Sublime

Since ancient times, in every place they have ever lived, Jews have represented the frightening prospect of freedom. As long as Jews existed in any society, there was evidence that it in fact wasn’t necessary to believe what everyone else believed, that those who disagreed with their neighbors could survive and even flourish against all odds. The J

MEANWHILE, IN EUROPE, the Allied war against the Nazis progressed. On May 8, 1945, the Germans surrendered unconditionally and World War II ended four months later on September 2. Some sixty million people died in the war (about 3 percent of the world’s population in 1940), including the six million Jews (constituting one-third of the Jewish people

What are stories for? That question becomes even harder to answer when we consider that an astonishing proportion of what counts today as “Jewish” literature in English is basically Holocaust fiction. If the purpose of literature is to “uplift” us, is it even possible to write fiction that is honest about the most horrifying aspects of the Jewish p

“In this most Christian of worlds / All poets are Jews.”

under this influence the personal ego finally suffered a loss of values. If the man in the concentration camp did not struggle against this in a last effort to save his self-respect, he lost the feeling of being an individual, a being with a mind, with inner freedom and personal value. He thought of himself then as only a part of an enormous mass o

How did we fail him? How did we fail him?

I took a medium-sized bottle of Jim Beam and drank from it under the covers while reading No Man Is an Island by Thomas Merton. Without God, we are no longer persons. We become dumb animals under pain, happy if we can behave at least like quiet animals and die without too much confusion.