At one strange and terrible moment in 1944, a conversation took place in Nazi-occupied Budapest between Adolf Eichmann and a charming rogue named Joel Brand, a man who preferred to spend his time in cafes while his wife ran the family’s little glove-making business. Eichmann offered Brand a deal — 1 million Jewish men, women and children would be set free in exchange for 10,000 trucks. “Blood for goods” is the phrase that Eichmann used to describe the deal he was proposing to make.

“If you remember the ’60s,” as the saying goes, “you weren’t there.”

That’s only one of the cherished myths that Don Lattin debunks in “The Harvard Psychedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America” (HarperOne: $24.99). It’s a fast, funny, and savvy book that dishes about some of the most celebrated figures in the American counterculture.

On the wall of my home office is an authentic family relic — a tallis bag that was carried from Byelorussia to Ellis Island by my wife’s grandfather, Ben Zion Benjamin. The embroidery, elaborate and colorful, features a date: 1895. Today, the tallis bag is framed under glass, but the secret of its provenance and the significance of the date are lost to us.

I am the kind of Jew I am today because of something that happened long before I was born, and the same is true for every Jewish man or woman who happens to be reading these words.

One measure of the vigor of the Israeli democracy can be seen in the candor and clear-sightedness of its scholars and other public intellectuals, ranging from journalist and historian Tom Segev (“1967”) to archaeologist Israel Finkelstein (“The Bible Unearthed”). To these examples we must now add Hillel Cohen and his remarkable new book, “Good Arabs: The Israeli Security Agencies and the Israeli Arabs, 1948-1967” (University of California Press, $27.50, translated by Haim Watzman).

Authors who want to take their unpublished works to the grave do not always get what they wish for. Franz Kafka famously ordered his manuscripts to be burned after his death, and his order was defied by the very friend he entrusted with the task. Vladimir Nabokov expressed the same wish for an unfinished novel, “The Original of Laura,” which is now being published more than 30 years after Nabokov’s death under the authority of his son.