet sibling Nextbook Press), is a reflective monograph on one extraordinary exemplar of the Jewish textual tradition. The release conveniently coincides with the publication of the final volume in Maggie Anton’s Rashi’s Daughters trilogy, Rachel (Plume, August). Since 2005, Anton has been applying her zeal for Talmudic learning, and for historical research about everyday life in medieval France, to fiction. Dramatizing the historically obscure experiences of Rashi’s three children, Anton’s trilogy vivifies his life and times, and, together, Anton’s and Wiesel’s books testify to Rashi’s continuing relevance.

As far as textual meetings-of-the-minds between modern Jewish thinkers and medieval ones go, Wiesel on Rashi sets a high bar. One comparably bracing encounter can be found in Abraham Joshua Heschel’s Maimonides (B&N Rediscovers, June), originally published in German in 1935—an early precursor to several recent biographies of Maimonides, including Sherwin Nuland’s contribution to the Nextbook series. Heschel—an insightful scholar, sensitive poet, and pioneering Civil Rights advocate—notes that “it was not the codifier and ‘guide’ Maimonides but the commentator Rashi who became the shaper, teacher, and educator of his people.” Yet the achievements of Maimonides still astonish every bit as much as Rashi’s. In addition to his commentaries on the Mishnah, for instance, Maimonides published numerous treatises in Arabic that powerfully influenced the development of medieval medicine, offering advice on healthy living and quick cures for scorpion bites. One such treatise, On Poisons and the Protection against Lethal Drugs (BYU, July) has recently been republished in a multilingual, critical edition edited by Gerrit Bos of the University of Cologne, continuing the series that began with the 2001 publication of On Asthma. Similarly detailed editions of Maimonides’ writings on hemorrhoids and coitus, as well as several volumes of medical aphorisms, can be expected in coming years.

Lizzie Skurnick, veteran blogger and author of ten novels for teenagers, does not see herself as following in the footsteps of Rashi or Maimonides. Instead, Farah Fawcett provided a model for Skurnick, or at least for her hairstyle around the time of her bat mitzvah. But in parsing the nuances and resonances of classic young adult novels—including a few Jewish essentials, such as Judy Blume’s Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret and Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself, Bette Green’s Summer of My German Soldier, and Sydney Taylor’s All-of-a-Kind Family—Skurnick’s Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading (Avon A, July) accomplishes for the preteen literary set more or less what Rashi provided for the Jews’ sacred texts, and a reading guide for a different, but no less perplexed, demographic.

Rosenberg’s aphorism was a way of asserting that this difference was purely formal—that the vocation of the intellectual, as a professional analyst of texts, was essentially the same as that of the Talmudic commentator. As Irving Howe noted in his memoir A Margin of Hope, it seemed fitting that when the immigrant Ivan Greenberg renamed himself Philip Rahv, he chose the Hebrew word for rabbi: as editor of Partisan Review, Rahv became “the chief rabbi,” as Howe put it, “of our disbelieving world.” They may not have believed in Judaism, but the New York Intellectuals were carrying on a Jewish tradition—the tradition of commentary.

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.

Benjamin and his friend Gershom Scholem agreed in seeing Franz Kafka as a kind of Talmudist manqué, and in parables like “Before the Law” Kafka deliberately imitates the Talmud, offering various interpretations of his own text. In a sense even Freud is a commentator, taking the recitations of the patient as his scripture and probing its hidden meanings. And when Jews entered American culture, they produced Lionel Trilling and Alfred Kazin, two of the most important critics of American literature; and Harry Levin, the major interpreter of Joyce; and Harold Bloom, who models his literary criticism on kabbalistic concepts. No wonder that when the American Jewish Committee founded a journal of Jewish American culture in 1945, they named it Commentary.

There is something appealing about the continuity this idea proposes: immigration and the Holocaust might have destroyed our ancestors’ way of life, but when the American Jewish critic sits at the table and examines a text, he is somehow following their example. Yet how can a commentator be said to belong to a tradition that, in fact, he does not possess? Certainly, when you look at the testimony of the great American Jewish critics, none of them link their own activity with any knowledge of the Talmud or rabbinic literature. Irving Howe wrote that his role models were not Rashi and Maimonides but “the fluent wit of Elizabeth Hardwick or the rhetorical plenitude of Alfred Kazin.” Lionel Trilling insisted, “I cannot discover anything in my professional intellectual life which I can specifically trace back to my Jewish birth and rearing.”

To suggest that, despite their personal ignorance of Jewish tradition, Trilling and Howe—or Benjamin or Brandes—were performing a Jewish role, seems to require us to believe that there is something about the Jewish mind that is instinctively, necessarily drawn to commentary and criticism. But no sooner is this idea stated than it becomes clear how similar it is to the old anti-Semitic belief that Jews are essentially uncreative, only able to manipulate the work that other peoples produce. The most influential proponent of this idea was Richard Wagner, who wrote in “Judaism in Music” that “the Jew can only after-speak and after-patch—not truly make a poem of his words, an artwork of his doings.”

This idea is obviously absurd—it would be degrading even to list the Jewish writers, composers, and artists who falsify it. But as Paul Reitter has shown in his excellent book The Anti-Journalist: Karl Kraus and Jewish Self-Fashioning in Fin-de-Siecle Europe, it had a powerful impact on German Jewry, instilling a self-doubt that affected even its greatest minds. Ludwig Wittgenstein once worried in his diary, “Even the greatest of Jewish thinkers is no more than talented. (Myself, for instance.) I think there is some truth in the idea that I really only think reproductively.” How, then, can Jews take pride in their “mass production of intellectuals,” and see an affinity between rabbinic commentary and modern literary criticism, yet rightly reject the notion that the Jewish mind is restricted to “secondary” activities like commentary and criticism?

For help with this quandary, I turned to the new book Rashi by Elie Wiesel, which will be published in Nextbook Press’s Jewish Encounters series next month. Rashi, of course, is the prince of the commentators: on every page of the Talmud, his commentary appears in the center of the book, on the side closer to the binding. Wiesel’s brief book shows how Rashi—Rabbi Shlomo ben Yitzhak—emerged from the violently anti-Semitic milieu of 11th-century France to become one of the greatest minds in Jewish history. A polymath, a linguist, a mystic, and a rationalist, he applied his genius to producing a vast commentary on the Bible and almost the entire Babylonian Talmud.

Speaking to Wiesel by phone, I asked him whether he believed there was a lineage of the kind Rosenberg saw, from Rashi to secular literary critics and commentators. He was skeptical: “I hope so, anyway. But if the commentator doesn’t know who Rashi was, it’s impossible. What they are doing may be in the same line, but I wouldn’t say it’s a continuation or a result or a consequence.” Nor did he agree that, in some cultural sense, Jews are predisposed to commentary as a literary form: “I as a Jew would like to say that, I would be proud. But let’s be honest—other cultures also have their commentators. What was Pascal, what was Descartes? They are also commentators.”

Wiesel, of course, is a memoirist and a novelist, and so I was particularly interested to see the points of contact between his imagination and Rashi’s intellect. He told me that, while he still reads Rashi today, he does not turn to him for literary inspiration: “I’ve read it and studied it hundreds of times. But does it help my literary endeavor? I don’t think so.”

But perhaps the main thing I learned from Wiesel’s Rashi is that this kind of opposition—between intellect and imagination, commentary and creation—simply does not apply to Rashi. For one thing, the kind of love Wiesel clearly feels for Rashi is deeply personal, as he writes: “And why not say it? I discover I am sentimental. Ever since childhood, he has accompanied me with his insights and charm. Ever since my first Bible lessons in the heder, I have turned to Rashi in order to grasp the meaning of a verse or word that seems obscure…. A veiled reference from him, like a smile, and everything lights up and becomes clearer.”

In the middle section of his book, Wiesel shows how it is that a commentator can leave such a powerful impression of his own mind and sensibility, even when dealing with a canonical text. He does this by offering samples of Rashi’s commentary on the Book of Genesis, from the creation of Adam to the burial of Jacob. What Wiesel shows is that, while we might think of commentary as meaning explication and analysis, for Rashi it is something much more supple and original. Take, for instance, his gloss on the story of Jacob’s deception by Laban, the father of Leah and Rachel:

When he meets Jacob, his future son-in-law, he embraces him. What could be more natural? No, says Rashi: ‘He embraces him so he could go through his pockets which he thought were full of gold coins.’ Laban embraces him also ‘to see if he has precious pearls in his mouth,’ says Rashi.

Clearly, this is not just clarification of the biblical story; it is a creative retelling, adding vivid new details that both heighten the story’s immediacy—we can see Laban peering into Jacob’s mouth—and deepen its characterizations: Laban’s tricking of Jacob, by substituting Leah for Rachel, is foreshadowed in this sneaky embrace. Even when Rashi is focused narrowly on the text, he reads it in an expansive way:

‘And Jacob loved Rachel; and said (to Laban), I will serve thee seven years for Rachel thy younger daughter.’ Rashi’s commentary: Why so many details? Because Jacob felt that Laban was an inveterate liar. He said to him: I will serve for Rachel, but if you think you can tell me that we’re referring to another Rachel, off the street, let me be specific: ‘thy daughter.’ And in case you say you’ll change her name to Leah and Leah’s to Rachel, let me say to you right away: ‘your younger daughter, the youngest.’ But, adds Rashi, in spite of all these precautions Laban betrayed him.

Here Rashi demonstrates the basic principle of his commentary: the belief that, because the text is divine, its words are perfectly chosen and their meaning inexhaustible. It is impossible to say of Rashi, as we might of a secular critic writing about a poem or novel, that he is overingenious, interpreting things that need no interpretation. Today, reading the Bible as the flawed work of human authors, we might not wonder why it refers at one point to “all [Jacob’s] sons and all his daughters,” when in fact he only has one daughter, Dinah; we would simply chalk it up to scribal error. Rashi, however, must see the slip as meaningful, so he advances theories: each of Jacob’s sons had a twin sister, or else they were married and the Bible really means Jacob’s daughters-in-law. Instead of foreclosing possibilities of meaning, Rashi wants to hold them open. To borrow a phrase from Keats, he loads every rift with ore.

The lesson of Wiesel’s Rashi, then, is that while the tradition of rabbinic commentary may lie behind the Jewish intellectuals, it also lies behind Jewish novelists and dramatists and philosophers—perhaps even composers and painters, too. All of them can draw on it, because the kinds of imagination now put to work in all those genres were condensed, in the world of rabbinic Judaism, into a single activity, that of commentary. This was not because of any innate tendency of the Jewish mind, but because of the absolute coherence of the rabbinic worldview. If the Bible is God’s word, then all our human powers are needed to understand it—and, in fact, our powers need no wider field of activity. If the Bible is not God’s word, however, then it is possible to turn those powers to other purposes; what was once coherence begins to look like mere constriction. But even if he is no longer necessarily an authority, Rashi, and the tradition of commentary at whose head he stands, remains a resource for the Jewish—and, as Wiesel notes, the non-Jewish—imagination.

Adam Kirsch is a contributing editor to Tablet Magazine and the author of Benjamin Disraeli, a biography in the Nextbook Press Jewish Encounters book series.

Fraud Victims Want Maximum for Madoff [NYT]
Victims’ Letters to Judge Denny Chin [PDF]

The incendiary comment got renewed attention in mid-May when Elie Wiesel, Claude Lanzmann, and Bernard Henri-Levi recounted Hosny’s record of offensive comments in a letter opposing his candidacy. (“Israel has never contributed to civilization in any era, for it has only ever appropriated the contributions of others,” Hosny pronounced in 2001.) He’s the “opposite of a man of peace, dialogue, and culture,” they wrote. “Mr. Farouk Hosny is a dangerous man, an inciter of hearts and minds.”

Israel dropped its opposition to Hosny before his public mea culpa but after a closed meeting between Benjamin Netanyahu and Hosni Mubarak, the BBC has reported. UNESCO’s next director-general will be selected in October.

Egypt minister who urged burning Hebrew books stumbles in bid for UN post [Haaretz]
Egypt’s UNESCO hopeful in book burning row [BBC]

The items on the latter list were the most self-evident: One would need food, of course, Ziploc bags of Cheerios and Skittles, apple juice boxes, and cans of Diet Coke from the pantry. Family photographs—I’d want images of my annihilated relatives to occupy a place of honor at Yad Vashem. A few suitably depressing items of clothing and, finally, books. The books were the most important. Even an activity as challenging as fleeing the Gestapo was bound to include some downtime, and the titles I packed were chock-full of helpful hints, sure to help me out of any jam or rat-infested crawlspace under an abandoned Warsaw building where I and three others lay hidden, eating rotten potato peels and creeping in the dead of night to relieve ourselves in the frozen sewers. I speak, of course, of the genre known as Young Adult Holocaust literature, a body of work specifically designed to remind Jewish children that no matter how safe they might feel, there will always be those who wish to destroy them. As one perspicacious young reader observed in his “Kid’s Review” (in the name of research, I browsed a few such tomes on Amazon recently): “Would you want to be a jew when you are getting ready to be killed by the germans I wouldn’t.”

There was Touch Wood: A Girlhood in Occupied France by Renee Roth-Hano, outlining how to pass as a convent-educated Catholic. I learned the appropriate times to cross oneself (out of fear, reverence, or superstition), invoke a saint (for a lost object, a difficult problem, or when beset by a pack of thieves), and that Frenchmen who refer to Jews as “wily Israelites” are less virulently anti-Semitic than those who prefer the more traditional “filthy Christ-killers.” The Island on Bird Street by Uri Orlev taught me how to burrow under the ghetto wall, how to keep and shoot a gun, and that the only person you can really trust is your pet mouse. And in Number the Stars by Lois Lowry, I discovered the importance of being Danish.

Such tales of woe were plentiful, yet unlike their real-life counterparts, these brave, benighted children, these Henryks and Hannahs and Boleks and Shmuliks, rarely wound up in Auschwitz. They might lose all their earthly possessions, be assaulted by classmates and teachers shouting racial epithets, even have parents or younger siblings murdered before them (all events deemed appropriate for young readers and beneficial to the formation of their Jewish identities), but clearly the experience of a death camp, even fictionalized, was just too scary. There was, however, one notable exception: The Devil’s Arithmetic by Jane Yolen.

It was like a dare, that book. To have read it—not just to have checked it out from the library and stared at the cover, paralyzed with fear for three or four days, but to have actually read it—was a kind of status symbol. It marked you as a force to be reckoned with, a deranged loose cannon, the kind of kid who would stick her hand in a tank of piranhas or say “Bloody Mary” three times in the mirror at midnight with a death wish in her eyes. The others would whisper about you in car pool before they picked you up on the first day of school, like you were Dennis Hopper. Don’t mess with her. She’s crazy. Loco. Read The Devil’s Arithmetic cover to cover and ain’t been the same since.

While the film adaptation starring Kirsten Dunst has somewhat deflated its epic creepiness, The Devil’s Arithmetic is probably the most frightening book ever written for children. It’s certainly the most frightening book I’ve ever read. The chilling premise is this: Hannah Stern, a modern thirteen-year-old girl, prefers the company of Gentile friends to studying for her Bat Mitzvah and is weary of visiting her elderly grandfather, a semi-catatonic concentration camp survivor who spends his days parked in front of the Hitler—I mean, the History—Channel, weeping uncontrollably. “I’m tired of remembering!” she exclaims. Well, as every Jewish child who has had his Hebrew school class visited by an itinerant representative of the Anti-Defamation League knows, he who does not remember history is condemned to repeat it. I think it’s printed on the mini-Frisbees they hand out after they’ve finished terrifying you. For Hannah, with her casual disregard for the suffering of her elders (and at thirteen, she should really know better), this concept will take a particularly vivid form. Upon opening the door for Elijah at her grandparents’ Passover seder (to which she has come grudgingly—bad girl! Bad JEWISH GIRL! ), she feels a strange breeze across her face and is mysteriously whisked away to… the magical land of Birkenau!

The fish-out-of-water/new-kid-in-school scenario is very common to children’s literature, playing on a child’s fear of strangeness, loneliness, of not belonging. Most of these stories, however, do not feature Josef Mengele as a supporting character. But eventually Hannah, with a little help from her fellow inmates, masters the camp rules for survival—basic bowl-and-potato etiquette, exploiting the lesbian tendencies of the female guards, and of course, “never stand next to someone with a G in her number. G means Greek, and the Greeks don’t last long”—only to discover that such rules are merely a superstitious construct devised by the prisoners to delude themselves that they can somehow subvert, or at least delay, the inevitable, and lo, the ungrateful little JAP gets sent to the gas chamber. Ha! That’ll learn her!

But lucky for Hannah, instead of paralyzing her central nervous system as she claws futilely at the walls with her fingernails until finally suffocating to death in agony, the gas transports her safely back to her own time like three clicks of a pair of ruby slippers, sadder, wiser, and presumably more willing to call her grandparents once in a while. Maybe even come over, spend a little time, would it kill her? No, it wouldn’t. Typhoid, sadistic medical experiments, the hungry Rottweilers when you get off the cattle car, that’s what kills you. Bubbe and Zayde only want to see you once in a while, is that such a crime?

The message was hardly lost on me. And as I practiced taking apart the showerhead to check for Zyklon B pellets before I turned it on, I noted to myself that if anyone was going to open the door for Elijah at the seder, it was going to be my sister. She was almost five years younger than me and hadn’t even started kindergarten yet; she had a lot less to live for.

This is what we were raised on. These were the stories that filled our heads—I’m speaking in the Rothian “we” now, the “we” that means every Jewish person of my generation anywhere in America. Our parents’ generation, the baby boomers, had focused on happy Jewish things like the state of Israel and Sandy Koufax. They seldom spoke of the Holocaust at home or at religious school. It was too recent, too vivid, too painful a reminder of the world’s cruel indifference. But we could take on this burden, this legacy of unspeakable pain. Enough time had passed. We wouldn’t be crushed under the weight.

I attended a Jewish day school, and my class had an ongoing assignment: Once a week we were to find a newspaper article that featured some Jewish content, cut it out, attach it to a sheet of notebook paper with a staple or paper clip (we were not to use Scotch tape, although neat gluing was permissible), and on the notebook paper, in pen, inscribe a brief summary of said article. The definition of “Jewish content” was fairly relaxed—a piece concerning a certain Aaron Spelling show might be acceptable, or, depending on our teacher’s mood, a review of the new Billy Crystal movie—as was the standard to which our summary was held; a typical sentence might read: “What is Jewish about this article is that it is an article about Israel which is the Jewish country so as you can see this article has something Jewish about it.”

It wasn’t difficult to find such a story. Jews—not to mention their antagonists—manage to keep themselves in the news. There was always a snippet about Yasser Arafat or Jeffrey Katzenberg somewhere, and in a pinch there was The Jerusalem Post my father received in the mail twice a month, in which everything, even the want ads, was Jewish. And it was in this paper, as I struggled to complete my homework in the thirty minutes between The Golden Girls and L.A. Law one evening, that I discovered the item that would destroy my mind and haunt my soul, that would finally push me from the rocky precipice of sanity into the chasm of Nazi-induced psychosis.

It was here that I first read about the Mengele twins.

Ominously titled “The Girl in the Cage,” it was a first-person account from a survivor of the horrifying and perverse medical experiments the Auschwitz camp doctor, nicknamed “the Angel of Death,” performed on sets of twin prisoners, mainly children. Don’t, I told myself, staring wide-eyed at the accompanying ink drawing scratched in a stroke so rough it looked painful. Stop reading. Find some little piece about Teddy Kollek and call it a day.

I was nine, but I remember everything in that story like I read it yesterday. How she and her twin sister were discovered hiding under their mother’s skirt as they disembarked from the cattle car with cries of “Zwillinge! Zwillinge!” (“Twins! Twins!”), and were ripped from her arms as she was sent to her death. How the twin girls were locked naked in a small cage and given injections that gave them seizures. How one day, her sister seized so violently she was taken from the cage and never returned. The unanesthetized, pointless surgeries, the cutting into her leg to scrape at the bone with a scalpel, the chemicals dropped in the eyes to see if they would change color, the chilling times they would sit nude on Mengele’s lap, as he petted them fondly, speaking in soft, fatherly tones. And of all the twins kept for torture in the medical block, this girl and her dead sister, four years old when they first arrived, they were the lucky ones. They weren’t subject to experimental hysterectomies or sex-change operations. They weren’t sewn together back-to-back like the Gypsy twins Mengele had tried to conjoin artificially, who screamed for three days until the gangrene killed them.

Like all children, I was warned from the time I was very small of the peril of talking to strangers. Strangers harbored all manner of unsavory intentions, and a stupid or greedy child taken in by their offers of candies or bicycles was sure to find himself covered with cigarette burns and gagged and bound with electrical tape in a rat-filled subterranean chamber, forced to submit to all kinds of disgusting adult demands involving his private parts. Nearly hysterical one day, I confided my fears to my mother, who consoled me. Most strangers were perfectly nice people, she said, with no intention of hurting children or their private parts. But there were a few bad apples out there, not many, but a few, and it’s a shame that they were the ones we heard about, but that’s the way it was.

“Don’t worry too much, baby,” she said, stroking my hair. I buried my small, damp face in the comforting curve of her chest. “You can’t go around being afraid all the time. And you know that Daddy and I will protect you, no matter what.”

However, the evening I came to her with my Mengele problem, she was in a lighter mood.

“Dr. Mengele, huh? Maybe that’s who we’ll send you to the next time you’re ‘too sick’ to go to school.” She giggled, greatly amused. “Oh, a leetle Jewish girl mit a sore throat? Vell, vee vill RIP her throat out and zen it von’t hurt anymore!”

I gazed at her silently, ashen faced and ill.

“Oh, come on, sweetie. It’s a joke.”

“Jokes are supposed to be funny,” I whispered.

She rolled her eyes. “Jesus Christ, will you lighten up? Go finish your damn homework—it’s almost time for L.A. Law.”

She had lied. My mother had lied. Most people were not nice. Most people looked at you and saw a target, a victim, someone to be abused, tortured, exploited for political or professional gain. A helpless plaything upon whom the world’s monsters might inflict their own hate-filled perversions, their darkest, basest desires. Such was the nature of being a child. Such was the nature of being a Jew. And by that logic, was not a Jewish child the worst thing to be? They were everywhere, the bad people. They were still out to get us, all of them, biding their time, ready to pounce at the proper moment, when the world was once again susceptible to hatred. Everywhere. The neo-Nazi skinheads who grimaced from the envelopes of Anti-Defamation League fundraising letters; that girl with the giant pink glasses from preschool who told me that Jews were not God’s Children; the mild-mannered mechanic, embedded quietly in some Ukrainian community in Michigan, who turns out to be an infamous death-camp guard who made people eat their own ears. My mother said she would protect me from such horrors, that she and my father would keep me safe. Another lie. Where were all those other mothers? Where were the Mengele twins’ mothers? Dead. Gassed. Dead, gassed, and useless.

Downstairs, I could hear the first strident bars of the L.A. Law theme song.

“Sweetheart?” my mother called up the steps. “Sweetie?”

I took a deep breath. “Yeah?”

She paused, taken aback at the palpable fear in my voice. “Do you want some ice cream?”

Fool. Ignorant of the gathering storm that soon would shatter our comfortable little lives into a million bloody pieces, she dug deeper into her carton of Edy’s Grand, dribbling some down the front of her freshly laundered nightgown, while the television—The television! The infernal soundtrack that blocks our ears, our minds, from truth!—flickered across her blank, doomed face. She was watching L.A. Law; she couldn’t miss L.A. Law. But where would she be when they came for Benny, the retarded guy? When they came for the red-haired English lesbian who came on this season? Still watching, still spooning low-fat chocolate chocolate chip into her mouth? Spoon away, old friend, spoon away. Because when they come for Douglas Brackman, when they come for Stuart Markowitz, it will be too late. Too late for us all.

I didn’t sleep that night.

Or the next night.

Or the night after that.

For there in the walls of my bedroom, walls painted in the palest china blue, a color I had chosen myself from the book of paint chips the decorator had brought, creeping so lightly, so stealthily, that senses less acute than mine, brains less agile, might mistake them for the scuttlings of a mouse, there, inside my walls, were the Nazis.

Nazis! Gray eyes glinting in the flickering light, canine ears pressed tightly to the drywall, long-bridged noses, slim and elegant, filled with the scent of the wretched Jew-child. They missed nothing. The moment I closed my eyes would spell my doom, for at this moment they would pounce, and oh! What fresh Hell awaited this helpless Daughter of Israel! But I would not go easily. I would not doom my body to the ash heap. I would not be but another faceless victim, another nameless number, another faggot (in the bundle-of-twigs sense) for their grisly fire! Not I! Not this night!

“We need to talk,” said my mother. The ballet car pool had just dropped me at home.

I wriggled impatiently, anxious to fix some microwave popcorn and return to my copy of Nuremberg Diary. “Um, not now, okay?”

“I got a call today from Mrs. Finkel.”

“Mrs. Finkel?”

“The librarian. You know, at the Jewish Community Center. She’s friends with Grandma—”

“I know who she is. How did she get this number?” I demanded.

“What do you mean, how did she get this number? Probably she got it out of the Hadassah directory, the same way I would get her number.”

Nearly every Jewish woman and girl in the country belongs to Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America. The local chapter directory is a veritable who’s who of area Jewish females. Earlier that week, I had casually mentioned to my mother that we might consider terminating our association with the organization and withdrawing our names from its records, as when They came for us, the Hadassah directory would likely be the first place They’d look.

“Mrs. Finkel told me that you tried to check out all four tapes of Shoah this afternoon.”

“So? You’re allowed to check out all four tapes! They come as a set! It’s like checking out one tape!”

She was still making that damn face. I hated that face. “She told me it was the seventh time you’ve tried to check it out in the past three weeks.”

“So what? She kept saying it was reserved.”

“It’s on the thirteen-and-over list, honey.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning you have to be thirteen or over to check it out. That’s the rule.”

“That’s the first I’ve heard of any such rule.”

“Sweetie, that’s the rule.”

“IT’S A BULLSHIT RULE!”

My mother’s shrill temper flared at last. “And when were you planning to watch all NINE AND A HALF HOURS OF SHOAH, HUH? Were you going to take a night off from whatever weird fucking shit you’re doing to the walls of your room when the normal people are asleep?”

Never content to let a long period of insomnia pass unproductively, I had kept myself busy in the restless wee hours cutting out pictures of famous Jews from magazines and sticking them on the walls of my bedroom with bits of chewed gum, where they acted as talismans warding off the unspeakable evil that lay in wait. The resemblance to Anne Frank’s famous bedroom wall in the Secret Annex, touchingly adorned with colorful postcards and newspaper ads picturing film stars and babies, was not lost on me; however, I reasoned, if poor Anne had only been a bit more judicious, a little more ethnocentric in her selections, things might have turned out differently. The Gestapo wasn’t going to get me, not with that giant picture of Henry Kissinger on the wall.

“I shudder to think how many times in a row you could watch that goddamn thing,” my mother continued, shaking her head. “How many fucking times did you sit through The Birth of a Nation last summer? Seventeen? Eighteen? Enough times to make a sane person psychotic—God knows what it did to you.”

I began to cry.

“Honey, tell me something.” She looked thoughtful. “What happens to you when you start to have scary thoughts?”

My cheeks flush. My heartbeat veers wildly out of control. I start to claw at my skin like it’s a canvas bag I’ve been tied in, a canvas bag filled with rats. My stomach churns. I feel like I’m going to pass out, throw up, or, failing those, throw myself out a window, hoping pain or death will distract me. “I don’t know,” I said.

“Okay.” She pursed her lips again. It’s not easy to be the mother of a schizophrenic third-grader, but oy; what are you gonna do? “Tell me something else. Do you ever think of anything besides the Holocaust?”

The Holocaust. I gasped a little at the sound of it. I had stopped using the word. It hung in my head, unspoken, un-thought-of, like the name of a crush one dares not speak aloud, lest by some Mystical Power of Boy, he should hear it, and abruptly, heart-wrenchingly, withdraw his presence from your lunch table, and if that happened, you might as well not even go back to school. You might as well not even live. You might as well rip the picture of Woody Allen off your wall and let the Nazis come get you.

“Do you ever think of anything besides the Holocaust?” She was waiting for an answer.

“Sometimes. But then—”

“Then what?”

“Well, if I find myself not thinking about…it…then I make myself think about it. I’ll think about something I’ve read or some picture I saw, and I won’t stop thinking about it until I can’t stop thinking about it.”

“Why don’t you let yourself not think about it? What do you think is going to happen?”

“Those that do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” I intoned solemnly. Surely this would end the conversation. I could creep to my room, finish reading Ribbentrop’s testimony to the war crimes tribunal, and enjoy the ensuing surge of terror in peace and quiet before dinner.

“Who said that?” my mother asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe Elie Wiesel?”

“No! Who said that to you?”

“Oh.” I almost laughed. “Everyone.”

“Everyone? At school?”

School, Hebrew school, every work of Jewish children’s literature I had ever received as a prize or present, every piece of spiky Holocaust memorial sculpture displayed in a Jewish Community Center lobby with a title like Remember Not to Forget or Six Million…and Counting.

It was not yet acceptable for pediatricians to prescribe antianxiety medication to small children, nor was she about to launch a verbal attack against a Jewish community and education system that with its overwhelming emphasis on victimhood, its insistence that the youngest and least of its brethren experience the same level of psychic pain as its elders in penance for growing up in a country and time relatively free of hatred or danger, leads to a kind of retroactive survival guilt that would ultimately manifest itself in their unformed psyches in one of two ways.

So my mother just said, a little sadly, “Listen to me. The next time you find yourself having those thoughts, I want to you to close your eyes, count to three, and then, as loud as you can, I want you to shout ‘STOP!’ Okay?”

“STOP!” I shouted.

“No! To yourself!” My mother clutched her ear. “Shout in your head.”

I shouted in my head for months. My mother, continuing her good work, banished most of the books from my shelves, replacing them with The Baby-Sitters Club and, against her better judgment, Sweet Valley High. “I’d rather have you shallow and sexually precocious then morbidly psychotic,” she said. Eventually, the thoughts began to recede. I managed to say the word Holocaust aloud. I no longer checked the showerhead for gas or packed small bags full of socks and SnackWell’s, and when it was released in theaters a few years later, I managed to see Schindler’s List with a friend of German-Catholic descent and did not become hysterical—although we had smoked an oddly strong joint in the parking lot before the movie and were forced to discard our popcorn when it began to remind us of a jumbo tub of buttered human teeth, refillable with proof of purchase.

But true salvation would not come until I was in Auschwitz.

I was on a Jewish teen tour, with hundreds of other Jewish teenagers from all over the country—somehow it seemed fitting that my first personal encounter with the death camps should also be my first with the Jewish youth of Long Island and New Jersey.

After a week spent methodically pulverizing what little faith in humanity we had left, we would spend the second week visiting the glory, wonder, and triumph of the Jewish spirit that is the state of Israel, and in this way would our parents ensure that we would grow up to be the kind of people who would marry other Jews, send our children to religious school, and, after we had built up our medical practices, begin to contribute significant chunks of money to the proper federations and charities.

I was told this experience would change my life.

We spent a bit of time orienting ourselves to our surroundings, recovering from jet lag, surveying the delicate peer dynamic of our new community. Soon we were prepared to begin the important business of hysterical weeping.

Which was what I was doing, crumpled against the pillar in the Sorting Room at Auschwitz. We had walked slowly around the cavernous space, examining the enormous mounds of things that had once belonged to people—the mountain of hair, a chamber crammed with children’s toys. The faces of even the toughest and angriest among us were streaked with tears, but my wails must have been particularly wrenching (or ostentatious), for almost at once, I felt an arm softly draping my shoulder.

It was Bettina, a tiny blond woman in her seventies. Several Holocaust survivors were traveling with us, but Bettina was by far the best loved—and the least haunted. I turned slightly to look up into her kind face, and she wrapped her arms around me at once, cradling me like a mother.

“Shhh, darling, sha. Don’t cry like that. Don’t cry.”

“I can’t help it!” I blubbered.

“I know, sweetheart. I know. But not like that. Listen to me, darling. You shouldn’t carry our pain,” she said, wiping the tears from my face with a folded Kleenex, slightly damp. “Our pain is ours. We don’t need you to feel it for us.”

“But all the people….” I couldn’t stop. “All the things.”

“They’re just things, bubbeleh. Just things.” She gestured toward a huge case. “And think, maybe some of the people that used those things, they’re still alive somewhere!”

I followed her hand to the case full of empty cans of gas pellets.

“Okay,” she said. “Not those maybe. But look. Those shoes. Maybe, would you believe it, somewhere in there is a pair of my old shoes? And I’m standing here with you, darling. You see?”

“Isn’t it painful here for you?” I asked. “To be here?”

Her eyes darkened. “Painful? Yes, sweetheart, of course. But I’ll tell you what. It’s a lot better than the last time I’m here.”

I laughed out loud, and a girl nearby stopped sobbing for a moment to glare at us. Bettina plunged an arm into her enormous handbag and extracted a wrinkled Halloween-sized packet of M&M’s. “Here,” she said, patting my cheek. “Take.”

I took.

“Eat!”

I ate.

From Have You No Shame? by Rachel Shukert. Copyright © 2008 by Rachel Shukert. Published by arrangement with Villard Books, an imprint of Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.

As it turns out, Night has been selected for Oprah’s powerful and morally uplifting book club. To mark the occasion, she traveled with Elie Wiesel to Poland. Arm in arm, they strode through the snow-covered wastes of Auschwitz, pausing under the Arbeit Macht Frei gate to ponder the presence of evil in the world and to pose for photographs.

O magazine milks the journey a step further, allowing the reader into the intimate recesses of Oprah’s heart. In her “What I Know for Sure” column, after exhorting her readers to “look around, there’s beauty everywhere,” she takes a look down at her own feet, giving “a prayer of thanks” for her Uggs and “pairs of gloves.”

Taking care to note that she is visiting Auschwitz on her birthday, she promises to give “new life to the memory of the dead.” Such selflessness! Most women would enjoy taking some time for themselves on their birthday. Instead, Oprah channels the sorrows of the world, rectifying them one show at a time, managing even to reunite a long-separated Rwandan family while Elie Wiesel looks on approvingly.

While it’s hard to fault the priestess of self-actualization for wanting to bring Night, and by extension, a greater awareness of the Holocaust to a wider audience, there’s something jarring about the triumphalism of it all. Expanding Night‘s reading public is one thing; incorporating the “hallowed ground” of Auschwitz as a selling point for afternoon television is something completely different. The mawkishness of it all, the Very Special Episode quality, as if Tootie were forced to spend an afternoon with a survivor.

I don’t know what disturbs me more: the cheery billboard image or the presumption that Oprah’s train of self-improvement, once it barrels through the camp gates, will move on to the next topic of the day. Which, as her website tells me, is finding the best fitting bra and an interview with the cast of Grey’s Anatomy.

As every publisher knows, joining Oprah’s Book Club means hundreds of thousands of additional copies in print, millions in royalties. I’m not so cynical to think that Wiesel is simply in this for the money; most likely he believes that, by getting his story out to another enormous pool of readers, he is preserving the memory of the Holocaust for future generations. There may be no better way to reach a mass audience of American readers than by sitting next to Oprah for an hour, but it comes at a terrible price.

Wiesel began his 1986 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech with a Hasidic tale about the Baal Shem Tov, who tries “to hasten the coming of the Messiah,” then loses his memory, a divine punishment “for having tried to meddle with history.” Reflecting on this parable, Wiesel said:

Remembering is a noble and necessary act. The call of memory, the call to memory, reaches us from the very dawn of history. No commandment figures so frequently, so insistently, in the Bible. It is incumbent upon us to remember the good we have received, and the evil we have suffered. New Year’s Day, Rosh Hashana, is also called Yom Hazikaron, the day of memory. On that day, the day of universal judgment, man appeals to God to remember: our salvation depends on it. If God wishes to remember our suffering, all will be well; if He refuses, all will be lost. Thus, the rejection of memory becomes a divine curse, one that would doom us to repeat past disasters, past wars.

Authenticity may seem especially fraught when it comes to memories of the Holocaust—hence the rush by Amazon and Barnes & Noble to reclassify Night, which was published as an autobiographical novel, as nonfiction—but Wiesel does not confine his concern with memory to the Holocaust. By accepting the embrace of Oprah, who told Larry King about James Frey, “Although some of the facts have been questioned, the underlying message of redemption still resonates for me,” Wiesel is also accepting her dangerously low threshold for how memoirs correspond to historical truth, and reducing himself to being another amazing storyteller on the talk-show circuit. Some may think he’s already reduced himself; the celebrated Holocaust survivor in Francine Prose’s 2005 farce A Changed Man bears some resemblance to Wiesel.

Before Wiesel entered the picture, I was watching the Frey fray with great interest, noting the similarities between this scandal and the debunking of Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments. As with A Million Little Pieces, the publishers of Fragments and supporters of the man calling himself Wilkomirski at first brushed aside any disclosures based on documentary evidence. They said his vivid memories were more valid than any piece of paper identifying him as a Swiss-born gentile who had never been in a concentration camp, that the book rang true no matter what his actual experience was, that you could just as well call it a novel. But a sustained campaign forced the true story about the author of Fragments to come to light, and his “memoir” was eventually withdrawn.

Fragments and A Million Little Pieces are representative of a wave of memoirs—real-life miracles, redemption stories, lives that fall apart and are heroically repaired through the act of writing—that have replaced stories about prophets and martyrs in our nominally secular culture. Wiesel and other Holocaust survivors have inadvertently stirred up this wave by telling their improbable tales of survival, but it doesn’t mean they have to be swept up in it. Wiesel is unlikely to spurn Oprah, but perhaps could use some of his authority to persuade her and Random House to distance themselves from A Million Little Pieces, and teach Oprah’s viewers a valuable lesson. “If anything can, it is memory that will save humanity,” Wiesel said in Oslo. But, like the Baal Shem Tov, anyone who tries to meddle with history risks punishment.