People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present

Jewish history is a living testimony to the power of ideas,

Jews are one quarter of 1 percent of the world population. Yet they make up almost 30 percent of the world’s Nobel Prize winners. Such achievement is not bred in the genes. It is a product of centuries of insistence on the gift of the human mind. The great heroes of Jewish spirituality always include scholars and sages.

The lesson of the Holocaust was that in the face of overwhelming concentration of power, acts of self-sacrifice and spiritual demonstration had little or no effect on the murderers. Classic moral traditions—martyrdom in Judaism, satyagraha in Hinduism, the cross and turning the other cheek in Christianity—were shattered in the Holocaust. Nor did th

Insofar as there were still Jews, they lived, spiritually speaking, in suspended animation, mere ghosts among the living. The result was a failure, among Christians and even sometimes among Jews themselves, to understand that Judaism had not died with the loss of the second Temple. To the contrary, it underwent one of most creative moments in Jewis