For neurotic parents freaked out about their kids’ development: Philip Schultz’s memoir My Dyslexia demonstrates that even a kid with learning disabilities, who couldn’t read until the fifth grade, can grow up to be a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet.

For the comic-book fan who needs a little help growing up: Created by a brother-sister team, Galit and Gilad Seliktar’s graphic novel Farm 54 describes in harrowing style growing up amid tragedies on a moshav, or settlement, in 1980s Israel.

For the aspiring New York intellectual: If they accomplish nothing else, Alfred Kazin’s Journals, edited by Richard M. Cook, should counter any youngster’s callow yearning for a more vibrant age of American Jewish culture, by making very clear just how lousy it felt to hang out at the Podhoretzes’ with Irving Kristol and Norman Mailer.

For the sports fan willing to go deeper than, say, Moneyball: In uncovering the role of Jews in running Negro Leagues baseball teams and then integrating the majors, Rebecca Alpert’s history Out of Left Field: Jews and Black Baseball offers support to those who understand American athletics not just as bread and circuses but as a site for the negotiation of key racial and social relationships.

For the religious pedants you can’t avoid: If they’re constantly quoting a baraita at you, they might be interested to learn in Talya Fishman’s Becoming the People of the Talmud: Oral Torah as Written Tradition in Medieval Jewish Cultures that it was hardly inevitable that the Talmud would be transformed into the primary text of rabbinic Judaism.

For a friend in want of a good orgasm: Christopher Turner’s history Adventures in the Orgasmatron: How the Sexual Revolution Came to America surveys the career and ideas of Wilhelm Reich, who evangelized for the psychological necessity of getting off.

For an American Jewish World Service-supporting exoticist: Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff’s stories and essays, collected in Mongrels or Marvels, do more than revel in the charms and dangers of the East; they offer the insights of a Jewish woman who was born to Iraqi and Tunisian parents in 1917, raised in Cairo, and wrote exclusively in English while living in Israel.

For the Us Weekly devotee: It may not satisfy TMZ hardcores, but for milder celebrity junkies, Gwyneth Paltrow’s cookbook My Father’s Daughter: Delicious, Easy Recipes Celebrating Family & Togetherness will allow your loved one to cook and eat a little like the Hollywood royalty descended from the Gaon of Nitzy-Novgorod.

For someone ignorant about Israeli and American culture who nonetheless insists on spouting off about the politics and culture of both countries: Yoram Kaniuk’s Life on Sandpaper, a genre-bending work of autobiographical fiction, introduces the reader to a young painter and veteran of the 1948 War of Israeli Independence who spent the 1950s hanging out with Miles Davis and Marlon Brando, and who reels off anecdotes of his youth idiosyncratically and with none of the comfortable clichés one might expect.

In the spring of 2007, I was fortunate enough to enroll in his final class at Columbia University and experience his teachings first hand. While the class was primarily made up of devotees—and make no mistake, he had many—as a philosophy major, this was the first and only history class I ended up taking. Even for me, a history novice, his clear thinking and beautifully wrought narratives brought life to the stories he told.

Praised primarily for his historical writings (most famously, Zakhor) and his teachings at Columbia, Yerushalmi hadn’t been known for his fiction. Until now. This week’s New Yorker features his posthumous debut, Gilgul (subscription required). The story within a story deals with themes familiar to Yerushalmi, touching on messianism and reincarnation (or gilgul).

In the story, Ravitch, himself a historian who has written a study on the Jewish tales of Sacher-Masoch, visits the sorceress Gerda at the behest of one of his friends. While at the time he has no interest, life’s events four years later, including the divorce from his wife and his father’s death, leave him overwhelmed with the need to visit her again. Gerda speaks in riddles of sorts, as all good sorceresses do, and tells him the story of a man who was “pathologically rest-less.” While he had no desire to travel, the man felt a strange compulsion that would constantly drive him away from wherever he was settled. Gerda explained to him that while he was born in Bucharest, his soul was the soul of Isaac Benveniste, a 15th century physician born in Spain and exiled during the great expulsion of 1492. He tried to reach Israel, but ended up dying in Rhodes. His restlessness is what inhabited him. Ravitch, captivated by the story, asks her if this is the source of his troubles as well. But all Gerda tells him is, “this story was meant for you, but is not about you.” Like Ravitch, we are left wondering about the meaning of such a tale and how this fits into our lives.

On the New Yorker website, Yeushalmi’s widow, Ophrah, discussed her husbands work with fiction editor Deborah Treisman:

Do you know whether this story—or, at least, the story within the story, the history of Isaac Benveniste, the fifteenth-century Spanish Jewish physician—was drawn from his historical research?

It calls on some basic themes that occupied him, such as exile, Israel, the Diaspora, and more. And the choice of a Sephardic name—Benveniste—hints at that; his major historical research was in Spain, and resulted in his book “From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto: Isaac Cardoso,” about a seventeenth-century Spanish Jew, who abandoned his post as court physician in order to live openly as a Jew in Italy.

Ophrah goes on to explain that Yerushalmi never expressed any desire to publish the story (“if Yosef hears of this somewhere…he will be astounded”), but a colleague convinced her of the merits of publishing posthumously. She also expressed the hope that the story would “bring him out of his ‘professor’ box and to a new audience.”

This Week in Fiction: Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi [New Yorker]
Related: History and Memory

But how is Luxemburg relevant to Jewish history? And what, if anything, would she have to say to Sarah Palin and her Tea Party supporters? The critic and essayist Vivian Gornick joined Long Story Short host Liel Leibovitz to discuss these questions in the first installment of Long Story Short, a new monthly podcast about the people, places, and ideas that have shaped Jewish life and history. Each installment will focus on a different subject—from the 17th-century false messiah Shabbatai Tzvi to the 20th century’s princes of punk, the Ramones—and will feature a wide array of thinkers, artists, historians, and intellectuals.

The conversations, leisurely and long, are recorded in Leibovitz’s living room over a bottle of wine and are designed as the antithesis to haste, hype, and the other vulgarities that plague our popular culture. The podcast owes a great debt to the BBC’s long-running show In Our Time, with which it shares the belief that ideas matter, and that rather than be marketed, condensed, tweaked, trivialized, or bowdlerized, they should be passionately discussed. [Running time: 42:27.]

Subscribe to Long Story Short.

Now the career diplomat has turned his surreptitious scribbles into a 700-page narrative, The Prime Ministers: An Intimate Narrative of Israeli Leadership, that he explains “is not history, but a story about history.” His insider’s account of the founding and building of the state of Israel is also a memoir of sorts, peculiar in that the memoirist gives all the best lines away to others. “Of course, I have my feelings, philosophies, ideas about things,” said the 81-year-old Avner, “but the book is not about me. My intent was to bring back to life episodes showing how these figures behaved, primarily under situations of stress, and also some unforgettable intimate moments.”

But The Prime Ministers is also a sobering post-Oslo account of pre-Oslo Israeli leadership. With the conclusion of the Cold War, U.S. presidents could afford to entertain fantasies of a new world order and a peace dividend, but not Israel. In many ways, Jerusalem forgot how to make its case to Washington, that it was not merely a chip in a game of geopolitical poker, but a strategic asset in its own right—and had been recognized as such even by a U.S. president, Richard M. Nixon, who seemingly had no love for the Jews. It was Begin who clearly explained that the Jews had rights, not merely claims, to their historical homeland. Avner’s book is a timely reminder that Israel has not survived these last 60-plus years because it has satisfied the claims of the world community, but has rather thrived thanks to the ingenuity, inspiration, and courage of its leaders.

The major figures here are the four prime ministers for whom Avner worked, with Begin as the book’s undisputed protagonist, often stealing scenes from the other three even when they are the sitting prime minister and Begin is the leader of the opposition. In this telling, Begin towers over them all, an Israeli leader, Avner writes, “possessed of a unique, all-encompassing sense of Jewish history.”

While the election of the right-wing Begin government moved mainstream Israeli politics to the center (in the same way that Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher affected the United States and the United Kingdom), Rabin forged a strategic relationship with the United States. These two more than any of the country’s other famous patriarchs are the founders of current-day Israel.

Rabin’s influence came in part from his direct involvement in domestic U.S. politics beginning with his support of Richard Nixon against Hubert Humphrey in the 1968 presidential election. As Avner writes, Rabin explained his tactical style to a somewhat astonished Begin:

It is not enough for an Israeli ambassador here to simply say “I’m pursuing my country’s best interests according to the book.” To promote our interests an Israeli ambassador has to take advantage of the rivalries between the Democrats and Republicans. An Israeli ambassador who is either unwilling or unable to maneuver his way through the complex American political landscape to promote Israel’s strategic interests would do well to pack his bags and go home.

I asked Avner, the former ambassador to the United Kingdom and Australia, if he thought this sort of direct involvement should be part of the Israeli ambassador to Washington’s job description. Not at all, Avner insisted. “It could only happen by default, if one wins trust and is invited into the inner sanctums of power. But you can’t set out to do it. And I don’t know of anyone else before or after Rabin who had the chutzpah to say it this way as he did.” Rabin was special. “He was the right man there, winning the trust of the Nixon Administration and not least Kissinger himself. He once said the only secretary of state who truly understood the Israel-Arab conflict in all its complexities was Henry Kissinger. Nevertheless, for much of the time, they had a love-hate relationship with each other.”

***

Avner’s book is something of an anomaly among political memoirs, where mid-level bureaucrats typically assert a centrality for themselves that rarely survives book reviews, never mind the first draft of history. Avner on the other hand is a major player, “one of that same impressive generation of British-born Israelis who made their mark in serving the State of Israel, like Efraim Halevy and the late David Kimche,” said Jonathan Spyer, a British-born Middle East analyst who moved to Israel 20 years ago. Nonetheless, Avner’s own account of his career invariably forces him to the margins, which becomes the book’s source of self-effacing humor.

Avner writes, for instance, of how Eshkol once stopped in the middle of delivering a speech Avner had written to disapprove of a passage and chastise Avner in front of the audience. On another occasion, at a White House banquet, Avner’s lavish kosher meal created such a stir with his table companions that across the room President Gerald Ford wondered what was going on. It was Avner’s birthday, explained Prime Minister Rabin. Accordingly, the U.S. commander-in-chief led the entire banquet hall in a chorus of “Happy birthday, Yeduha,” unaware that Avner’s name had been misspelled on his place card. Afterward, Rabin explained to Avner that he had no choice but to fabricate the story about his birthday. Otherwise, he tells him, “there’d be a headline in the newspapers that you ate kosher and I didn’t, and the religious parties will bolt the coalition, and I’ll have a government crisis on my hands.” Justice is served when Betty Ford drags Rabin out on to dance floor, where he nearly trips over his own shoelaces, only to be saved by the comparatively light-footed Henry Kissinger.

The book’s much more significant duet is Kissinger and Rabin’s, which helped consolidate the alliance between Washington and Jerusalem. Eshkol named Rabin ambassador to the United States in 1969, and Avner followed him there, marveling at this future prime minister’s access to the White House.

“Rabin was central to the U.S.-Israel relationship, especially within the Cold War context,” said Avner. Rabin understood that the Nixon White House’s chief concern was the Soviet Union and made the case for Israel as a strategic asset primed to take on Moscow’s regional allies, Egypt, and Syria. He also teamed up with Kissinger in an intra-Beltway battle against Nixon’s less than Israel-friendly Secretary of State, William Rogers.

As in most portraits, Kissinger comes off as a complicated character, best understood, in Avner’s reckoning, in light of two of Kissinger’s German precursors, Metternich, the 19th-century statesman and strategist, and Heinz, a teenage refugee from Nazi Germany who wound up at George Washington High School in upper Manhattan—that is, the adolescent Kissinger.

Avner relates a remarkable story of sitting at the King David hotel in Jerusalem with a Washington psychiatrist whom Avner pseudonymously refers to as Willie Fort. As Kissinger makes his way through the lobby, Fort hails him—“Heinz, Heinz”—and Kissinger’s face turns flush, before he moves on, ignoring Fort. Avner demands an explanation for the strange scene, and his companion relates how he and Kissinger were close friends in high school, both of them refugees from Hitler’s Germany. Avner writes:

Henry Kissinger, [Fort] said, habitually insisted he had no lasting memories of his childhood persecutions in Germany. This was nonsense! In 1938, when Jews were being beaten and murdered in the streets, and his family had to flee for their lives he was at the most impressionable age of 15. At that age he would have remembered everything: his feelings of insecurity, the trauma of being expelled, of not being accepted; what it meant to lose control of one’s life, to be powerless, to see one’s beloved heroes suddenly helpless, overtaken by the brutal events, most notably his father whom he greatly admired. Those demons would never leave Henry Kissinger however hard he tried to drown them in self-delusion.

How, Avner asks Fort, does this impact his role as mediator between us and the Arabs?

“ ‘People like him invariably over-compensate,’ ” Avner quotes Fort. “ ‘They go to great lengths to subdue whatever emotional bias they might feel, and lean over backwards in favor of the other side to prove they are being even-handed and objective.’ ”

***

For Avner, at the opposite end of the spectrum from Kissinger is Begin, who would do anything for his own people. “He was a quintessential Jew,” said Avner, who, as he explains, had not been a Begin supporter until then. “For years the word ‘terrorist’ clung to him,” Avner told me, “and when he was elected in 1977 he was described in many a corridor of power as a ‘warmonger.’ Nevertheless, it was he who won the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating the peace with Egypt. Upon election he asked me to stay on working with him as an adviser, and I was hesitant at first. I asked him for time to think it over, and he said, ‘You want to speak to Rabin don’t you?’ Yes, I told him. So I called Rabin and he said, ‘Take the job, Begin is an honest and responsible man. He’s your kind of Jew, observant.’ Before Begin, all of Israel’s leaders were diehard socialists. It was unheard of before him, for example, that a dinner at the White House would be kosher. After him, all White House dinners for visiting Israeli prime ministers are kosher.”

Avner stayed on to “shakespearize,” as Begin said, the prime minister’s Polish English, but the most important piece of writing Avner may have done on Begin’s behalf is this book. In the afterword, Avner recalls explaining to Margaret Thatcher that Begin never produced his own memoirs. Accordingly, Begin is the presiding spirit of The Prime Ministers, which opens with Avner’s first recollection as a boy of hearing English neighbors cursing the name of the Irgun leader, and concludes with Begin’s death in 1992.

“What opened my heart was the man himself,” Avner said. “His nobility stretched into the small things. I was recently telling Natan Sharansky something about Begin, which he didn’t know and which brought tears to his eyes. When Sharansky was imprisoned in the Soviet Union, his wife, Avital, received a government stipend to make phone calls to Moscow each week to keep the campaign for his freedom alive, but some bureaucrat told her she was overstepping her budget. When Begin heard about this, he instructed that all of these bills should come to him, and he would pay for them out of his own pocket.”

I asked Avner where Begin’s reputation stands today. “In all the polls for the last few years, Begin has overtaken Ben Gurion. Why? Overwhelmingly, people ascribe to his credit the peace treaty with Egypt. He is also fondly remembered for his humble and chivalrous lifestyle. He is particularly revered by the Sephardic Jews who gave him his majority in 1977. In fact it was Begin who emancipated them into the democratic system, virtually all of them having come from lands—North Africa and the Middle East—where democracy is an eccentricity. He was the first to appoint a swath of Sephardic Jews to his cabinet. Moreover, Begin is the man credited for having prevented two civil wars,” said Avner, referring to the sinking of the Altalena in 1948 and before that when Begin and Ben Gurion squared off against each other in 1944. “Begin believed that a Jew must never raise a finger against another Jew. He was haunted by the Holocaust and lived Jewry’s ancient past when Jerusalem fell to the Romans in 70 CE because Jews were fighting each other. He was so steeped in Jewish history, he talked about the destruction of the temple as if it had happened yesterday.”

And what, I asked Avner, would Begin make of Israel’s strategic situation today? After all, against the good opinion of the international community, including Washington, Begin ordered the destruction of Iraq’s nuclear facility at Osirak. Would he do the same thing with Iran?

“I don’t know. He would have opposed sanctions from the start,” said Avner, believing that Begin would have had no faith in their efficacy against an ideologically driven regime like Iran. “At the same time,” Avner continued, “Begin, having himself once commanded a force of his own—the Irgun during the British mandate—knew the limits of military power, and I don’t know if he would have thought that Israel had the power by itself to defang Iran. But as obsessed as he was with the Holocaust, he would have mounted a vociferous worldwide campaign against the Iranian leaders who deny the Holocaust and threaten to wipe the Jewish state off the map. I don’t think our present leaders—and the Diaspora Jewish leadership for that matter—are doing enough to alert the world of the existential dangers for the whole of the West, and not only Israel. Begin would be shouting from the rooftops demanding that this be put at the very top of the international agenda. For all the talk it is still not at the top of the international agenda. One thing is clear: Given our geopolitical situation, Israel simply cannot tolerate a nuclear Iran.”

“The [Lower] East Side is a volcano of superstitious ignorance,” read an article in the New York Tribune in the steamy June of 1906, referring to masses of immigrant Jews prone to the kind of mass hysteria that occurs every so often in the quarters of poor and ignorant.

In this case the volcano had erupted in a riot earlier in the month when 50,000 immigrant mothers descended on their local public schools demanding to see their children, having had heard that there was a Board of Health-sanctioned child slaughter taking place. Greeted by locked doors, the screaming throngs surrounded the schools and began smashing windows and pounding on doors. On Essex Street, some white-hot mothers clambered up ladders in an attempt to break into P.S. 137 through the second-floor windows.

During this rampage, gangs of immigrants cursed out principals, fought police, and attacked anyone in the street bearing the slightest resemblance to a doctor—and, according the Tribune, this meant anyone in a pair of spectacles. Some of them raided vegetable pushcarts for ammunition while others, like one young man who pulled a revolver on a member of the Board of Health, used more serious weapons.

Word had spread among the Jews of the Lower East Side that uptown doctors were coming into downtown public schools and were, as described in the daily Varhayt, “cutting the throats of Jewish children!” After a two-hour assault, the rag-tag army achieved victory: Their kids were released early and alive, proving that no such slaughter had taken place.

Thrilled at having gotten a miraculous half-day’s vacation, the kids didn’t even know what the ruckus was about. “I dunno sir, I t’ink the school exploded,” one boy told a reporter from the Evening Post.

As with many hysteria-inducing rumors, this one contained a kernel of truth. After cases of tonsillitis kept scores of Jewish students out of school a week earlier, one school principal recommended that these kids have tonsillectomies. The mothers complained that the trip uptown for such a procedure wasn’t possible for people who worked 12-hour days, six days a week. What’s more, the 50-cent doctor’s fee was too high. So, the principal kindly arranged for doctors from Mt. Sinai hospital to come to the school and perform quickie operations.

Just days before the riot, doctors performed 83 tonsillectomies at P.S. 100 on Cannon Street. Most of the kids were back in class the following day. According to the Tribune, none of the operations were performed without parental consent, and, they added, there were no complaints. A tonsillectomy was no big deal.

But the Yiddish daily Varhayt claimed otherwise, reporting that not only did many of the young patients fail to get their parents’ permission, they had been sent home with unintelligible permission slips. “First of all,” the Varhayt editorialized, “the poor and unhappy immigrant mothers who suffer the stifling heat and confinement of the tenements can’t even read. And secondly, they aren’t able to understand the technical English on the permission slips that was being read to them.” All they knew was that when the children returned home from school after their procedures, they did so drooling mouthfuls of blood, barely able to speak. Shocked, their parents asked what happened. “Doctors cut our throats,” the children replied.

Rumors of a wholesale slaughter leapt like wildfire throughout the tenements and shops. As the gossip wended its way through the neighborhood, the story grew from “doctors cut our throats” to “two children died” to a wild “83 children died.” Street-corner orators got into the act, screaming about the massacres in the schools, comparing them to the pogroms in Russian-ruled Poland.

Coming on the heels of a particularly brutal pogrom in Bialystok that had just been reported on—accompanied by gruesome photos—in the Yiddish press, the Lower East Side surgeries morphed, in the eyes of gullible parents, into evidence of an American pogrom. Accustomed to such violence in Europe, many of the recent arrivals believed such things could happen even in America.

But if the Tribune implied that the Jews were superstitious dupes prone to wild overreaction, the Yiddish Varhayt shot back that the fault lay with the Board of Health and the school’s principal for stupidly sending home permission slips not in Yiddish. The Varhayt also launched into a tirade about how Irish principals have no respect for Jewish immigrant parents and essentially do what they want with the children.

All the Yiddish papers decried the overwrought reaction of the mothers. But in an attempt to fully blame the Lower East Side’s Jews for the riot, both the Tribune and the New York Times alleged that there was a gaggle of local Jewish doctors who had spread the rumor because they were furious that uptown doctors were performing tonsillectomies on local kids for free, when they could be getting 50 cents a pop. The Yiddish press opted not to remark on that theory.

The Tribune also took the opportunity to bemoan the episode as one of a series of events that plagued the overcrowded and frequently obnoxious Jewish quarter. Four years earlier, they noted, Jewish women rioted against local butchers, and three years earlier, they rioted against doctors who were treating their children for trachoma. These same immigrant women joined together most consistently for “Landlord Riots,” which exploded every time rents were raised, and for bank riots, which occurred every time a Jewish bank went belly-up, leaving its poor immigrant depositors with bupkes.

The great tonsil riot fizzled quickly, as it occurred at the end of the school year and was forgotten almost immediately as students graduated and parents kvelled. The police, however, worried a little longer and, according to the New York Times, posted squads of cops outside heavily Jewish schools, on Essex and Grand Streets, where, on the last day of classes, graduates performed scenes from The Merchant of Venice to their Yiddish-speaking parents, none of whom rioted or even panicked. Well, maybe they panicked just a little.

In Inventing Our Life: The Kibbutz Experiment, a documentary film-in-progress, Toby Perl Freilich looks at the evolution of the kibbutz from its inception to the present, drawing on the memories and reflections of members from five kibbutzim. Perl Freilich spoke to Vox Tablet’s Sara Ivry about the kibbutz movement’s ability to cultivate leaders even as it alienated women, non-Ashkenazim, and, ultimately, its own offspring.

Throughout August, to commemorate the kibbutz movement, Tablet Magazine will post a weekly clip from Perl Freilich’s film, beginning today.

TO WATCH THE FIRST INSTALLMENT, CLICK HERE.

The holiest of Jewish holidays isn’t Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur. It’s Shabbat, a holy day so important that it ranks on God’s top ten list. The Sabbath is mentioned a dozen times in the Torah, far more than any other commandment. The Talmud claims that remembering the Sabbath and keeping it holy is like observing all 613 commandments at once, which is why, as we learn in The Big Lebowski, religious Jews absolutely do not roll on the day of rest.

For those dedicated to the commandment’s full implementation, the Sabbath is something that must be protected against any infraction, no matter how minute. As recently as last year, a group of religious Jews in Jerusalem violently protested the operation of a parking lot on Shabbat. The people who took part in the action are the latest incarnation of Shomrei Shabbos, “Guardians of the Sabbath,” or, “Sabbath Enforcers.” The Enforcers have their distant origins in the medieval character known as the klopper, the man in the shtetl whose job it was to walk about the village and bang on the Jews’ houses to let them know it was time to close up shop because Shabbos was beginning.

This form of public communal cultural preservation was particularly tested during the urbanization of the 19th century. When Jews opened businesses, there were always those Shabbos enthusiasts who made the rounds on Friday evenings making sure Jewish shops were shut down. Infractions were often met with threats of boycotts and violence. The holy day was not something to take lightly.

As secular Yiddish groups like women’s rights organizations and sports clubs established themselves in the early 20th century, so too did Orthodox groups begin formalizing their unions. Chief among them was the establishment of an official Shomrei Shabbos organization. After the organization was founded, at a conference in Berlin in 1929 by a group of German rabbis, religious Jews from many countries soon joined, all agreeing that desecration of the Sabbath was on the rise as a result of the nature of modern life—forced store and factory closures on Sundays required Jews to work on Saturdays. Rabbis at the conference sought a way to ensure Sabbath observance among Jews who had no choice but to work on the day of rest. They considered petitioning governments to allow a day off on Saturday and to work instead on Sunday.

In 1930, a second, much larger Shomrei Shabbos conference was held, also in Berlin. Some 2,000 people attended the event, and, by then, the Shomrei Shabbos were active in more than 21 countries. Among ideas floated at the event was a proposal to approach the League of Nations about making Sabbath rest an international priority and the suggestion of creating a Shabbos Encyclopedia, which would examine the history of Saturday work stoppages from biblical times to the present. Famed poet Chaim Nachman Bialik promised to contribute an article.

Geared to helping Jews who wanted to but couldn’t observe Shabbos, the conference did not take into account people who cared nothing for the day of rest, or those who might purposely break it as part of their political or social ideology. But, as Asher Ginsburg (aka Ahad Ha’am) once noted, “Shabbos keeps Jews more than the Jews keep Shabbos.” To the Enforcers on the streets of Warsaw, this was a matter of national concern. They had no qualms about cracking skulls for the sake of Shabbos and, occasionally, breaking it in order to keep it whole.

The Yiddish press is full of incidents involving the Enforcers. In August 1927, the Yiddish daily Moment told the story of a young Jew riding a bicycle through a heavily Hasidic neighborhood of Warsaw on a Saturday. It was just before noon, when synagogue services typically ended and thousands of congregants spilled into the streets. As the young rider approached the corner of Tvarda and Marianska Streets, a Hasid saw him and screamed, “Mekhalel-shabesnik!” (“Shabbat breaker!”) at the top of his lungs, and hurled himself off the sidewalk to block-tackle the cyclist.

“A bitter holy war began to play out,” Moment’s reporter wrote, as the cyclist got up and began to argue with his assailant. The cyclist was furious at being smashed to the ground. The Hasid, meanwhile, was equally angry at the public flouting of the holy day. The two began throwing punches, and Hasidic bystanders joined in, taking their own swings at the biker, for “the honor of the Sabbath,” Moment reported. The Hasidim “saw fit to ‘get even’ with the young man’s bicycle, breaking spokes and bending the frame and wheels until it was transformed into a heap of junk.”

Eventually, the police showed up to drive the large crowd away. They arrested the cyclist and his attackers and lugged the smashed bike back to the precinct as evidence. While Baghdadi Rabbi Chaim Yosef, also known as Ben Ish Chai, the same name he gave to his 19th-century halakhic treatise, wrote that bicycle riding is permitted on the Sabbath within the confines of an eruv, Warsaw’s Hasidim seemed to know nothing about such a ruling.

Fear of arrests did not deter these Shabbos watchdogs. A year later, Moment reported on roving gangs of them every Friday evening. One particular night, they happened upon a Jewish boy at the corner of Gzhibovska and Granitshna Streets in Warsaw shouting, “Buy ‘em ladies, pumpkin seeds, fresh out of the oven, buy ’em now!”

One of the Enforcers walked over and calmly alerted the boy that Shabbos had begun and that he should stop selling the roasted seeds. The boy ignored him. What began as “moral advice from the Enforcer quickly turned into a physical threat,” according to Moment. While the Enforcer was yelling at the kid, a crowd grew. On one side were Jews on their way to synagogue. They were poised to drag the “mekhalel-shabesnik” into an alley and pound some sense into him. The other side consisted of people defending the alleged transgressor.

As in the earlier incident, the fight escalated, and soon people were screaming and smashing their canes over each other’s heads. Moment’s reporter doesn’t say what happened to the peddler-boy during the fracas but does tell us when the police arrived they arrested a half a dozen people who spent Shabbos in the clink.

The melee didn’t stop other Enforcers from continuing to prowl that evening, and, “after determining that the Jewish seltzer stands on Tvarda Street were indeed closed,” they came upon a young couple on a date. While a Shabbos rendez-vous does not qualify as a transgression, it turned out that the young man was smoking a cigarette—an act that necessitated the lighting of a match, strictly prohibited on holidays.

One of the Enforcers flew into a rage upon seeing the smoker, snatched the smoker’s hat off his head, threw it to the ground, and stomped on it. The victim, as Moment dutifully reported, “was baffled and didn’t quite know how to react. His date, on the other hand, was a real eyshes khayel—a woman of valor. She knew exactly what was happening and jumped on the Enforcer, scratched his face like a cat, and tore out a hefty chunk of his beard.” The Enforcer, Moment continued, let out a “blood-curdling scream which brought hundreds of people into the street, crowding it so much that the tram was unable to get through.” The police finally arrived and arrested everyone involved.

The Enforcers did not only antagonize relations between religious and secular Jews in interwar Poland. Sometimes, they used their powers to deal with internal matters.

Take, for example, the May 1933 case of Yoel Weiderfeld, a well-off Hasidic landlord. According to Moment, Weiderfeld had evicted a family with six small children from an apartment, throwing them into the street. Though local Hasidim tried to get Weiderfeld to reconsider his decision, the landlord remained unmoved.

Not so the Shabbos Enforcers, who sprang into action. On a Friday night, while Weiderfeld was at his shtibl greeting Shabbos, the Enforcers moved the poor family, “together with their meager belongings, back into their apartment.”

When Weiderfeld found out about it, he was furious and vowed to initiate new eviction procedures. But the Shabbos Enforcers remained on the case. “When the landlord went to pray that Shabbos morning, the other worshippers asked of him that he allow the poor renter back in,” Moment reported. They also tried to delay Torah reading until Weiderfeld agreed to allow the family to remain. But the landlord was a stubborn sort and steadfastly refused their entreaties.

Without other recourse, the Enforcers’ next move was to grab Weiderfeld’s tallis, wrap it around his head, throw him over a bench, and start punching his back and buttocks—a Yiddish underworld tactic known as “aroysnemen a mashkante,” taking out a mortgage, on someone. In spite of the serious shellacking, the landlord freed himself and fled the synagogue to a nearby pharmacy, where he called the police—himself violating Shabbos. Instead of returning to shul, he engaged the services of the law, who again, Moment continued, “threw the poor family out of the apartment—on Shabbos, no less.”

Condoned by the most important rabbis, the street-level tactics of the Enforcers remain a violent inheritance today. While the contradiction inherent in their aggression seems to elude them, their desire to protect, defend, and enforce the Sabbath remains paramount: While they’re around, they’ll see to it nobody rolls on day of rest.

A Recent Anti-Semitic Theme: The Sabbatean Role in the Armenian Genocide [The Armenian Weekly]

I guess I just wondered why he did this project. >>

A chapter on the war currently states: “The Palestinians and the Arab countries contended that most of the refugees were civilians who were attacked and expelled from their homes by armed Jewish forces, which instituted a policy of ethnic cleansing, contrary to the proclamations of peace in the Declaration of Independence.” It also includes the Israeli perspective on the same events. A Ministry of Education spokesman said that “a great many mistakes, some of them serious” had been found in the book and would need to be corrected before it could be returned to the shelves; a history teacher who’d complained about the book told Haaretz, more bluntly, that “presenting Israel’s claims as being equal to those of Arab propagandists is exactly like presenting the claims of the Nazis alongside those of the Jews.”

Israel Pulls Textbook with Chapter on Nakba [Haaretz]
Related: Text Messages [Tablet]

For a dim-witted and jolly child like myself, Holocaust Day proved an intolerable burden. It wasn’t that the topic itself failed to fascinate; on the contrary, ever since stumbling across Anne Frank’s diary sometime in the second grade, I nursed few obsessions more persistent than the Nazis and their crimes. But Holocaust Day, with its demand of instantaneous sadness, with its recycled pageantry and terrifying iconography, struck me as grotesque. What lesson, I seethed quietly, was I supposed to take from this daylong commemoration that focused so much on pomp and so little on circumstances, on the concrete and complex set of historical developments of which this immense tragedy was composed? What was I supposed to learn?

The nation’s masters of ceremony thought of everything. They must have anticipated my question, as they had designed a one-word solution and printed it on a sticker we were all obliged to wear on Holocaust Day. It featured a red flower against a blue background with black block letters delivering the command: “Yizkor,” it read. Remember.

There could, perhaps, be no more profoundly Jewish concept. What are we, after all, if not a nation bound together by memory, sustained throughout millennia by the wisps of our shared history, the recollections of the past informing the longings of the future?

But memory is never without consequences. In 2007, for example, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, produced a hotly debated paper that claimed that if mankind wished to guarantee the thriving exchange of opinions and ideas, it must first teach computers to forget.

Beautifully titled “Useful Void: The Art of Forgetting in the Age of Ubiquitous Computing,” the paper claims that if we train our machines to continue and accumulate every bit of data, from the purchases we make on Amazon to the photos we post on Flickr, we will soon find ourselves living in a pixilated Panopticon, the notorious prison in which all inmates are constantly observed.

“If whatever we do can be held against us years later,” the paper states, “if all our impulsive comments are preserved, they can easily be combined into a composite picture of ourselves. Afraid how our words and actions may be perceived years later and taken out of context, the lack of forgetting may prompt us to speak less freely and openly.”

It is curious to imagine what Professor Mayer-Schönberger would have to say about this week’s parasha. A compendium of highly detailed laws and commandments read by Moses to the Israelites, it ends with a vague and ominous statement.

“You shall remember what Amalek did to you on the way, when you went out of Egypt,” read the portion’s last lines, “how he happened upon you on the way and cut off all the stragglers at your rear, when you were faint and weary, and he did not fear God. [Therefore] it will be, when the Lord your God grants you respite from all your enemies around [you] in the land which the Lord, your God, gives to you as an inheritance to possess, that you shall obliterate the remembrance of Amalek from beneath the heavens. You shall not forget!”

What a confusing construction, this: don’t forget to obliterate the remembrance of Amalek. Don’t forget to forget? Remember to remember? Just what should we make of this strange clause?

Later Biblical commentators were not as subtle as Moses. Addressing Saul, the newly minted King of Israel, the prophet Samuel provides the young leader with more specific instructions. “Now go and smite Amalek,” he orders, “and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox, and sheep, camel and ass.”

But this interpretation presents a problem. Taken literally, it advocates genocide. Isn’t that what obliterating the remembrance of a whole nation means? Shaken by this strange and dangerous edict, and wary of its possible wicked interpretations, generations of Jewish scholars addressed this verse at depth. The Talmud itself offered the definitive account, claiming that as the wars of Sancherib the Assyrian long ago “mixed up the nations” of the regions beyond recognition, it is impossible to tell who are the Amalekites anymore—and if we don’t know who they are, we can’t kill them. Going a step further, Maimonides, in his guide to the perplexed, suggested that it is not Amalek per se we must remove from the world but Amalekite, or nefarious, behavior, thereby obeying the command to remember by mending the world with education and good deeds. (For an excellent discussion of the Amalek conundrum, see here.)

If nothing else, these debates betray one fundamental truth—that memory isn’t easy. It’s a burden. And it’s one I’ve felt from a young age. Emboldened by the sticker plastered on my chest every Holocaust Day, I grew up and nurtured my desire to remember, to learn more, to better understand. In high school, I traveled with my classmates to Auschwitz, and was appalled to see them translate the traumatic experience of visiting the death camp into a surge of nationalistic pride, waving high the Israeli flag and talking loudly and proudly about their upcoming military service. To them, the commandment to remember was synonymous with strength; never forget meant never again be weak. The same sentiment resurfaced when I visited Yad Vashem for the first time as an adult and was dismayed to see the clear narrative thread that invaluable museum offered its visitors: the very last item on display is Israel’s Declaration of Independence, a curatorial choice that suggests that the sole lesson one must learn from the colossal suffering and demise of millions had to do neither with the ongoing fight against extremism and hate wherever they may roam, nor with the pursuit of the universal values of democracy and justice and freedom, but with the establishment of a strong and independent Jewish state. If this is how we remember, I thought, forgetting may not be so terrible after all.

I found an eloquent proponent of this flammable idea in the Israeli historian Yehuda Elkana. Publishing an article titled “In Praise of Forgetting” in 1988, Elkana, himself a survivor, put forth a highly controversial proposal to his fellow countrymen: forget the Holocaust.

“I do not envision today,” he wrote, “a more important political and educational task for the leaders of this nation than to mobilize on behalf of life, to devote themselves to building our future and not to occupy themselves from sunrise to sunset with the symbols, the ceremonies, and the ‘lessons’ of the Holocaust. It is incumbent upon them to uproot the domination of historical ‘remembrance’ on our lives.”

Elkana, of course, was not advocating that we actively forget the Holocaust, its horrors and its effects. That would be folly. A historian, he was well aware of the need for continuing documentation, for factual evidence and analysis of modernity’s most harrowing massacre. What he was raging against was the manipulation of memory, the assigning of uniform political meaning to an act as introspective and fragile as remembrance.

Witnessing the enthusiasm with which some Jews have received Quentin Tarantino’s reprehensible new film—the film’s producer, Lawrence Bender, called the moronic revenge fantasy a “Jewish wet dream”—I wonder if it isn’t time to take Elkana seriously and, if just for a short while, if only as a thought experiment, learn how to forget.

Berlin represents commerce in your play—the successful hitmaker—while Joplin represents art, hard at work on a ragtime opera he couldn’t get produced. Joplin goads Berlin into revealing that he has a secret, major work, a sort of a symphony telling his own American story. Was there a really such piece?

There was, but I couldn’t use it. It was also a ragtime opera, and it would just be too unbelievable that two of them would be writing two ragtime operas. So I turned it into more of an instrumental piece, but still a piece of serious music.

But then Berlin’s businessman instincts overtake his artistic aspirations, and that symphony instead becomes “Alexander’s Ragtime Band”—and the Eastern European motifs, representing his Russian childhood in that symphony, turn into the opening chords of “Alexander’s.” Is there that influence in the real song?

Not specifically in “Alexander’s.” But, sure, in songs like “Yiddishe Nightingale.” What’s interesting, I think, is that in pre-World War I America it was fine to do blatantly Yiddish and Jewish-influenced popular songs, like “Yiddishe Nightingale.” And then something happened along the way and made it taboo. I don’t know why this happened, but in silent movies there are Jewish characters, and these songs like “Yiddishe Nightingale” are sheet music that everybody sings. But then there’s this exclusion, the feeling that sort of we have to hide ourselves. Maybe because a lot of these media companies, in music publishing or movies, were headed by Jews. It wasn’t till the 1950s that Jewish characters started appearing again in the movies. Irving Berlin was writing blatantly Jewish songs, and then he stopped, completely I think, for the rest of the career.

Was it the flip side of the same coin—that to deracinate, to not write things like “Yiddishe Nightingale,” allowed him to write things like “White Christmas”?

When you’re in pop culture, which is sales, there’s a sense, like in all marketers, of what the public is going to buy. Every writer wants a Christmas song; it comes around every year. It’s one of the pots of gold in the music business, and the biggest pot of gold has been “White Christmas,” which to me has a little Yiddish melody in it. You know the cantorials, those notes you had to learn for your bar mitzvah? Those notes are very close together—the distance between the notes are almost as close as you could sing. If you listen to “White Christmas”—put some Hebrew words to that, see if it’s your bar mitzvah chant.

One of the things about the Jewish songwriters—I think Cole Porter pointed this out—is that because of growing up with cantorials, those bar mitzvah chants, those close notes, they were comfortable writing that. It’s not standard to English-Irish music, where a lot of our music came from. But this Middle Eastern kind of sound, for the Jewish songwriters, that came very easily. It wasn’t strange, and it wasn’t exotic, and it’s very affecting—to the general public it kind of corkscrews into your heart.

So the reason so many Jews were Tin Pan Alley songwriters is because they learned to chant their bar mitzvah portions?

I think that’s part of it. But Tin Pan Alley wasn’t just composing. It was also coming up with a way of taking music and selling it. And I think a lot of the Jews coming into New York had to learn that peddler way of monitoring the customer, for survival—I know what he wants, and I know what he’ll pay. That idea of, take a piece of sheet music and sell it as if it was a tie or a new style of skirt, and have marketers around the country, and break it all at once, and get that product moving—Tin Pan Alley invented that.

And Irving Berlin, the play suggests, was all businessman. He turns that symphony into “Alexander’s” so he can sell it.

But he created a deathless piece of art. He may have created miniatures rather than murals, but I’ll take my Faberge egg. In fact it turns out that Joplin was kind of wrong about musical art in America in the 20th century. He thought American operas would be the great art. But there aren’t many American operas. Whereas I can hand you the great American songbook, and this is our art, this is the peak of our musical art.

You could argue there’s something specifically American about an art form that derives in part from commerce.

Could be. But, you know, Mozart had to fill his seats if he was going to write another opera.

In October, Nextbook Press will publish David Lehman’s A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs. It’s available for purchase in advance from Amazon.

Obama Links Slavery, Holocaust Memory [JTA]

There’s one problem with this premise. The reason historians don’t publicize the “soap myth,” according to Holocaust scholar Michael Berenbaum, who’s quoted in the trailer, is because it is, in fact, a myth. “There is no evidence that soap was actually manufactured out of human flesh, not because the Nazis were nice guys but because it was not economically feasible,” Berenbaum told Tablet. “We have at times tested soap that has been represented of being made of human fat and found that it was not made of human fat.”

“The Soap Myth” Premieres at Dog Run Rep [BroadwayWorld]
The Soap Myth [YouTube]

Anti-Semitism is stronger than we think. You know, it’s unfortunate. But this has happened to the Jews. It happened in Spain, it happened in Germany, it’s happening—and now it’s going to happen in America if these people don’t start behaving…. It may be they have a death wish. You know that’s been the problem with our Jewish friends for centuries.

The notion that Jews are somehow bent on their own destruction—and the subset of it concerning Jewish “self-hatred”—has had a long and ignoble history. It’s a theory that’s still very much in use—by all sides—in today’s debates over Israel. But that it was a theory held by a figure as paranoid—and as self-destructive—as Nixon makes a certain kind of sense.

On Nixon Tapes, Ambivalence Over Abortion, Not Watergate [NYT]

The 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann captured for the public the horror of the Final Solution. But getting the Nazi known as the Architect of the Holocaust” to a courtroom in Jerusalem took no less than 15 years.

Exactly how was Eichmann caught? In Hunting Eichmann: How a Band of Survivors and a Young Spy Agency Chased Down the World’s Most Notorious Nazi, Neal Bascomb tells the riveting story of the Mossad team that tracked down the war criminal in Argentina.

Bascomb talks with Nextbook about Eichmann’s attitude toward the Jews, the personal motivations driving the spies who caught him, and how Eichmann behaved once he was apprehended.

Photo of Eichmann in Argentina: AKG Images / Nordic Photos, courtesy Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

The normally camera-shy Albert Kahn outside his office in the rue de Richelieu in Paris in 1914, on the only occasion he agreed to pose formally for the camera.

Inspired by a breakthrough in photographic technology, Kahn was determined to document humankind using autochromes—vividly colored photographs made with a transparent film of dyed potato starch. Beginning in 1909, he spent his enormous fortune on a small army of photographers dispatched to 50 countries across every continent. Over the next 22 years, until 1931, he created one of the largest photographic collections in the world: 72,000 autochromes that document the everyday life of ordinary people from Ireland to Iran, Montenegro to Mongolia, and Vancouver to Vietnam. To celebrate a century of the little-known collection, Princeton University Press has issued an impressive new monograph, The Dawn of the Color Photograph: Albert Kahn’s Archives of the Planet.

The photographs depict a world we have only known in black and white. Kahn’s images present that world rich with the colors of life, and the autochrome’s uniquely vibrant, warm, and evocative hues deliver an emotional charge. They bridge the century that has passed and erase the sense that these people from an earlier time were somehow not like us. Perhaps this special color, long celebrated by connoisseurs of the autochrome, is what inspired Kahn to spend and spend until he was bankrupt, to spend even after the stock market crash of 1929, when most of his wealth evaporated and it was clear he could no longer afford to indulge this extraordinary passion. The autochromes depict their human subjects with a tender sympathy that is a perfect partner to Kahn’s own devotion to his fellow man. “I work for humanity,” he wrote in 1908. “I serve the human race.”

In a 1914 photograph from Paris, a young woman, part of a family posing outside their home, leans forward in her chair and fixes the viewer with an attractive face animated by intelligence and curiosity. In another image, two boys in Spain—arms draped around each other’s shoulders—strike the jaunty attitude familiar to best friends everywhere. Some photographs overwhelm us with their exoticism: the elaborate costumes worn by Serbian women in Macedonia obscure individuality under white kerchiefs, long white skirts covered by heavy red aprons, red jackets embroidered with gold thread, and necklaces of large gold coins. Such detailed documentation is part of what Kahn was after. He wrote that he wanted to “fix in the memory once and for all the different aspects of human activity, the customs and practices, the inevitable disappearance of which is only a question of time.” Recognizable human faces help ground these distinctive customs. In one photograph, a young man is dressed with simple formality in white pants, shirt, and hat, all trimmed in blue. He stares at the viewer with defiance and suspicion, unafraid but sullen. It is Hanoi, Vietnam, 1915, and the young man and his fellows pull the rickshaws of funeral mourners. Their world is now history, but the young man’s expression is timeless.

The new book is the first widely available collection to reproduce Kahn’s photographs from every region of the world. While earlier volumes were published with the cooperation of individual countries, those books tended to reproduce images that abetted nationalism (an irony that would not have amused the internationalist Kahn). But the new volume is perhaps too true to Kahn’s ideals. In favoring the universal over the particular, it largely overlooks the role played by Kahn’s Jewish origins, and the Jewish historical moment he so clearly typifies.

The special attraction universalism exerted on Jews has been on the academic radar for decades. “Everywhere, Jews played a leading role in universalist political movements, liberal, socialist, and, later on, communist too,” noted historian Michael Walzer in 2001. And it’s been almost 40 years since the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, in an article about Karl Marx and Benjamin Disraeli, shrewdly observed that politically emancipated Jews “longed to identify with the majority” because they desired a more profound emancipation, a “liberation from their anomalous, and often inferior, social status.” That analysis sums up Kahn’s life.

He was born Abraham Kahn on March 3, 1860 in the Alsace region of France. His father was a well-to-do cattle merchant who sent the boy to a Jewish primary school, then to a local gymnasium, and at age 16 to Paris. The last was a popular move among Alsatian Jews who, after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, found themselves living under German rule. Secular republican France and the opportunities available in Paris attracted many. Kahn lived at the Pension Springer, a boarding house for Jewish students, earned his baccalaureat, and joined the Jewish banking firm of Goudchaux. But despite his close association with the Jewish community, Kahn changed his name to Albert and took steps to distance himself.

He had good reason. Just as Kahn began making his fortune in banking, French anti-Semitism was gaining strength. The fame and wealth of the Rothschild family made it easy to associate French Jews with banking, and in 1882 and 1892 financial crises were blamed on Jewish bankers. Kahn, who had already begun what would be a lifetime correspondence with the French-Jewish philosopher Henri Bergson, refused to acknowledge these events. Their letters never mentioned the growing anti-Semitism, and the two friends maintained this silence even during the infamous Dreyfus Affair of 1897–99. But Kahn did respond to the Dreyfus Affair in his own singular way—in 1898 he founded the Scholarship for World Travel, which funded academic study abroad to foster international understanding and friendship. Thus, Kahn the universalist was born. He escaped the burdens of being in the Jewish minority by joining the greatest majority of all: humanity.

Though Kahn did not take any of the photographs himself, and assigned the selection of photographers to the project’s director, the Archives of the Planet was the product of his individual vision. And Kahn’s choice of photography as the medium for his greatest project is as fascinating as his universalism. Scholars and practitioners wonder at Jews’ extraordinary participation and achievement in photography, represented by the photographers Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Diane Arbus, and Richard Avedon, to name just a few. In January 2003, photographer William Meyers wrote in Commentary that photography operated as a branch of leftist politics, which gave Jewish photographers “a way of seeing.” For Jews eager to escape what they considered a parochial background, this political vision allowed them to focus on the world’s (non-Jewish) poor and dispossessed. In her 2004 article about Lotte Jacobi, University of Wisconsin professor Lisa Silverman suggests that Jews valued photography for its ability to portray them as acceptable German types. Art historian and photographer Max Kozloff was co-curator of a 2002 photography exhibition at New York’s Jewish Museum, and in the exhibit’s accompanying book he claimed that Jewish photographers produce intrinsically Jewish photographs, that there is a “Jewish eye.” Meanwhile, in a 2000 article for Photo Review, author and scholar A.D. Coleman wrote that photography attracted Jews because “the camera helps conscience shoulder the burden of memory.” And who has a greater burden of memory than the Jews?

But there is yet another aspect of photography that enticed so many: it is the ultimate universal language. The medium speaks to everyone, no translation needed; the great German photographer August Sander praised “photography’s universal comprehensibility.” Early on, photography raised hopes that a new age of greater understanding among nations would arise. And it is that quality that attracted Albert Kahn.

For groups often viewed as pariahs, championing universalism could be a form of self-interest. Photography, like Esperanto, socialism, and communism, held a special appeal for Jews because it exemplified an ideal of brotherhood so expansive it might accommodate even them. Most internationalist programs erased individuality in the name of unity. Socialist utopias were bland agglomerations of homogenized workers. But Kahn’s photographic project was different—by its very nature, his Archives of the Planet could not gloss over the differences among the world’s cultures. Instead, it recorded those differences and presented the evidence of a diverse humanity without any theorizing. Its only argument, implicit and powerful, is that all people have a right to exist.

In 1937, the Hungarian novelist Karoly Pap was called to defend his new book, Azarel, at a Budapest salon convened by the Hungarian Zionist Association. His detractors were nettled by the cutting tone of the book’s eponymous narrator, the eight-year-old Gyuri Azarel, whose indictments of his rabbi father are delivered with smirking fury. Pap—a popular contributor of stories and essays to Budapest’s avant-garde literary journals—was the son of a prominent reform rabbi, and some readers assumed that the novel was a cruel skewering of his own father. Others defended the book’s subtle portrayal of a child’s inner life and the difficulty of self-definition. In one passage, Gyuri dreams of exposing his father’s tyranny, telling himself:

Just go straight ahead to the synagogue, and you’ll wait outside listening until your father speaks, and right when he clasps his hands and looks up at the sky . . . then all of a sudden you’ll go inside, stand up in front of everyone, and shout: ‘All lies, every word of his! And the Good Lord is just like him, too, yes, he hits his kid because of God!’

His fantasies about winning his father’s acceptance are just as desperate. Gyuri’s dilemma—to reject the strictures of his father’s house or to submit to its stern routines, to insist on his independence or to capitulate to the comforting parochialisms and hypocrisies of communal life—is similar to one faced by Hungarian Jews at the time Pap was writing.

Reading Pap’s defense of the novel in an epilogue to the English language edition of Azarel (published by Steerforth in 2001, it’s the only one of his books available in English), it seems he had indeed intended to provoke a conflicted response in his readers. “What I’ve been criticized for and will yet be criticized for is completely true,” he said in a speech at the time. “The book is ruthless. Yet it was precisely only through this ruthlessness that I could achieve what I wanted, which was for my book to make itself felt all the way down to that depth of the Jewish soul . . . who could be pained more than I by the fact that the best of my people’s soul is accessible only through ruthless words and writing? I, who am this people’s writer?”

“The Jewish soul”—not generally placid—was in extreme tumult during the years Pap wrote, and Azarel was aimed straight at the heart of debates surrounding Jewish identity in Hungary during the 1920s and ’30s. The Jews of Hungary, who for half a century had been tolerated and even accepted into the mainstream of Hungarian society, were again feeling the encroachment of a dividing wall. Venomous attitudes toward Jews were perpetuated through newspaper columns, a growing body of literature that posited a Magyar identity purged of foreign influence, and laws restricting the number of Jews who could attend university. Among Jews themselves, there was great division about whether to embrace Hungarian nationalism, or take shelter in their own communities.

Pap’s response to the questions simmering in the Jewish zeitgeist were contrarian and unexpected. The son of Miksa Pollak, the chief rabbi of Sopron in Western Hungary, Pap grew up immersed in Jewish ritual and Biblical literature, influences evident in his repetitive, allusive language. But he was also exposed to secular culture. His father was a literary scholar as well as a rabbi, who practiced a forward-thinking, reformist Judaism that sought to reconcile the strictures of Jewish law with full participation in modern life. Reform Jews in Hungary had firmly broken with the Orthodox, and the two groups—which each comprised about half of the total Jewish population—actively disdained one another.

Set against a backdrop of declining Jewish power in the country and large and tense conflicts within the Jewish community, it’s easy to see why Azarel unsettled its readership: the book is a love/hate note from Pap to his Jewish childhood, written at a moment when the Jews of Hungary were terrified. Pap’s demand for self-scrutiny was a lot to ask.

After their legal emancipation in 1867, Hungarian Jews embraced freedom with particular zeal, adapting the Magyar language, and helping to finance the infrastructure of a newly-formed Hungarian state. By the early 20th century half of Hungarian Jews were secular, and identified more strongly as Hungarian citizens than as members of a parochial sect. The climate of revived anti-Semitism in the 1920s and ’30s only deepened the rift between the secular and the Orthodox. Many Jews converted to Christianity, and openly reviled their religious brethren; others, without completely disavowing Judaism, tried to scrub away the taint of the shtetl by joining secular social movements.

Pap left home at 17 to join the Austro-Hungarian army and fight in World War I, wanting to get away from his father’s confining world, to prove his loyalty to his country, and to contest the pervasive stereotype of spindly Jewish cowardice. But he came to oppose the idea that Jews should—or even that they could—assimilate. In the army, he was exposed to the callous prejudices of his fellow soldiers, and began to suspect that Jews would never be genuinely embraced by the mainstream. He dramatized his war experience in his first novel, Gyorgy Leviat, in which he depicted Jewish characters coping variously with exclusion—a theme that he would develop further in Azarel.

After the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Pap briefly joined the communist revolution of Bela Kuhn, who ruled for three months before his government collapsed. Jews were widely seen as sympathetic to the communist cause, and hundreds were killed in the months after Kuhn was deposed in a panicked wave of anti-Jewish violence. Pap was jailed for a short time on a trumped-up charge; when he was released, he spent some months in Vienna. Unmoored from his family, whose adaptive Judaism he had come to view as inert and empty, Pap eventually returned to Budapest, where for a few years he lived a migratory life. He briefly joined a theater troupe, and began to write poems and stories. After an editor at Nygat (“West”), the pre-eminent experimental literary journal in Budapest, took an interest in Pap’s work, his writing life commenced in earnest.

Pap lived at a remove from the swirling, bohemian literary scene in Budapest. Each day his wife, who worked as a clerk to support them both, would give him enough money for two cups of coffee and he would board a tram to a café where he wrote all day long. At a time when many of his Jewish contemporaries were trying to prove their mettle as edgy modernists, Pap was one of the few who explicitly depicted Jewish characters in Jewish settings.

Azarel begins with a Biblical bargain—the dedication of an infant to the service of a zealous God. Gyuri Azarel, who narrates his own story in rueful hindsight, is handed over as an infant to his fanatical grandfather Papa Jeremiah. The father of seven sons who toiled his whole life in other people’s fields, Papa Jeremiah hoped that his own sons would become great scholars of Torah. But while Gyuri’s father went to rabbinical school, he studied an innovative, modernized Judaism that his father detests. Papa Jeremiah insists that he and Gyuri sleep on beds of straw and eat nothing but homemade bread; he burns the gifts that Gyuri’s parents bring in a big bonfire; he fasts; and he dunks the tiny Gyuri in a cold ritual bath. But even as Gyuri is afraid of and repulsed by his grandfather, he is strangely drawn to his rigorous routine of prayer, fasting, and penance. For all its severity, Papa Jeremiah’s world buzzes with mystery, something Gyuri will find lacking in his father’s less observant Jewish household, to which he is restored around the age of five, when Papa Jeremiah dies.

Although ostensibly freer than when he was living with his grandfather, Gyuri finds his parents’ house impossibly restrictive. He observes with disgust the way his mother plies his father for money by making him elaborate meals. At home his father is remote and mercurial, while at the pulpit he presents himself as a gracious family man. Gyuri is a truculent child, and his narration condemns the reform Jewish world around him as stuffy, hypocritical, materialistic, and unimaginative. Wandering his father’s house, he finds no objects with “any secret proclivity to play, any latent mystery or music they would have revealed only to me . . . everything was utterly manifest, motionless, closed.” And yet he trembles with yearning to be part of this world. Here he is in synagogue, watching his father: “In the heart of the pulpit, as I stare and listen, Father grows larger! Especially when he stretches out his arms now and again, taking with them the arms of his gown, like giant wings and lets his surging voice resound, I am so proud to belong to him that I shudder with exhilaration . . .”

Pap, with great sympathy for this contrarian little boy, attunes the reader to the pendulous swings in Gyuri’s emotions, skillfully capturing the narcissism of childhood. Gyuri is like a small rubber ball tethered to a paddle by an elastic string, knocking roughly against the wood but never fully breaking away. The echoes of the story of Abraham and Isaac are clear: first, Isaac is literally bound to an altar, but when he is released from immediate physical danger, he is bound by something even firmer and more devastating—that is, to the father and the religion that have hurt him, and that will continue to exert a force on him throughout his life. But Gyuri’s rebellion is ultimately circumscribed: he gets used to his family and adapts to their ways. No matter how much he resists the dull norms of their lives—and no matter how much the narration, ordered capriciously by Gyuri’s confused, childish mind, resists the structures of a conventional story—he eventually capitulates.

Pap believed that all Jews—like ferocious little Gyuri—were destined for the peculiar loneliness of being surrounded by an uncomprehending crowd (like most of Hungary’s Jews, he was killed in Bergen Belsen, five years after the publication of Azarel). In Gyuri, Pap created a child through whom he could mediate the conflicting strains of Judaism that lived within him. Gyuri observes the limitations and hypocracies of Judaism with a purity of vision common to precocious children; and yet his vision is inconsistent, inflected variously by moods of defiance, bewilderment, need, longing, love, and possible madness. If Pap was, as he claimed, the writer of the Jewish soul, then Gyuri is its repository: wise beyond his years, yet perennially stunted by his earliest experiences.

In a sense, then, Marie Syrkin, Nachman’s daughter, could consider herself Israel’s step-sister; and over the course of her long life, her relationship to Zionism and Israel was as close and tumultuous as any sibling rivalry. Today, when even her father’s name has faded among American Jews, it is not surprising that few people still know who Marie Syrkin was. But for much of the twentieth century, her life was inseparable from the story of American Zionism. Like Jackie Kennedy, she went through life burdened and elevated by the responsibilities of her quasi-sacred name; like Alma Mahler, she was loved by a series of gifted men.

But Syrkin’s Zionist milieu afforded few opportunities for their kind of glamour. One of the moving things about Carole Kessner’s new biography, Marie Syrkin: Values Beyond the Self, is the contrast between Syrkin’s extraordinary pedigree and passion and her quite ordinary, even shabby circumstances. In the 1930s and 1940s, she commuted by subway from Riverdale to her job as a teacher at Textile High School in Manhattan, which she disliked but could not afford to give up. Then, during her sabbaticals and summer vacations, she would be off to Palestine to observe life in the Yishuv, or to Switzerland to report on the latest Zionist gathering for Jewish Frontier, the small magazine she helped to edit.

In August 1939, Syrkin was in Geneva as a delegate to the Twenty-First Zionist Congress, the last one before the Holocaust. She barely got out of Europe before the Second World War broke out; she was crossing the Atlantic on the Queen Mary when she heard about Germany’s invasion of Poland. A few days later, she was back at the chalkboard. Surely none of her students suspected that, in her spare time, their teacher was helping to make history.

But this combination of modesty and destiny was Marie Syrkin’s birthright. She was born in 1899 in Switzerland, where her parents had met two years before at the First Zionist Congress. While her mother, Bassya, was pregnant, Marie’s father later told her, “she would gaze longingly each day at a photograph of Theodor Herzl hoping that she would have a boy who would look like Herzl.” Though Nachman and Bassya were both trained as doctors, they devoted themselves full time to Zionism and revolution; like the lilies of the field, they gave no thought to what they would wear. Nachman Syrkin’s “personal needs,” one of his friends recalled, “were so modest that he could be said to be living on the absolute minimum possible to civilized man.” And he expected the same austerity from others. Marie remembered the scandal when a rumor reached him that “Comrade P. had eaten a good dinner in a restaurant” while on a mission to Vilna: “There was something undeniably base about eating in a restaurant while comrades . . . were munching wild strawberries.” No wonder, then, that some of Marie’s most vivid childhood memories had to do with her rare indulgences in cherry sodas or banana splits.

For the first nine years of her life, Marie followed her parents as they criss-crossed Europe and Russia, working for the cause. In 1908, the family finally put down roots, of a kind, in the Bronx, where Nachman had been hired to edit a Labor Zionist periodical. But any chance of stability vanished when Bassya died, of tuberculosis, in 1915. Marie was brought even deeper under her father’s charismatic spell—a recipe for conflict when, inevitably, she began to discover and be discovered by men. At eighteen, she eloped with Maurice Samuel, an ardent English Jew who would go on to have a prominent career as a Zionist and man of letters. But Nachman sued to have the marriage annulled, and Marie gave in to her father’s fury.

Kessner’s account of this tumultuous episode, drawing on Samuel’s love letters, is the dramatic high point of the book, as it seems to have been in Marie’s own life. Her next marriage, to a chemist named Aaron Bodansky, lacked the passion of her romance with Samuel, and the couple was soon divorced. Finally Marie found a suitable partner in Charles Reznikoff, the poet, whose idealism and reluctance to seek steady employment made him highly reminiscent of her father. Their marriage lasted from 1930 until Reznikoff’s death in 1976, mainly because the couple was content to live largely separate lives, often in different cities. While Reznikoff took long walks and composed his spare lyrics about New York City, Syrkin was traveling the world writing and polemicizing. After 1950, her home base was Boston, where she taught at newly founded Brandeis University.

The bulk of Kessner’s biography deals with the first half of Syrkin’s life, the most dramatic and the best documented period. We see Syrkin being squired to the Cotton Club by Vladimir Jabotinsky—surely one of the unlikeliest tableaux in Zionist history—and becoming fast friends with Golda Meir, whose biography she would write. As she ages, along with the State of Israel, Syrkin becomes less idealistic and more defensive about the Zionist cause. Kessner, who was Syrkin’s pupil and friend until her death in 1989, seems particularly haunted by the criticisms of post-Zionist historians like Benny Morris, who have helped to undo the heroic myths of Zionism in which Syrkin believed.

In general, Kessner’s intimacy with her subject is both the strength and the weakness of Marie Syrkin: Values Beyond the Self. If not for their friendship, Syrkin’s life might never have been written. Yet Kessner is not an objective or experienced biographer, and the book has obvious shortcomings in both style and substance. It is best approached as a personal tribute rather than a work of scholarship—a successful attempt to restore Marie Syrkin to her modest but fascinating place in Jewish history.

Hugh joined Lawton and a group of intrepid truth-seekers on a rainy London morning. Lawton mixes passion and humor as he explains why British Jews have split into so many denominations, each fiercely defending its own views.

Clive Lawton

“London, West” (detail), Letts’s popular atlas. (1883)

This election, I’ve been thinking a lot about an unlikely political superstar. He belongs to a historically oppressed minority group, and faced down intense prejudice from a political establishment who never believed a man like him could rise to the top. He skyrocketed to the leadership of his party, bringing down a much more established party leader on the way, and prompting questions about whether he was ready for the highest office. He is a writer who bared his soul in print in a way no ordinary, cautious politician would dare, then used his writerly imagination to capture the imagination of a country.

He is Benjamin Disraeli.

Of course, he is also Barack Obama. Indeed, the similarity between Obama and Disraeli, whose biography I recently wrote for Nextbook’s Jewish Encounters series, is striking. Disraeli was the first Jewish prime minister of England, and Obama, it now appears, is likely to become the first African American president of the United States. Like Disraeli, Obama belongs to an ethnic minority that has traditionally been abused by the majority he seeks to lead. If he does win next week, it will represent a triumph of democratic openness and equality, just as Disraeli’s career did in the eyes of many of his contemporaries. Indeed, as one French statesman joked, the greatest triumph of English liberalism was that a Jew could rise to lead England’s Conservative party.

But the most significant thing Obama and Disraeli have in common, despite all the differences in their characters and politics, is that they were both writers before they became politicians. Disraeli published his first novel when he was just 21, more than a decade before he entered Parliament, and his early fiction was heavily autobiographical—a laboratory in which he could experiment with his persona and ambition. Likewise, Obama published an autobiography, Dreams from My Father, years before he entered politics; and his book, like Disraeli’s, is surprising coming from a politician, both for its high literary skill and its honest wrestling with issues of identity and belonging.

Both men turned first to writing to explore the question that would eventually define their public lives: is it possible to genuinely belong to, and even lead, a society that shuns people like you? In his autobiographical novel Contarini Fleming, Disraeli made his alter ego an Italian living in Scandinavia, rather than a Jew living in England, but the parallel is clear. Contarini complains that he does not look like other boys, and he dreams of returning to Venice, his mother’s homeland, and restoring it to its ancient glory. In his next book, Alroy,

Disraeli would create an explicitly Jewish fantasy, imagining a medieval hero-king, David Alroy, who conquers the Middle East and restores the Jewish state in Palestine. Dreams from My Father is far less romantic and fantastic, but it, too, is a workshop for its author’s identity, as he struggles with the legacy of his idealistic white mother and his absent African father. In his book, Obama writes about traveling to Kenya to confront and reclaim his African heritage, just as Disraeli made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, in 1831, to come face to face with the Jewish past.

When Disraeli entered English politics in earnest, he abandoned his youthful dreams of becoming a Jewish national leader. But he never stopped making his Jewishness central to his public and political identity. In the novels he wrote in the 1840s, as he was rising to the top of the Conservative Party, and in his speeches during the debates over whether to allow Jews into Parliament, Disraeli advanced very provocative ideas about Jewish power, Jewish racial identity, and the spiritual debt Christians owed to Judaism. These ideas were actively detrimental to his career—members of his own party thought them bizarre or blasphemous—yet Disraeli never tried to mute them, to become simply a mainstream Tory politician. Knowing that he would always stand out from his surroundings, he decided to stand out vividly and memorably—even his clothes were extravagant.

Still, it’s risky to press the comparison too far. For there is a deep and treacherous gulf between 19th-century British politics and 21st-century American politics. Disraeli’s Conservatives, who like him believed in tradition, social hierarchy, and class deference, have nothing in common with conservative Republicans, whose belief in small government and free markets hews closely to the platform of the nineteenth century’s Liberals. By another irony, liberal Democrats, like Obama, would find much to admire in Disraeli’s program of social welfare legislation. As prime minister, his environmental, labor, and education policies led one British labor leader to say that the Conservatives had done more for the working man in the five years of Disraeli’s government than the Liberals had in the previous fifty. Yet the policy that was perhaps most important of all to Disraeli—maintaining the glory of his country’s empire—finds no resonance at all in American politics, where even the most hawkish politicians discuss war as a dire necessity rather than a glorious adventure.

Even more important, when it comes to comparing Obama and Disraeli, is the very different status of Jews in England and blacks in America. When Disraeli was born, in 1804, there were about 15,000 Jews in the whole of Britain, out of a population of some twelve million. Jews may have loomed large in the English imagination, thanks to Jewish villains imagined by Chaucer, Marlowe, and Shakespeare, and to the role of the Jews, for good and evil, in English Christian thought. But in real life, there were too few Jews to make much impression on English politics or society, and there was certainly no such thing as a Jewish voting bloc for Disraeli to appeal to. (In fact, the few Jewish voters generally supported the Liberals.) There is no comparison to the absolutely central role of African Americans in the history of this country, from before its founding down to the present. Historically, politically, demographically, and culturally, African Americans are at the heart of American life, in a way that Jews never were in England. Above all, the legacy of slavery and racism is infinitely more poisonous in America than anti-Semitism ever was in England.

But there is another, more significant difference between the two men. As he gets closer to the presidency, Obama is becoming less and less like Disraeli—that is, less vivid, less imaginative, less original as a thinker and speaker. To put it in one word, Obama is deliberately making himself less of a writer.

Since his great speech on race and racism in March, delivered in response to the Jeremiah Wright controversy, Obama has tried earnestly and with surprising success to downplay the significance of his race in the election. He prefers, when possible, to shrug off the whole question, as when he remarks that he doesn’t look like the presidents on our currency, or alludes to his “funny name.” The reason for this, of course, is that Obama recognizes better than anyone just how momentous his election would be as a milestone in American history. The issue of race is so terribly freighted that he does not need to add another ounce to it. In this sense, contrasting Obama’s reticence with Disraeli’s loquacity shows how much more serious American racism is than English anti-Semitism.

The less he dwells on race in his campaign, Obama has apparently calculated, the more likely he is to win. In other words, the less he challenges voters to make the election about racial progress, the more likely he is to strike a terrific blow for racial progress. Disraeli grew up in a Romantic age—Lord Byron was his idol—and what he wanted more than power was to impress himself on the world, to become known on his own terms—which were inevitably Jewish terms. Obama, a more pragmatic man, is willing to efface some of the self we can glimpse in his writing, if that is what it takes to rise to the top of the greasy pole. This calculus seems to be working; but ironically, it may end up making Obama, whose achievement promises to be greater than Disraeli’s, a less memorable historical figure.

On its surface, Judenhass is a pretty straightforward project. It’s a very brief history of “Jew hatred” (Sim avoids the term “anti-Semitism,” on the grounds that Semites aren’t necessarily Jews), in the form of a forty-nine-page comic book. Most of it consists of historical quotations of anti-Jewish calumnies (and pen-and-ink portraits of the people who said them), overlying drawings of dead and dying Jews in concentration camps. Often, Sim will draw and re-draw fragments of a single photograph over a few pages, six or thirty or fifty times, to pound the horror home, as if to say, no, look, he’s dead, this part of his face is dead, and this part of his face is dead, and his eyelid is dead, these bastards killed him . . . An afterword identifies most of Sim’s visual sources—largely historical photographs from books such as Gerhard Schoenberner’s The Yellow Star.

Sim, in recent years, has been fascinated with the sort of “photorealism”—his word—practiced by a handful of comic strip artists of the 1950s and 60s, who were essentially trying to reproduce photographs as line drawings. His version of that technique is at the core of Judenhass (as well as his other current project, Glamourpuss, in which he applies it to photos from fashion magazines). For decades, Sim was known as one of the great caricaturists, so it’s peculiar and frustrating to see him abandoning part of what he does best. But he’s also enormously adept at the hyper-detailed, photography-inspired style he uses here, and he’s held on to another one of his gifts: compositions that convey both narrative and ideology. It’s one thing to juxtapose a portrait of Martin Luther, looking thoughtful and serious, with Luther’s call for synagogues to be burned down; it’s quite another to superimpose Luther’s words on the burning Euskirchen synagogue and his face on a pile of emaciated corpses.

Sim is a rhetorician whose chief tool is his pictures, and if there’s one thing he does well, it’s to visually dramatize a point. In a sequence near the beginning of Judenhass, a series of panels shows a journey along railroad tracks, captioned with Sim’s observation that “if there is a chance of systemic Jew hatred being eliminated from our society, it can’t just be Jews who speak out against it”; he decries “non-Jews saying ‘never again’ from behind the sheltering and disingenuous façade of: ‘how could this have happened?’” Finally, he declares that the history of Jew hatred meant that, Nazi Germany or no Nazi Germany, “the Shoah was very much inevitable.” When he gets to the word “inevitable,” it’s the only word on a two-page spread depicting the ARBEIT MACHT FREI gate of Auschwitz. Kaboom.

Except, of course, the Holocaust wasn’t inevitable—that’s the point, for instance, of Nicholson Baker’s recent book Human Smoke, a far more sophisticated variation on the sort of accretion-of-anecdotes technique Sim is using. Baker argues that the catastrophes of World War II were the result of an escalation of military profiteering in which Allied leaders were complicit. His research is also far more meticulous than Sim’s. In the very first quotation in Judenhass, H.G. Wells is cited as saying, “The Jews are clever but not clever enough to conceal their cleverness,” a sentence attributed to a citation from “a letter writer to The National Post.” The actual line, from the narrator of Wells’ 1909 novel Tono-Bungay, is “They are a very clever people, the Jews, but not clever enough to suppress their cleverness.”

A bit later, Sim quotes Winston Churchill saying in 1937, “We seem to be heading toward some hideous catastrophe”; the drawing beneath that caption is another mound of bodies. Did Churchill see the mass slaughter of Jews coming and brush it off? No: the actual quote from Churchill is “We seem to be moving, drifting steadily, against our will, against the will of every race, and every people, and every class, toward some hideous catastrophe. Everyone wishes to stop it, but they do not know how.” He was talking about World War II, not the Holocaust. At best, Sim’s omission of “every race, and every people” is careless (his source seems to be the reference book The Holocaust Chronicle, which includes the sentence “‘We seem to be moving,’ Churchill said, ‘toward some hideous catastrophe’”); at worst, it’s outright deceptive. In his end-notes, Sim mentions that he discarded some Jew-hating “quotes” that turned out to be fakes. Too bad he’s perpetuating the problem.

The meaning of Judenhass is also, unavoidably, shaded by Sim’s own history. He’s best known for his six-thousand-page magnum opus, Cerebus, originally serialized from 1977 to 2004: an overwhelming, sprawling, magisterial story set in a sort of fictionalized medieval Europe. The protagonist, an anthropomorphic aardvark, becomes the prime minister of a city-state, then the pope of a major (also fictional) religion, and after losing everything and spending decades wandering and hanging out in a bar, he’s recognized as a prophet by a trio of Jewish wise men, returns to power, and destroys the fascist matriarchy that’s taken over the continent. (That barely scrapes the surface, but it should give you some idea.) It’s a satirical wonder, a landmark of English-language cartooning, and more talked about than read.

That may have something to do with its imposing bulk, or the fact that Sim self-published the sixteen volumes containing it. It may also have to do with an awful lot of the second half of Cerebus being a tedious and frustrating, if brilliantly drawn, elaboration on Sim’s convictions that women are soul-sucking voids, feminism is the worst thing ever, and the only path of righteousness is his personal mash-up of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and sneering indignation. (Sim was an atheist until he read the Bible in 1996 and the Koran in 1999.) Near the end of the series, he devotes over 150 pages to a close reading of Genesis in tiny type, based on the premise that YHWH (pronounced “Yoohwhoo”) is the vain, evil, female entity that’s trying to usurp the real God’s place. Sim is also witheringly bitter about what he perceives as unfair, ideologically driven neglect by the comics field’s “close-minded Marxist-feminists”; he recently announced that he would henceforth only communicate with people who were willing to sign a statement declaring that they did not believe Sim to be a misogynist.

Since the Holocaust tends to magically confer seriousness on any artistic project that addresses it, it’s easy enough to construe Judenhass as Sim’s play for respect. (His afterword notes that, since Judenhass takes about twenty-five minutes to read, he hopes it can be assigned to teach high school students about “the subject . . . and the on-going significance . . . of the Holocaust,” ellipses his.) Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt: he has probably spent more time staring at and meticulously duplicating these excruciating photographs than anyone else alive. For that alone, his argument deserves a good hearing. And there’s no denying the power of the work itself.

All of that power, though, comes from a relatively small pile of source materials, which raises the inescapable question: what does Judenhass do that, say, The Yellow Star doesn’t? The answer is that it’s art about the calamity: it’s the work of Dave Sim’s hand. It aestheticizes the documentation of unspeakable horror. But its technique actually makes its argument less effective.

“All photographs are deceptive by nature,” Sim writes in the afterword, “so where I was unable to determine the nature of any given element I tried just to imitate the pattern of light and shadows to the best of my ability.” The argument that all photographs are deceptive, though, is sophistry: while photographs aren’t the same as direct experience, and they can be altered or used for deception, they’re generally more reliable than any other form of documentation. That’s why The Yellow Star is a book of photography rather than simply verbal testimony or drawings; photographs bear more-or-less objective witness. Photographs say “this happened.” Drawings say “I saw this—or it could be that I saw a picture of this, or perhaps I made this up.”

The other problem with Sim’s explanation is that cartooning is much more deceptive by nature than photography. A cartoonist expresses style by deliberately distorting his or her perceptions; cartooning is a subjective medium, and it always has a distinct interpretive spin. Art Spiegelman’s drawings in Maus, for instance, are deliberately metaphorical representations of his understanding of his father’s personal experience: disaster made personal. Sim-as-narrator disappears from Judenhass after its first few pages, but as much as he attempts to duplicate these photographs’ “pattern of light and shadows,” every image in the book is distinctly a Dave Sim drawing. Some of them are superb Dave Sim drawings. But, to precisely the extent that Judenhass is the work of Dave Sim’s particular drawing hand, it doesn’t represent reality—or, rather, since its tone is trying to present an objective cross-section of history, it fails to represent reality.

The final sequence of Judenhass, in fact, includes a blatant visual deception. Sim excerpts a passage from Merle Miller’s Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography of Harry S. Truman, describing how Truman was persuaded to have the U.S. officially recognize Israel by the tears of his old business partner Eddie Jacobson, and how Truman himself wept a year later when the chief rabbi of Israel told him that “God put you in your mother’s womb so that you could be the instrument to bring about the rebirth of Israel.” It’s accompanied by several drawings based on photographs of Truman and Jacobson—to which Sim has added the “great tears” rolling down their cheeks that Miller mentions. Sentimental excess? Sure. But it also makes Sim’s technique for the entire project suspect, even though Jacobson and Truman’s tears are a matter of something like historical record. Consider the potential effect of photographs, rather than drawings, in a book about the Holocaust including details—even historically accurate ones—that were obviously Photoshopped or pasted into the actual photos: it would make the reader wonder how true everything else around them was. Sim is trying to claim both representational accuracy and artistic license, and he can’t have it both ways.

Even the Jacobson anecdote itself undermines Sim’s thesis. It wasn’t unstoppable world-historical forces that led Truman to recognize Israel, Miller implies, but one man’s personal intercession that led Truman from saying “I wasn’t going to see anyone who was an extremist for the Zionist cause, and I didn’t care who it was” to championing Israel’s statehood. In the unlikely event that Judenhass becomes a standard high school reading assignment and brings about universal understanding, it will disprove its own argument: that the Holocaust came about not because of historical actors making particular decisions but because of free-floating, implacable loathing of Jews. To say “never again” is to believe that history need not repeat itself; to educate people about the Shoah is to influence the actions of individuals, any of whom can change the world. And to impute literal truth to even a small falsehood perpetrated in the name of art—in a work devoted to repudiating lies perpetrated in the name of ideology—is to surrender the battle.

I had never considered living in Vienna. The city was enmeshed in my family’s history, but I was drawn to Paris, Madrid, Jerusalem—cities whose languages I spoke. I had been to Austria once, at seventeen, with my parents, to visit the places where my grandfather had lived; he died that same year.

But in 2006 I won a journalism grant packaged with four months of residency at a research institute in Vienna. I didn’t know the city at all. I wrote to everyone I knew asking where I should live. I keenly missed my grandparents—my grandmother had died in 2001—for the first time in years.

I found my landlord/roommate—I’ll call her Hilke—on Craigslist. The advertisement promised an apartment that would be “light filled and friendly,” and “two minutes walk to U4 station Friedensbrücke,” the metro stop for my institute. We emailed each other and spoke once by phone. She told me she was an artist. I breezily mentioned that my family had left Vienna in the 1930s.

I arrived late at night, in early February, emerging from my taxi onto an empty, cold, and damp street. Hilke made a pot of tea and sat me down in her yellow-walled kitchen. If you were to pass her on the street, you wouldn’t notice her. Shoulder-length straight hair, close to blond. She was a hippie-punk Mittleeuropean type, thirty-six years old, but could have passed for younger, with a fondness for skirts worn over pants with hiking boots, a kohl-lined eye. For years, Hilke told me, she had shaved her head, a style she partly attributed to her romance with the extreme postwar Viennese art movement called Aktionism; it involves blood, semen, and violence. “You’re a journalist,” she said, prompting me to continue where our phone conversation had left off. “Yes,” I said. “I’m writing about Jews, Muslims, and foreigners in Europe.”

“Are Jews Muslims?” she asked, giggling nervously. “It’s a stupid question! I know!”

“No, no, not stupid,” I said, bewildered. “Were it that easy!” I excused myself, begging out of the conversation; I said I was tired. She showed me to my room. It was bare, with a mattress on the floor, and a slab of plywood over two wooden horses—a desk. But it was airy and—I’d find the next day—bright, with large, late-nineteenth-century windows. I went to sleep.

I felt ghostly in Vienna—transparent, disconnected, unmoored—a feeling exacerbated by my lack of language and by Hilke herself, who was often shut behind closed doors. I rode the U-Bahn around the city, retracing my grandfather’s steps. I pulled half-remembered phrases out from the depths of my head. Eine kleine espresso, bitte?

A week after I arrived, I came home from work and put the kettle on the stove. Hilke shuffled out of her room, asked if she could sit with me, and launched into a story about a failed love affair. I parried with a similar tale. “Yeah, that guy was a bit nuts,” I said, referring to an ex. She smiled. “Do all Jews go crazy at age forty?” she asked. “Because I know gypsies do.” “No, that’s not right on either count,” I said, delicately, hoping not to scare her off if I sounded too judgmental. “But . . . you do seem to have some peculiar ideas about Jews.”

“It’s true,” she agreed, “that’s exactly why I rented the room to you. It was obvious you were Jewish—no one else left Vienna in the 1930s.”

As a teen, Hilke quickly explained, she’d run around with a skinhead crowd (following a boy) in a suburb of Vienna and had blithely absorbed their anachronistic anti-Semitism. Both her parents were history teachers, she said, who disapproved of racism and anti-Semitism—and, by extension, her friends. Their disapproval egged her on. It was only later, in university, she quashed her feelings. “I’ve always had to be so politically correct,” she said, earnestly. And, while it wasn’t that now she actively disliked Jews, resentment lingered: She didn’t like that she was forced to study the Holocaust, or to feel recalcitrant for something she hadn’t done. Yet she wanted to know more. “Now I can ask the questions I’ve never been able to ask!” With my help she would understand, finally, what was wrong with Jews, why we were so reviled. She had chosen me as her teacher: Sarah Wildman, speaker for the Jews.

The following morning, still processing Hilke’s request, I walked down Wallensteinstrasse to the Institute for Human Sciences, picked up my daily double espresso and pastry at the local bakery, and resumed my research on outsiders. I dashed off an email to my partner, Ian, who was living in Madrid, detailing the events of the night before. “What to do?” I asked. At 12:30 on the dot, I trooped downstairs to the dining room with the twenty or so other fellows. The Polish cook, Lidia, who prepared the midday meal, was already annoyed by my vegetarian requests, so I skipped the hot entrée, headed for salad, and then sat down with a raucous group of philosophers and historians.

When the conversation reached a lull, I blurted, “My roommate is a former skinhead! She rented to me because I’m Jewish!” The table heaved. This was absurd, people said; I had to move. Immediately.

I said I would look for another place. But I felt compelled to stay. For some reason (hubris, perhaps?) I thought I could change her.

Growing up in the New York metro area meant I never had to explain who I was to anyone. We were mildly Sabbath observant (dinner Friday night, shul Saturday morning, movies with friends in the afternoon), my parents kept a kosher home, my grandfather was a Holocaust refugee, I went to Jewish summer camp. I knew dozens of other people who shared a similar background. In Vienna, I felt very visibly Jewish, which, counterintuitively, made me push the point. At the Institute I made some people uncomfortable. “You’re so American,” they said. That meant I was loud. I laughed louder, talked louder, dressed louder.

There was just one other Jew: Thomas, a chain-smoking philosopher originally from Budapest. He had a postcard for the 1928 film Die Stadt Ohne Juden, “The City Without Jews,” pinned to his office corkboard. In the film a city expels all of its Jews and the city falls apart; it’s a comedy. But few of the other fellows knew Thomas was Jewish. Thomas grew up in Communist Hungary and then blended as quickly as he could into Austria; he wasn’t one to call unnecessary attention to himself the way I did.

On my second weekend in town, I went out with one of the Austrian fellows, Herwig, a Holocaust historian, and his Polish girlfriend. Cheerily, I told them about my childish thrill at riding trains my grandfather might have been on, about my grandfather’s lifelong, undiminished love for Vienna. “Life in 1938 here would have been awful for him,” Herwig said, uncomfortably, “especially after the right to practice medicine was taken away.” Midway through the meal, I asked him why he’d chosen to study the Holocaust. “Well,” he cleared his throat. “I suppose it is because of my family. How should I put this. . . .”

His grandfather, he explained, was a translator for the Gestapo and likely participated in the major roundups of Jews in Prague. Like other ethnic Germans he was expelled from Czechoslovakia after the war; he lived, unrepentant, into his nineties. I loved Herwig for telling the story without apology, but at the same time, I was deeply uncomfortable. Did Herwig and I owe each other something? It felt somehow too intimate; too exposed. I woke the next morning with a feeling of dismay, like I had slept with someone wrong for me.

Hilke, on the other hand, really wasn’t interested in answers so much as expressing frustration. “You’re obsessed with your own victimization,” she would say. And I would parry, “You’re welcome to be the victim, Hilke.” She wanted to find a way to share the guilt between us, a means to draw a line blaming Jews, at least partly, for the Holocaust. She wanted us to be different somehow. “But my primary identity is Western,” I said to Hilke, thinking this would resonate. “It was arbitrary my grandfather wasn’t your family doctor. But by fluke of history, I’d be your neighbor.” She shook her head. There had to have been a reason.

“There were centuries of persecution,” she said one afternoon as I put away groceries. “Don’t you think that means there was something wrong?” I tried to explain simply not believing in Christ made Jews suspect. This response bored her. “Look,” she said, and led me into her home office. On her bulletin board were photos of her grandfathers in Nazi uniform. She told me she pinned them there to remind herself—both of what they had done, and that she refused to be ashamed of her lineage. It was as though she was saying that if she had embraced the demons in her family history, I should embrace mine.

Before that moment I had never felt so keenly conscious of my own skin, so othered and ethnic, standing in front of these long-dead men and Hilke. Still, I didn’t move out. Instead, I changed the subject. We talked about sex, mostly. Hilke was into Tantra; she went to Tantric sex workshops and came home days later, quieter, with greasy hair. One night I returned home to a thermostat cranked up to 100 degrees, thick incense smoke, and the sound of Hilke and a man chanting. Somehow her sexual foibles made her less threatening.

Most evenings, after work, I cooked dinner, and she told me stories. “I was in a sadomasochistic relationship with a woman for a year,” she said one night over pasta. “The first night we slept together, I passed out during sex.” Occasionally she talked about art, but art often came back to sex, which came back to me, in a strange circular way. She seemed determined to shock me. And I was equally determined to remain unshocked. “Really, you passed out?” I’d say, “Pass the parmesan.”

“I told a friend I was renting to a Jew,” Hilke said to me one morning as she poured her Muesli and made her herbal tea. Small prisms hanging from the ceiling refracted rainbows all around us. “He said, ‘Oh, Hilke! Don’t you feel you shouldn’t use that Nazi word, Jude?’” I sighed, annoyed. “No, Hilke. Jew is not a Nazi word.”

But others echoed the sentiment. “Yes,” said Karin, a friend from dance class, “that’s how I felt growing up too. ‘Jew,’ ‘race’—those were words not to be used in polite society.” It was strange growing up in Austria, agreed Sophie, a philosopher. “For us Jews were just dead. It was odd to find them, later, in discos.”

I began to wonder how unusual Hilke actually was. Was she an outlier? Or simply more honest in her confusion? One morning I told her what Karin and Sophie had said. “Yes,” said Hilke, impassively, looking up from her computer. “Jews were just victims. They were just piles of dead bodies in photos. I hated their weakness.” She told me of a visit to Mauthausen as a sixteen-year-old with her skinhead boyfriend. She purchased the commemorative book and pasted the pictures around her room, to remind her of her own strength.

”But the bodies didn’t start out weak. They were weakened,” I protested. She shrugged.

The judgment of weakness, somehow, bothered me more than anything. I brought it up a few days later. “Don’t I seem normal to you?” I asked, stupidly, standing in her doorway, picking my cuticles. “Don’t I seem strong? I go to the gym!” It was masochistic, I suppose. I wondered: Was she changing me, instead of I her?

Beyond work and Hilke, I explored Vienna. I rode the trams around the cold, marble, glorious Hapsburg architecture of the first district up to the still-poor tenements of the second district where my grandfather Carl once lived and a handful of streimel-wearing ultra-Orthodox Jews now live again. I meandered the city—it felt old, the demographic average skewing higher than sixty, with few baby strollers—and I walked where Carl had walked, attended the opera he loved. I fell in love with the Naschmarkt, where dozens of fruit and vegetable vendors are joined on Saturdays by peddlers hawking everything from buttons to tattered Russian Torah scrolls.

My grandfather Carl first came back to Vienna in 1950, to look for other survivors; there were none. Two years later he and my grandmother visited again. They returned biennially for decades after, spending six weeks at a time. In my presence, my grandfather never talked about the anti-Semitic wave that drowned the city in 1938. Instead he recalled opera and Goethe, spring days in the Augarten park, and the best medical school in the world. But privately he was far less optimistic. My father had a passport from the moment he was born. And as soon as he made a bit of money in the United States my grandfather set up bank accounts outside America, to ensure the family wouldn’t start over with nothing if and when they fled again.

In late March, my parents arrived for a weeklong visit. In the freezing rain, we trekked from Freud’s house to the Leopold Museum to the Naschmarkt to the Albertina museum, in front of which stands the first paean to the destroyed Jewish community: a statue of a Jew, on his knees, condemned, Sisyphus-like, to scrub the street in front of the museum in perpetuity, his back covered in barbed wire. “This honors us?” my father asked as we emerged from the museum.

On our one sunny day together, my parents and I made a pilgrimage to my grandfather’s house and looked up at its still-shabby exterior: 27 Rueppgasse, not far from the Prater, where the giant Ferris wheel immortalized in The Third Man looms. On the way there we stopped to see my apartment. “I told my friends you’re living with a Nazi,” my mom had said earlier that day, laughing. “Please don’t say that to her,” I begged. “Maybe I should get you a T-shirt,” said my mother, “‘Your grandfather tried to kill my grandfather and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.’”

Hilke was home when we came in. We three were all shorter than Hilke. They all shook hands, cordially. I stood there imagining Hilke would start cackling, “Three Jews! Three Jews in my apartment!” But Hilke was pleasant.

I hadn’t really expected her to act badly around my parents. By then she and I had a rapport of sorts. All those dinners and frank conversations about relationships, sex, and yes, Jews, had meant something, hadn’t they?

Or maybe they hadn’t. “Aren’t Jewish women sexually loose?” she asked one morning, after I gave her rent money. “I mentioned to a friend that you weren’t bothered by my stories—and he said it was because Jewish women are slutty.” She had just come back from a workshop on golden showers. (Do you need a workshop to know how to pee on someone? I wondered.) “Jewish women are called whorish and frigid—don’t the two cancel each other out?” I snapped and walked out, slamming the door. “Take the garbage out!” she called from behind me.

Thomas and I began to spend more time together. We talked about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a topic I wouldn’t have touched with the other Europeans at the Institute. When I flew to Tel Aviv for Passover, the other fellows were shocked. How could I miss a week of my fellowship? Then Thomas announced at lunch that he had gone to Budapest for the seders. Everyone turned to stare. Thomas is Jewish too? It was like finding a long-lost brother.

“Sarah, only you would find the only openly anti-Semitic thirtysomething in this city,” he would say, shaking his head and sucking on a Nil, his harsh Hungarian brand of cigarettes. “I’ve heard she’s not really anti-Semitic,” said another philosopher who thought she knew someone who knew Hilke. “She’s an artist.”

And just as I started to agree with that—maybe she really was just self-educating, albeit roughly—Hilke’s behavior finally wore me down.

It was May Day, and Ian, who was visiting for the weekend, and I were watching a film on the television in her office. “Two Jews watching a Holocaust documentary,” she said, coming upon us, “on a rainy night in Vienna. It’s like the beginning of a joke!” When Ian got angry she said, “Why are you so upset? I mean, you killed your Indians.”

I started to tell the anecdote at work, but my friends at the Institute were becoming bored by this routine. “Just move already,” they said.

But I had thought I could convert her. I thought she would love me, find me amusing and smart. She would see that Jewish women were Western and normal. I wanted the strange nights of anxiety to mean something. Maybe I did speak for the Jews! Besides, I had only a few weeks left—it was stupid to move at this point. Yet part of me wondered if I hadn’t simply been sucked into yet another of Hilke’s sadomasochistic relationships, with no safe word.

I stopped telling stories about Hilke, but I stayed until the end of my fellowship. And when it was over, it was nearly June, the weather was finally warm, and the apartment was filled with light. We sat in Hilke’s office and talked. “Now I know there are Jews who are more like me,” she said, “but I still think Jews are weak.”

I had failed. But I knew that already. It was time to go.

“You’re a journalist,” she said sadly some days before I left. I stood uncomfortably in her doorway, looking up at her Nazi ancestors. “You’re going to write something about the stupid Austrian, I’m sure.” I promised I would change her name.

Last October, at a Bard College conference in honor of the hundredth anniversary of Hannah Arendt’s birth, Christopher Hitchens made an interesting, if troubling, argument about Arendt’s analysis of anti-Semitism in modern times. Hitchens’ argument went more or less like this: (a) Arendt treats anti-Semitism as if it can be understood in rational, historical terms, as a disorder in the nation-state, which led, over the course of the 19th and early 20th centuries, to the rise of a totalitarian government in Germany. But (b) consider the remarkable tenacity of anti-Semitic thought! Sixty years after the Holocaust, that old hoax, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, is posted on Hamas’ Web site; meanwhile Mel Gibson has been maligning the Jews to a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputy. Might it not be, therefore, that (c) anti-Semitism requires an extra-historical explanation? Here Hitchens cited a remark from Rebecca West’s Balkan travelogue, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: “Now I understand another cause for anti-Semitism; many primitive peoples must receive their first intimation of the toxic quality of thought from Jews.” The Jews, Hitchens suggested, generalizing from West’s observation, may have introduced the rest of the world to the pain of intellectual activity and its attendant torments of doubt. And if that’s so, then could it not be that (d) the hatred of Jews is as intractable as the hatred by unthinking people of thought itself? In that case, Hitchens concluded, anti-Semitism would predate history; when we study it, “we would be looking down the corridors of our past and discovering the original scenes of tragedy.”

This is, it seems to me, a strange argument, not least of all because it presumes that there were entire peoples who walked the earth for centuries, and maybe even millennia, without thinking too hard about anything. It is also a depressing argument, in that if it’s correct, then the battle against anti-Semitism will never be won; thinking people can only struggle on the side of thinking for as long as their strength lasts, and hope that others will follow their example. I don’t know what spirit Hitchens offered it in, whether it was the product of long reflection, or something more fleeting: a collection of provocative thoughts offered to an audience who would, as he must have known, ask him about the Iraq war no matter what he said. I reproduce his remarks here not so much because they require a serious refutation, as because they testify to the strangely persistent difficulty of thinking about anti-Semitism as Arendt thought about it: in historical terms. Can it really be that, as she took pains to demonstrate in The Origins of Totalitarianism, “it should have been this seemingly small and unimportant Jewish problem that had the dubious honor of setting the whole infernal machine [of the Nazi ideology] in motion”? And if the “Jewish problem” really did play such an important role in the history of the twentieth century, doesn’t it make more sense to think of the Jews as representing something greater than themselves, something like “the toxic quality of thought”?

Hitchens is certainly right about one thing: questions about the nature of anti-Semitism have once again become pressing. And that being the case, the publication of a new volume of Hannah Arendt’s work, which casts a great deal of light on how she thought about the Jews, Judaism and Jewishness, is timely, to say the least. Arendt, who was born to Jewish parents in Hanover, in 1906, worked for Zionist organizations in France and Germany in the 1930s, and emigrated to New York City, where she died in 1975, is best remembered now for one particular work on Jewish themes: Eichmann in Jerusalem, her account of the trial of the Nazi Adolf Eichmann, which was the object of much controversy upon its publication in 1963. Because Arendt noted that the Judenräte, or Jewish Councils, in Europe cooperated with the Nazis (a fact which had come to light at the trial), individual Jews and Jewish organizations all over the world accused her of having blamed the victims of the Holocaust for their fate. Her enemies branded her an anti-Semite in public; her friends reproached her in private with lacking “love for the Jews.” Now that the cooperation of the Judenräte is a part of orthodox Holocaust history, the controversy over Eichmann is becoming hard to understand. Even so, one of the many good things about The Jewish Writings, edited by Jerome Kohn and Ron Feldman, is that it includes Arendt’s replies to a few of her accusers, which will, in their exhaustive precision, hopefully lay the specter of Arendt’s alleged anti-Semitism once and for all to rest.

These replies, however, constitute only a small part of a large book. The Jewish Writings collects pieces written by Arendt from the 1930s to the 1960s, many of which have never been published in English before, or were only published in newspapers and periodicals and have long been unavailable. The subjects of some of these pieces have grown obscure with the passing of time: a 1943 essay on “Why the Crémieux Decree Was Abrogated” may puzzle a reader who has forgotten (or never knew) what the Crémieux Decree was in the first place. But the fact that these pieces were written in response to current events in most cases only adds to the interest of the book. In a series of articles written for the German-Jewish newspaper Aufbau between October, 1941 and November, 1942, Arendt made the case again and again for the formation of a Jewish army to fight the Nazis. The insistence with which she returned to this subject leaves the reader with a feeling very close to anguish: On the one hand, you feel the absolute urgency of Arendt’s argument that the Jewish people need to take an active part in the making of their history if they are to survive as a people at all; on the other, you witness the failure of this argument to sway the British government, or the American government, or even the American Jewish organizations which could have done something about it. (Indeed, The Jewish Writings speak eloquently, if implicitly, on a subject that is perhaps not discussed often enough by political theorists: the almost insurmountable difficulty of getting people and institutions to do anything.)

Arendt titled one of the Aufbau articles “Ceterum Censeo,” an allusion to the Roman statesman Cato the Elder, who called at the end of every speech for the destruction of Carthage, but the identification is wishful; in the 1940s, Arendt was less a Cato than a Cassandra. As the tide of the war turned, and the survival of at least some fraction of the Jewish people seemed assured, Arendt turned her attention to Palestine. She questioned the wisdom of obtaining a state from the British Empire’s colonial largesse, and observed presciently that “even a purely Jewish Palestine would be a very precarious structure without a prior agreement with all the Arab peoples on all its borders.”

The rise of Nazi Germany led Arendt to wonder if the nation-state had outlived its usefulness, or at least if it needed some other form of political organization to keep its excesses in check: “Future historians will perhaps be able to note that the sovereignty of the nation-state ended in absurdity when it began to decide who was a citizen and who was not,” she wrote, an assertion that must echo uncomfortably in the ears of any American who opposed the Military Commissions Act last year. Arendt argued for a commonwealth of nations in Europe, not unlike the present-day EU; she argued for a Mediterranean federation in which “the Arabs would be strongly represented and yet not in a position to dominate all others.”

The Jewish Writings is that most heartbreaking of books, an atlas of roads not taken, illuminated now and then by a sentence that rises out of the past to warn us against an error which it may still not be too late to avoid. Here is Arendt, writing about the onset of totalitarianism in Germany: “Once the businessman’s opportunism has suffocated peoples and nations by atomizing them in a politics of cliques and clans, despotism takes this atomization to its logical conclusion, until finally sons denounce their own fathers, neighbors and friends denounce one another, for the sake of their careers or personal security.” We have not, for the most part, yet begun to denounce one another (though Ann Coulter’s recent remarks about John Edwards suggest that American politics, at least on the right, is getting just about as ugly as it has ever been), but already globalization is atomizing us: our public space is broken into a thousand channels, an assortment of niche markets and fan bases, each with its tiny fraction of MySpace and its circle of Friendsters.

Whatever their ostensible subjects, the essays and articles collected in The Jewish Writings do not stray far from a single theme, which Arendt expresses now in one way and now in another, always in the hope that her words will lead, somehow, to action: the necessity for the Jewish people to recognize that they participate in history along with everyone else. “It is not true,” she wrote in Aufbau, “that we have always and everywhere been the persecuted innocents. But if it were true, it would be dreadful indeed—it would remove us far more completely from human history than any actual persecution ever could.” The emphasis is Arendt’s. She says it again and again: the Jews were betrayed by their naive sense that they had no political role to play in, say, early 19th-century Germany, or late 19th-century France. She calls this naivete “worldlessness,” and it is the Jewish analog of anti-Semitism: the belief that the Jews are fundamentally different from all other peoples, and therefore need not—or cannot—take part in world affairs. Neither a rush into the embrace of great Gentile thinkers (the description of which gives Arendt occasion to write one of the funniest sentences in The Jewish Writings: Of Dorothea Mendelssohn, who married the philosopher Schlegel, Arendt remarks, “She did not encounter the world, she encountered Schlegel”), nor a wild belief that the Jews can maintain themselves in Palestine against all comers (which amounts, Arendt contends, to a “despair of everything and a genuine readiness for suicide”) can remedy this worldlessness. The only cure for it is for the Jews to take their place as Jews among the other peoples of the world, to understand themselves as historical actors, to act and be acted upon, like everyone else.

But who are these Jews to whom Arendt is speaking? The question is perhaps so basic that she did not think to ask it. And yet it seems worth asking: Are the Jews adherents of a religion, like, say, the Catholics, or are they an ethnicity, like, say, the Kurds? Are you a Jew by birth or by election? In fact—and this is one of the more complicated things about The Jewish Writings—Arendt defined Jewishness in different ways at different times. In the summer of 1940, she wrote to a French friend:

The first prerequisite [for obtaining recognition of the Jewish people in a European parliament] is for us to be rid of all those Jews who do not want to be Jews. Even under the best of circumstances the times will remain far too grave for us to continue to afford the luxury of assuming before the whole world moral and political responsibility for people who do not want to be a part of us. 

Which would seem to imply that Jewishness is elective: one can opt out of the Jewish nation—or at least be expelled from it. A year later, though, she wrote an article for Aufbau, in which she took to task “those Jewish snobs who… loftily declare themselves above ties to their nation.”

Well [she remarks], treason has never yet put an end to the existence of an entire people, and just as “emancipated” women have had little success in saving the world by removing the difference between male and female, our “emancipated” Jews will not succeed in arguing themselves and us out of this world. 

Setting aside the interesting implications this sentence has for Arendt’s sense of the relations between the sexes, it’s not hard to see the parallel she is drawing here: Jewishness is like womanhood, at least to the degree that neither one can be erased by an act of will. One can no more expel a Jew from the Jewish people than one could expel a woman, however “emancipated,” from the biological condition of womanhood.

Beneath this apparent contradiction lies a fact which would have been as obvious to Arendt as it was to anyone reading her at the time: Between the first statement and the second, Germany and its allies had completed their conquest of Western Europe. It had become unconscionable to think of “being rid” of any Jews, even those who by inaction functioned as traitors to their people. In the end, Jewishness is, for Arendt, a political category: Neither a biological fact nor a matter of individual election, it is an alliance between one person and another, between writer and reader, an alliance whose terms vary depending on the circumstances in which it is formed. The Jewish people, united neither by country nor by language, exist in a public space, the existence of which cannot be taken for granted; it must be maintained by assent (and communication, and dissent) among the community of Jews. In other words, the “emancipated” Jews did not succeed in arguing Jewry out of existence for this reason alone: there was someone who argued back.

In this, if Arendt is correct, the Jews are no different from any other people. And the converse is also true: other peoples are no different from the Jews. As Ron Feldman notes in his introduction to The Jewish Writings,

[I]t wasn’t the spread of the Jewish “god” of money that defined the modern age, as Marx would have it. Rather, the modern age was characterized by the cause which underlay the Jews’ reliance on money wealth: the lack of any physical place to which people were rooted and from which they could orient themselves to the world, grasp reality, and experience history. The unique worldless situation of the Jews increasingly became the generalized condition of mankind. 

The Jews are exceptional among human beings only in that, for a moment in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they were ahead of other peoples: They were like the land on the other side of the valley where the storm has already hit. Now the storm has hit everyone, and we have all, to some extent, been uprooted. In light of this frightening fact, Christopher Hitchens’ gloomy assertion of an original, ineradicable anti-Semitism looks almost like nostalgia. For a time when it was possible to believe that the Jews really were different from everyone else, and that—because they were different—some people on earth might not share their fate. History has already proved that belief false. If Arendt teaches us anything, it is that our only hope for survival lies in history, and not beyond it.

For many people chess is more than just a game. The kerfuffle over Vladimir Kramnik’s bathroom breaks during this year’s world championship demonstrated precisely how emotional the game can get.

David Shenk, whose great-great-grandfather was a celebrated player in 19th-century Paris, has spent the past few years writing The Immortal Game, an investigation of chess’s enduring influence. He talks with us about its evolution, and its role in Jewish life and lore from Moses onward.

Growing up, classics professor Daniel Mendelsohn knew virtually nothing about his grandfather’s brother Shmiel, apart from the fact that he, his wife, and their four daughters were “killed by the Nazis.”

For his new book, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, Mendelsohn set out to learn everything he could about their lives, and their deaths. The search, which begins with a small packet of letters after his grandfather died, leads him to Israel, Australia, and, of course, the Ukrainian village where Shmiel’s family lived and perished.

Mendelsohn talks to Nextbook about how a search for six people became a 500-page meditation on history, memory, family, and the story of Cain and Abel.

From The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million

She was not what I expected. Tiny but ramrod-straight, her auburn hair, with its expensive copper highlights, swept back in an impeccable and clearly expensive coiffure, she exuded an air that was at once crisp and distant. She was wearing dark colors that highlighted her brilliant hair: a black silk blouse, a violet sweater. Large gold earrings adorned her long lobes. Jack kissed her on each cheek as she strode in.

This is Daniel Mendelsohn, he said, pointing me out; and then, pointing to Matt, he smiled and said, And this is also Mr. Mendelsohn.

I’m so pleased to meet you, I said. My mother is Frydka’s cousin.

Mendelsohn’s great-uncle Shmiel

Yes, she said, walking past me and seating herself at the table, where she immediately picked up some photographs, I know. Unsmiling, she abruptly started looking through the pictures Matt had taken during our trip to Ukraine: an ancient crone in L’viv, leaning out of a doorway in which you can just make out a groove for the mezuzah that had once been affixed there; an old man in the little square in Bolechow, holding a goat by a leash.

As I stood there trying to think of what to say, I noticed that the air of gentle reminiscence that has characterized the first fifteen minutes of this strange reunion had become charged. Clearly I wasn’t the only one whom Meg Grossbard put on edge. I wondered what private histories, dating sixty years back, lay beneath the polite greetings being uttered by the others at that moment. Six months later, I would find out.

Because I was already a little afraid of her—this woman on whom I had to depend to rescue Frydka from total obscurity, and yet who was clearly already resistant in some undefinable but palpable way—I found myself instinctively trying to appease her, the way that, when I was a boy, I would try to appease my grandfather’s fourth and last wife, that difficult and unsmiling woman with the tattoo on her arm, of whom we were all afraid. So when Mrs. Grossbard turned to me, pulling a photograph from a plastic bag and handing it to me, a posed studio shot of Frydka in which the pretty, long-dead girl is wearing a babushka and very barely smiling, an image I had never seen before and which looks strikingly like my mother—when Mrs. Grossbard turned to me and said, That is Frydka Ja’ger, I stupidly replied, as if to confirm something she considered important,That’s my mother’s cousin. She looked at me, not smiling, and said, Yes I know, she was my girlfriend, with just the barest, proprietary emphasis on the word “my.”

She returned to her bag. I have only a few group photos of Frydka, she said. She explained that they weren’t hers. They had belonged, she said, to a girlfriend of hers and Frydka’s, a young woman called Pepi Diamant.

Di-AH-mant.

Shmiel with wife Ester and daughter Bronia

She perished, but her album survived, Mrs. Grossbard said, tonelessly. I found her album after the war, when I came back to Bolechow, and I took some—her pictures, my pictures, Frydka’s pictures.

I knew that what she meant was: pictures of Pepi, pictures of Meg, pictures of Frydka. (Pepi’s nickname, it became clear that afternoon, had been Pepci, pronounced PEP-shuh.) Oddly, Meg did not offer any of these miraculously preserved photos to me to look at just yet. I could just barely glimpse, through the plastic, snapshots of groups of girls: in summer frocks, posed in front of garden gates; in swimming costumes at the water’s edge; in wasp-waisted winter jackets, standing on skis.

Across the table, Boris Goldsmith, squeezed between Jack Greene and Bob Grunschlag, was looking through more photographs; they were all clearly waiting for the group interview to begin. Ignoring them, Mrs. Grossbard went on. She said, I saw Frydka for the last time—this was when we were still able to walk around freely—in February ‘forty-two.The last time . . .

Her voice trailed off. Suddenly she stopped short and looked right at me for the first time. You look very Aryan, she said, slightly accusingly.

I was taken aback. I do? I said, half in amusement.

Yes, Meg shot back. It’s very important, you know. We have a little thing about it, all of us. Because someone who looked like you had a chance to live.

I was unable to think of any adequate response to this, so instead I took out a photograph that had belonged to my grandfather, a picture in which Shmiel, white-haired and tired-looking, and Ester, stout and big-bosomed in a print dress, stand protectively on either side of Bronia, who looks to be about ten. I put the photograph on the table in front of Meg Grossbard, and she picked it up tenderly. For the first time the hardness, the resistance, seemed to dissolve, and Meg Grossbard, nodding softly, said quietly, Yes. That was her parents.

And—also for the first time—she smiled.

This story belongs to the class of legends that surround great books, and to a certain extent the legend has made the book great. The power of Suite Française—which, in the American edition at least, includes excerpts from Némirovsky’s diary, and the heartbreaking correspondence leading up to her deportation and death—derives not only from the words on the page, but from the murdered author’s silent appeal for justice, if not in her lifetime, then in ours. Certainly Némirovsky’s death overshadows the life that preceded it, making it hard to think of her as anything but a tragic figure, a martyr, perhaps even a kind of Jewish saint. And yet, as Jonathan Weiss’s new biography shows, for most of her life Némirovsky wasn’t any of these things.

Irène Némirovsky was born in Kiev in 1903. Her father Léon was a banker; her mother, Fanny, was beautiful, vain and self-absorbed. The family traveled often to Moscow; they spent vacations in the Crimea and on the Côte d’Azur. Then came the Russian Revolution: the Némirovskys were driven into exile, first to Finland, then Paris. Léon was not long in reestablishing his fortune, and by the age of 18 Irène was back in Nice, dancing, flirting, and staying out late. She was a haphazard student but an avid reader: already in Russia she had discovered Huysmans, Mauspassant, and Oscar Wilde; later she would develop a taste for the French Catholic writer Jacques Chardonne and Pearl S. Buck. She took quickly to writing in French, and by the age of 17 she was publishing literary sketches in Fantasio, a magazine for gentlemen.

Némirovsky, age 25

Némirovsky had her first real literary success at 26, with the novel David Golder, an account of the life and death of a rich Jewish oilman who can say no to everyone but his pretty, spoiled daughter. David Golder abounds in caricatures that it would not be unfair to call anti-Semitic: Golder’s associate Simon has the “heavy, drowsy eyes of an Oriental” and teeth “paved with gold, [which] sparkled strangely in the shadows.” Simon’s wife has a “thin face with a large hard nose in the shape of a beak…her round bright eyes shone intensely beneath pale eyebrows, placed in a strange way, unevenly, very high up.” And so on. Némirovsky defended these characterizations on the grounds that they were drawn from her own experience. But, Irène, teeth that sparkle strangely in the shadows? Eyebrows placed in a strange way? The Jewish press reacted to the novel with dismay; one journalist left an interview convinced that Némirovsky, if not actually an anti-Semite, was “also not very Jewish.”

Némirovsky’s fame, which lasted for ten years, nine more novels, two films, and a few dozen short stories, was mostly a right-wing phenomenon. Her books were serialized in the Gringoire, a newspaper that attacked Jews, immigrants, and Léon Blum’s Popular Front in its editorials. Némirovsky’s work was admired by the anti-Semite and future collaborator Robert Brasillach, and she in turn admired the work of Paul Morand, whose wife, Hélène, was an ardent pro-Nazi. If Némirovsky was uncomfortable in such company, she gave no sign of it. Weiss, her biographer, suggests that she was in the throes of a “discomfort with regard to her origins.” Her family had moved in Gentile society, high above the ghetto of Kiev, and she may have learned distaste for the unassimilated Jews with whom she risked being identified. Also, like other White Russians, she seems to have held Jews accountable for the revolution. “The aim of my life,” she wrote in a notebook, is “to document myself about Trotsky’s life, as a sort of eternal Jew, always in revolt…a traitor, a bit of a bum.” Near the end of her life, she converted to Catholicism, an act that seems to have been motivated more by real belief than by fear of persecution, which under French law she would have suffered anyway. In 1938 she petitioned for naturalization as a French citizen, but she had waited too long. Urged on by papers like the Gringoire, popular sentiment had turned against Jews and foreigners. Her petition was never answered.

There is no justice in Irène Némirovsky’s fate; there is no other story to be told about her death than the one that comes with Suite Française: she died horribly and in vain. If we are to look for the roots of the irony that runs through her biography—that she was a Jew who disliked other Jews, and was nonetheless killed by human beings who hated Jews with a violence that she was utterly incapable of imagining—we must look in the only place where she tried to give meaning to life: in fiction.

Némirovsky and her two daughters

Némirovsky’s “discomfort” with respect to her own identity mars David Golder, and clouds Suite Française, despite the fact that not a single Jew appears in the novel, nor a single concentration camp. For all its immediacy, Suite Française is a curiously apolitical novel. In its first part, “Storm in June,” German planes bomb the wounded and strafe caravans of Parisians, who have flown southward into the countryside. But when the German soldiers appear in Bussy, the fictitious occupied village of the novel’s second part, they turn out to be mostly a likeable bunch, given to exposing their muscular torsos and calling out in giddy, youthful voices for more champagne. So much the better for Némirovsky, you might say: She has succeeded under extreme duress in extending her sympathy even to the occupying army; but as the novel progresses, her evenhandedness comes to seem less like sympathy than a refusal to engage with the reality of her situation, a retreat into a study of provincial manners à la Balzac. The only characters in Suite Française who seem capable of real harm are the Parisian juvenile delinquents who stone their adult guardian to death in “Storm in June”:

They were frenzied, they danced around the priest as he lay sprawled on the floor, they sang and shouted. One of the youngest, with a girlish face, jumped with both feet on a sofa whose old springs creaked under the weight. [...] They felt a terrifying kind of joy. Dragging Philippe by the feet, they threw him out the window, so he fell heavily on the lawn. At the edge of the lake, they swung him like a bundle…. “Heave-ho! Kill him!” they shouted in their harsh, high-pitched voices, some of which still sounded childlike.

It’s as if Némirovsky were still fighting the battles of her childhood; as though the poor were still more to be feared than the Germans who were, even as she wrote, prohibiting her from publishing her work or leaving her house by daylight. (And indeed, Némirovsky mistrusted the Resistance, who, she thought, were out to “take everything” from those who owned the riches of the country.) This is less than sympathy, and more than ignorance; it is a kind of willful blindness, which is perhaps less evident to us now than it would have been fifty years ago: a blindness which had tragic consequences, not least of all for Némirovsky herself.