Sublime

We need individual stories. Without individuals we see only numbers: a thousand dead, a hundred thousand dead, “casualties may rise to a million.” With individual stories, the statistics become people—but even that is a lie, for the people continue to suffer in numbers that themselves are numbing and meaningless.

His 1989 film, Weapons of the Spirit, is a documentary about Le Chambon; it has become an educational staple that I watched in my high school French class.

They thought if they would sleep with him they will be saved. Everyone thought so. Was I better than the others? No. I was the same. And so he would go from one woman to another, from one to another.

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

The prophets count on us to be appalled by injustice.

As soon as the German army occupied Prague, talk began, in certain quarters, of sending the city’s famous Golem, Rabbi Loew’s miraculous automaton, into the safety of exile.