The memory of the Holocaust has haunted the Jewish imagination for three generations. It represents the rupture in our communal history, its shadow falling on everything else. And yet, we have amassed new memories since. Three books by local authors use the legacy of the Holocaust in their attempts to grapple with many facets of the Cold War.
What books must every Jew read? What books are critical to informing your understanding of your faith, your culture, your people? With this issue, The Jewish Journal introduces a new weekly column: My Jewish Library.
Philip Roth was born to a generation that believed in America, and although some of them were like the undertaker in the first scene of \”The Godfather,\” who also believed in America, but went outside the courts for justice — Roth\’s parents love their country, or what they remember of it.
Unfortunately, at least from the perspective of an editor at a Jewish newspaper, our communal leaders traditionally don\’t do memoirs. The result is an incomplete record of a community that operates a multibillion-dollar charity network, has helped frame the debate on domestic issues from civil rights to church-state separation and wields increasing power on the international stage.
There is a fierce anger at the core of Ruth Linn\’s work, the anger of a woman who suddenly and irrefutably discovers that the story she has been told by her Israeli teachers, Israeli society and Israeli culture from childhood onward regarding the Holocaust is but a partial narrative.
Aaron Lansky is the Yiddish Indiana Jones. The founder and president of the National Jewish Book Center, Lansky has been an intrepid archaeologist and adventurer in his decades-long effort to find and save Yiddish books around the world before they are destroyed or lost forever.
At present, the tradition or writing hanhagot continues. At the back are two neo-Chasidic hanhagot, by Hillel Zeitlin, a writer and martyr of the Warsaw Ghetto, and Arthur Green, a contemporary scholar and theologian, who is the author\’s mentor.
