People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present

Holocaust is increasingly revealed as the fundamental watershed in Jewish and human history after which nothing will ever be the same. It is one of those reorienting moments of Jewish history and religion when basic conceptions of God, of humanity, and of Jewish destiny shift.

A major factor in the colossal moral failures which made the Shoah possible was the nonresponse of the bystanders.

No: if anything, the liberal democracies of the West are abandoning the very values that were once known as the Judeo-Christian tradition. The family, the community, the sanctity of human life, the concept of an objective set of moral values, the idea of a covenant linking the present to the past—these are ideals in danger, not reigning orthodoxies

This was the beginning of a rich Jewish tradition and, at the same time, of the loss of everything the Jews had had: their state, their temple, their priestly and military bureaucracy, their sacrificial animals, and their rituals. All were lost and they were left (as a group) with nothing except the ideal of being: knowing, learning, thinking, and