People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present

The freedoms that we cherish are meaningless without our commitments to one another:

Sauvage developed his own theory about the righteous: that they are happy, secure people with a profound awareness of who they are.

that by studying these exceptional people, we can learn to be more like them.

other words, hating Jews was normal. And historically speaking, the decades in which my parents and I had grown up simply hadn’t been normal. Now, normal was coming back.

When we finish, we will be seven years older in our respective generations, and also, God willing, seven years wiser—even if we forget what we have learned, even if we are broken, even if our forgotten wisdom rattles around inside our minds like shards of broken tablets.

Ours is a broken world. Rebuilding is hard, daily, constant, endless, the marriage that follows the wedding, which is not a happy ending but an imperfect beginning.

Holocaust didn’t happen because of a lack of love. It happened because entire societies abdicated responsibility for their own problems, and instead blamed them on the people who represented—have always represented, since they first introduced the idea of commandedness to the world—the thing they were most afraid of: responsibility.

In other words, the cause of bloodthirsty antisemitic violence is . . . Jews, living in a place! Sometimes, Jews who live in places even buy land on which to live. To

All the Seas Were Ink, describing how the daily routine of Talmud study carried her through challenging years in her own life—and her book inspired many less-traditional people who had previously assumed that Talmud study wasn’t for them.