People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present

Another, asked to serenade a bride and groom, stands and sings, You are going to die. Others smash glasses at weddings, a practice continued at my own. 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. From when can we recite the eveni

God says: May it be my will that my compassion will overcome my anger. I wondered: Was I furious every day too? (I was, then.) Could I try to be furious only for one fifty-eight thousand eight hundred and eighty-eighth of an hour?

Destruction and humiliation didn’t matter. Only memory and integrity did.

replacing temple rituals with equally ritualized blessings and prayers, study of Torah, and elaborately regulated interpersonal ethics. The sages frantically arguing about when and how to recite which prayers are survivors and descendants of survivors, remnants of a destroyed world.

Daf Yomi, the “world’s largest book club,”

If All the Seas Were Ink,

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.

If anything, this felt more like Paris in 2005—a place where there was no shortage of legal protections and official goodwill, but where one wouldn’t be crazy to occasionally hide a yarmulke under a baseball hat. Yet the thought of explaining this was exhausting too, and also beside the point.

could not stomach all the “to be sures” and other verbal garbage I would have to shovel in order to express something acceptable to a non-Jewish audience in a thousand words or less. I could no longer handle the degrading exercise of calmly explaining to the public why it was not OK to partially amputate someone’s arm with a four-foot-long blade at