Sublime

Ben-Gurion set in motion the capture and trial of Adolf Eichmann. The trial proved to be a stunning breakthrough in public understanding. The “curtain of shame” was lifted and the enormity of the Holocaust revealed.

EICHMANN’S TRIAL WOULD BE the first time that Israeli society would publicly engage with the horrific details of the atrocity and with the nightmares that many Israelis—survivors of the inferno of Europe—carried with them every day.

By 1979, the entire liberation experience was covered with a haze of romantic nostalgia and selective memory by the survivors, who had a deep desire to identify with the American people and government.

un « calendrier éternel de toutes les guerres de l’humanité10 ». À l’inverse, l’histoire doit nous apprendre, selon lui, « à honorer l’esprit sous ses multiples formes, cet esprit éternel de l’humanité, que les dictatures et les censures bâillonnent parfois pendant quelque temps, mais qu’elles n’ont jamais pu étouffer11 ».

But no one tried to save the culture of Hasidism, for example, with its devotion to ordinary, everyday holiness—or Misnagdism, the opposing religious movement within traditional Eastern European Judaism, whose energy in the years before the war was channeled into the rigorous study of musar, or ethics. Entire academies devoted to the Musar Movement

I had mistaken the enormous public interest in past Jewish suffering for a sign of respect for living Jews. I was very wrong.