“Gentile Troubles: Saint Paul, the Rabbis, and Us”
Adi Ophir (Brown University/Tel Aviv University)

Professor Ophir considered the history of the gentile or “goy,” as the Jew’s “other.” Although quite famous, among Jews and Christians at least, this figure has received little scholarly attention. Professor Ophir spoke about two moments in this history, the most ancient and the most recent. Exploring the origins of the concept of the gentile, he asked what makes this “other” so different from many others.

Part of the BUJS Forum series.

Sunday April 28, 2015 at 12:30 pm
Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies
147 Bay State Road, Second Floor Library

Congratulations to our graduating Jewish Studies minors:

Samantha Cohen (COM ’15)

Andrea Firestone (Questrom ’15)

Benjamin Harris (CFA ’15)

Robyn Klitzky (COM ’15)

The Value of the Particular: Lessons from Judaism and the Modern Jewish Experience: Festschrift for Steven T. Katz on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday
In this tribute to Steven T. Katz on the occasion of his seventieth birthday, Michael Zank and Ingrid Anderson present sixteen original essays written by senior and junior scholars in comparative religion, philosophy of religion, modern Judaism, and theology after the Holocaust, fields of inquiry where Steven Katz made major contributions over the course of his distinguished scholarly career.

The authors of this volume, specialists in Jewish history, especially the modern experience, and Jewish thought from the Bible to Buber, offer theoretical and practical observations on the value of the particular. Contributions range from Tim Knepper’s reevaluation of the ineffability discourse to the particulars of the Settlement Cookbook, examined by Nora Rubel as an American classic.
Buy this book

 
Post-Holocaust France and the Jews, 1945-1955 edited by Seán Hand and Steven T. Katz
Despite an outpouring of scholarship on the Holocaust, little work has focused on what happened to Europe’s Jewish communities after the war ended. And unlike many other European nations in which the majority of the Jewish population perished, France had a significant post‑war Jewish community that numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Post-Holocaust France and the Jews, 1945–1955 offers new insight on key aspects of French Jewish life in the decades following the end of World War II.

How Jews had been treated during the war continued to influence both Jewish and non-Jewish society in the post-war years. The volume examines the ways in which moral and political issues of responsibility combined with the urgent problems and practicalities of restoration, and it illustrates how national imperatives, international dynamics, and a changed self-perception all profoundly helped to shape the fortunes of postwar French Judaism.Comprehensive and informed, this volume offers a rich variety of perspectives on Jewish studies, modern and contemporary history, literary and cultural analysis, philosophy, sociology, and theology.

With contributions from leading scholars, including Edward Kaplan, Susan Rubin Suleiman, and Jay Winter, the book establishes multiple connections between such different areas of concern as the running of orphanages, the establishment of new social and political organisations, the restoration of teaching and religious facilities, and the development of intellectual responses to the Holocaust. Comprehensive and informed, this volume will be invaluable to readers working in Jewish studies, modern and contemporary history, literary and cultural analysis, philosophy, sociology, and theology.
Buy this book

Elie Wiesel: Jewish, Literary and Moral Perspectives reviews:

Publishers Weekly

Kirkus Reviews (10/1/13) 

Jewish Book World Winter (2013/14) 

Jewish Book Council cover of the week 

Indiana University Jewish Studies Program (page 7)

NY Journal of Books

Toledo Holocaust Examiner 

Click here for more information about the book Elie Wiesel: Jewish, Literary and Moral Perspectives.

We are pleased to announce Jonathan Catlin as the winner of our 2015 Leo Baeck Essay Award with his essay entitled “Anti-Semitism” and “Judaism” in Dialectic of Enlightenment: A Jewish Answer to the Jewish Question. 

Mr. Catlin is a graduating senior at the University of Chicago, where he received honors in Jewish Studies and the Great Books program, Fundamentals: Issues & Texts. His work examines the concept of “catastrophe” in modern Jewish thought, drawing upon Holocaust studies, psychoanalysis, and the Frankfurt School of critical theory. He has served as an editor of Makom, a journal of Jewish studies, and editor-in-chief of The Midway Review, a journal of politics and culture, and published numerous essays on the Holocaust in contemporary thought and literature. After completing an MA in continental philosophy at KU Leuven, Belgium next year, he plans to pursue a PhD in modern European intellectual history to study German-Jewish intellectuals’ responses to the Holocaust.

Honorable Mention was awarded to Mary C. Andino, a sophomore at the College of William and Mary, for her essay entitled Navigating Gender, Morality, and Economy: Glückel of Hameln’s Wide Window into the Complex World of German Jewry, 1670-1720.

Congratulations Jonathan and Mary for your excellent work, and thank you to all of the students who participated in the contest.

Students gathered at the Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies to meet, enjoy Middle Eastern sweets, and listen to live music performed by the Rinat Tregerman Trio.

The event took place on September 15, from 8pm, and was held at the Second Floor Library of 147 Bay State Road.

Alexandra Herzog (Boston University): “Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Demons:
A Carnivalesque Journey”

Dr. Alexandra Herzog opened her BU Jewish Studies Forum talk on Isaac Bashevis Singer by asking, “Do we need demons in life?” Her close analysis of several Singer stories has led her to suggest that he  understood the supernatural as a naturally occurring force in his own inner life. He believed that demons are a necessity,  a vehicle for rebellion, protest, and questioning conventional notions of truth. Herzog’s talk prompted her assembled colleagues and students to further discuss various concepts of madness and the universal capacity to harbor demonic impulses.

A scholar of American Jewish literature and Gender Studies, Dr. Herzog noted that the Talmud says that madness must be experienced in moderation, as life is “sometimes sane, sometimes, insane.” Singer believed that madness is inescapable because “the world of matter and deeds is an insane asylum.” This perspective explains his frequent mockery of “order” in stories about reversed societal and gender roles, in which women’s bodies become battlegrounds for demonic possession, and stories in which mental illness offers an escape from social reality. Singer’s ending for these tales is always the same, Dr. Herzog noted: “carnivalesque” laughter and the horror of demons force order to unravel and signal the character’s descent into madness.

For more information on Dr. Herzog, see http://www.bu.edu/jewishstudies/faculty/post-doctoral-fellows/.

Boston University commemorated the 20th anniversary of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination this year with a lecture by Israeli security expert Efraim Inbar and a panel discussion moderated by NPR/WBUR On Point host Tom Ashbrook. Our event – which drew a standing-room only audience at the George Sherman Union Conference Auditorium – featured a personal message from former President Bill Clinton and brief comments from Israeli Consul General to New England Yehuda Yaakov.

In his introductory remarks, Elie Wiesel Center Director and Religion Professor Michael Zank deplored the current violence that has made victims of Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians. “We will never know whether this and earlier rounds of violence could have been avoided had the Oslo Accords between Israel and the PLO been implemented,” he said.

But, he added, “It is time to reconsider Rabin, who was not a perfect man, and Oslo, which was not a perfect agreement, but a step in the direction of a 2-state solution and a diplomatic, mutually-agreed, negotiated settlement of this conflict between the people of Palestine and the Jewish state, whose right to exist is beyond dispute.”

Director of the Begin-Sadat Strategic Studies Center at Bar-Ilan University and currently Visiting Israel Studies Professor of Political Science at Boston University, Professor Inbar knew and worked closely with Rabin for many years. In his lecture, he described the Israeli Prime Minister as a courageous leader, brilliant strategist, and sober realist, whose overriding goal was Israel’s security.

“He did not seek peace as a value,” Inbar said. “But he was willing to trade territory for Israel’s security,” premised on the hope that the Palestinian leadership would put an end to attacks on Israel. He became ambivalent after the signing however, according to Inbar, amid continuing reports that the Palestinians were violating the agreement and “were not preparing for peace, but for war.”

“He believed that Oslo was reversible,” said Inbar, who thinks that those violations would eventually have led Rabin to decide that the peace agreement with Arafat could not be implemented.

Inbar offered a dire view of Rabin’s legacy. “The peace process with the Palestinians was a failure,” he said. Today, twenty years later, the now “intractable” ethno-religious struggle with “no solution in sight” is, in his view, a “young conflict” that could last decades – an assertion that moderator Tom Ashbrook called “very disturbing.”

President Bill Clinton, who helped broker the 1995 agreement between Rabin and Arafat, struck a very different note. He described Rabin as “a man of uncommon courage and unbounded wisdom” who worked to “build lasting relationships based on mutual understanding” to create “the conditions for peace.”

Our four panelists offered a diversity of views on Rabin’s legacy and prospects for Mid-East peace. Professor Andrew Bacevich, Chair Emeritus of BU’s Department of International Relations, faulted “both sides” for the conflict. He said Israel’s continuation of West Bank settlements has “complicated the problem” and threatens to drive a wedge between Israel and the United States because it is “one of the root causes of anti-Israeli sentiment.”

Rejecting Professor Inbar’s bleak predictions, Susannah Heschel, Eli Black Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College, called “despair” an unacceptable response. She urged a more humane approach, arguing that political leaders alone cannot build peace. “We cannot keep repeating the same canards about ‘Palestinians.’ Instead, we need to speak to one another,” she added, “because there is no security without peace.”

Boston Globe Op-Ed Columnist Jeff Jacoby agreed with Professor Inbar’s analysis, asserting that “Rabin would have pulled the plug on Oslo” within a few months of signing the agreement with Arafat. “Israel wasn’t created for peace,” he added. “It was created to have a secure Jewish homeland, even if security means living without peace.”

Professor David Ellenson, Director of Brandeis University’s Schusterman Center for Israel Studies, argued that power alone is not enough to secure peace between Israelis and Palestinians. Part of the problem, he said, is that Israel has shifted away from Rabin’s pragmatic focus, “so what had been largely a secular conflict has become more of a religious conflict, and is now much more difficult to unravel.”

Overcoming the conflict will require “an ethic of aspiration,” he said, one that acknowledges the “conflicting narratives” of Israelis and Palestinians, with each believing in their historical right to their ancestral homeland.

The evening concluded with a half hour of questions from the audience, with vigorous discussion continuing long after in the reception that followed.

On Sunday November 1, the Center hosted Quill of the Soul: A Musical Tribute to Elie Wiesel at the Tsai Performance Center at 7pm. The multicultural performance was also the closing event of the year-long artist’s residency of Russian-Israeli composer Matti Kovler at Boston University, hosted by the Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies.

Inspired by Elie Wiesel’s “Melodies of My Childhood,” and the work of Israeli composer Andre Hajdu, Matti Kovler presented an evening that took the Hasidic Niggun (or “chant”) as its point of departure. Incorporating instrumental music, song, and media, this performance explored surprising parallels between Nigguns and other world incantations. The diversity of the program –and of the cast– mirrored the variety of faiths and ethnicities –from Hindu to Sufi to Buddhist– that share similar approaches to sacred song. Quill of the Soul featured a multi-national ensemble of 12 musicians, a student choir, video projections and narration.

Part of the Floating Tower series directed by Matti Kovler, Quill of the Soul was supported by the Boston University Jewish Cultural Endowment, the BU Arts Initiative and BU Center for the Humanities.

We are pleased to announce a new course on the Kabbalah, offered this spring semester by Dr. Yair Lior. The course closes a major gap in our curriculum and rounds out other courses we teach on early Jewish and comparative mysticism.

Also new this spring: HI393 Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (formerly: “Topics in the History of Israel”). Taught by Dr. Jacobson, who plans to return to Israel next year, the course counts toward IR tracks Africa & the Middle East, Foreign Policy & Security Studies, and Regional Politics & Cultural Anthropology; also approved as a MENA Social Science or Elective course. Vicky Kelberer-McKee (Pardee School advisor) writes: “Our students are very excited to take the course!”

Dr. Alexandra Herzog, post-doctoral fellow in Jewish Studies and the CAS Core Curriculum, will offer a new course titled “Sex in the Shtetl.” The course is offered as WS 305 B1″ Topics in Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies” and examines major works of modern Yiddish literature through the lenses of gender and sexuality, exploring how authors cultivated an imagination populated by norm-defying beings: the prostitute, the androgyne, the cross-dresser, angels and demons.

Finally, offered by the Kilachand Honors College, a new freshmen seminar on Moses and Muhammad, co-taught by Elie Wiesel Center director Michael Zank and Prof. Kecia Ali (Religion), author of an acclaimed book on the biography of Prophet Muhammad.

For more information about these and our other courses, please go to Spring 2016 Courses.

On March 15, from 6:30-7:30, Professor Rabbi David Ellenson will give the Elie Wiesel Center’s third annual Leo Trepp Lecture. Now Director of the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies at Brandeis, Rabbi Ellenson is a past president of Hebrew Union College and a scholar of German Jewish neo-Orthodoxy.

In his lecture, Professor Ellenson will review the emergence of Reform, Orthodox and Positive Historical (Conservative) varieties of Judaism in 19th century Germany and explain the ongoing relevance of their beliefs and structures for an understanding of Judaism today.

The lecture with be preceded by a festive reception, starting at 5:30, in honor of the Trepp Torah scroll, which Mrs. Gunda Trepp, who sponsors the Lecture series, has generously donated to be permanently housed at the Center.

Professor Ellenson, who has written on the importance of studying both text and context, is also Visiting Professor of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis University, as well as Chancellor Emeritus at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC-JIIR).

He is internationally recognized for his publications and research in the areas of Jewish religious thought, ethics and modern Jewish history. His twelve-year tenure as president of the seminary of the Reform Movement was distinguished by his devotion to sustaining HUC-JIIR’s academic excellence. He received an honorary doctorate from the Jewish Theological Seminary in 2014.

This event is free and open to the public, but an RSVP is required, as there is limited seating.

Best known for Arab Labor, his wildly popular Israeli TV sit-com, Israeli-Palestinian novelist and Haaretz columnist Sayed Kashua was greeted by a standing-room-only audience at the Elie Wiesel Center on February 18. The New Yorker has described him as “the most visible representative of Palestinian life in Israel.”

In conversation, he shared some of the backstory behind his TV projects, about what it means to straddle Israel’s Jewish-Arab divide, and – as the father of three, who was raising his children in one of Jerusalem’s Jewish neighborhoods – how it feels to start life over in America’s MidWest.

Kashua’s new series, The Screenwriter, is in its first season. Unlike Arab Labor, a comedy that skewered Israeli stereotypes, the new show is a barely fictionalized drama about an Israeli-Palestinian writer who navigates Israel’s two worlds. Why the shift to drama? Kashua said he had no choice.

“My work has always been political, always about identity and nationality, and the personal and political pain of being trapped in stereotypes,” he said. “But as the situation – and the occupation – got worse in Israel, humor became impossible. I needed a new way to talk about these things.”

Kashua left the country in the summer of 2014. Three Jewish teenagers had been murdered, Jerusalem crowds were shouting “death to the Arabs,” and a Palestinian boy was found, burned to death. “I called my agent and said I had to leave, “he recalled.

Today he teaches at the state university in Illinois. His children are learning English and making friends, as he and his wife adapt. “I was tired of choosing camps, of people putting words in my mouth,” he explained. “But I still have an empty house in Tira, my village. Now we live in the cornfields in Illinois. I’m less scared. But I was raised in a place where you’re not supposed to leave.”

EWCJS minor, Erin Miller (CAS ’17, SPH ’18), was featured in the College of Arts and Science’s Magazine Spring 2016 for her dedicated research assistance with Dr. Grodin’s project on Rabbinic Responsa during the Holocaust. To read more about her contributions and the specifics of her research in halakhah and medical ethics, click HERE for the full article.

This spring marked the second year of The Leo Baeck Institute-NY Essay Prize in German-Jewish History and Culture.

EWCJS is pleased to announce Mr. Jesse Gamoran as the winner of our 2016 Leo Baeck Essay Award, with his essay entitled The Munich Visiting Program, 1960-1972. Mr. Gamoran graduated this past May from Oberlin College, where he studied Jewish history and German Studies. Starting this July he’ll be participating in the Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange for Young Professionals, a yearlong study-intern program in Germany. In addition to Jewish history, Jesse has interests in education and library science.

The prize money was gifted by Bernard Bloom, former president of the Leo Baeck Institute, and awarded by the Elie Wiesel Center in conjunction with the Leo Baeck Institute in New York. To compete, students were asked to submit an essay of between 4,500 and 7,500 words on any topic related to the history and culture of German-speaking Jews, along with faculty letters of commendation.

Honorable Mention was awarded to Ms. Madelyn Stone, a student at Northeastern University, for her essay entitled “Reality is the Satire”: The Will to Hope in the Writings of Jura Soyfer.

Congratulations Jesse and Madelyn for your excellent work, and thank you to all of the students who participated in the contest!

To see other scholarship opportunities for undergraduate students, click here.

This week marks the first anniversary of Professor Elie Wiesel’s death on July 2, 2016 (26 Sivan 5776). Thus far, our retrospective has taken a chronological approach to the works of Professor Wiesel, beginning with the autobiographical Night and moving on to his first novel, Dawn. This week, as we reflect on the richness of his inspiring life, we break with our approach and turn to two recently published memoirs. All Rivers Run to the Sea was originally published as Tous les fleuves vont á la mer in 1994. A second volume, And the Sea is Never Full, was originally published as Et la mer n’est pas remplie in 1996. Professor Wiesel took these titles from the biblical book of Ecclesiastes (Kohelet) 1:7. “All streams flow into the sea / Yet the sea is never full; / To the place [from] which they flow / The streams flow back again.”

Passage #1:

If only I could recapture my father’s wisdom, my mother’s serenity, my little sister’s innocent grace. If only I could recapture the rage of the resistance fighter, the suffering of the mystic dreamer, the solitude of the orphan in a sealed cattle car, the death of each and every one of them. If only I could step out of myself and merge with them.

If only I could hold my memory open, drive it beyond the horizon, keep it alive even after my death.

I know it isn’t possible. But what of it? In my dreams the impossible is not a Jewish concept. (5)

Passage #2:

Joseph edited my translation and told me he was ready to teach me. He soon became my professor of literature and political science, explaining that Yiddish had its own grammar and idiosyncrasies, with countless nuances and as many pitfalls. “If you want to hold the reader’s attention,” he said, “your sentence must be clear enough to be understood and enigmatic enough to pique curiosity. A good piece combines style and substance. It must not say everything—never say everything—while nevertheless suggesting that there is an everything.” (164)

Passage #3:

The day I stop writing, what shall I be? I still have so many stories to tell, so many subjects to explore, so many characters to invent or reveal. I am still tormented by the same anguish: Notwithstanding all the books I have written, I have not yet begun. But then I write them in order to understand as much as to make myself understood. (355)

Passage #4:

And yet. One must wager on the future. To save the life of a single child, no effort is superfluous. To make a tired old man smile is to perform an essential task. To defeat injustice and misfortune, if only for one instant, for a single victim, is to invent a new reason to hope.

Oh yes, I know: it is not always easy to hope. Also, hope can become a trap whose victims are as unhappy as victims of despair. I came up against this problem when I was writing THE FORGOTTEN, which I had trouble finishing. I did not want to leave my young protagonist Malkiel faced with total despair. In all my novels I try to open or at least to indicate a path not toward salvation (does it exist?), but toward encounter, with the Other and also with oneself. In THE FORGOTTEN, the old hero, Elhanan, deprived of his memory and aware of the incurability of his disease, no longer has any hope of human contact. Who could possibly succeed in making him smile one more time? I saw no solution to the problem and kept the manuscript in a drawer for several months. Then very early one morning, as I was working, I heard my young son in the next room. And suddenly the solution was clear. I needed to help perform a transfusion of memory; as Elhanan’s diminished, Malkiel’s would be enriched.

At a certain age one becomes attached to certain words. I now love the word “transfusion.” (403)

Passage #5:

“Remember,” the Book commands us. In my tradition, memory does not set people apart. On the contrary, it binds them one to the other and all to the origins of our common history. It is because I remember where I came from that I feel close to those I meet on the way. It is because man is capable of transforming his burdens into promises that he lives them fully. That is why to live without a past is worse than to live without a future. What would our civilization be if it were stripped of its memory? Memory is more than the sum of images and words, cries and deeds; it is even more than an individual or collective identity; it is the bond that ties us to the mystery of the beginning, this nebulous place where man’s memory is reflected in God’s. (406-407)

Join us for the fourth week of selected passages at our Facebook!

Professor Leora Bilsky joined us on March 15 for our third BUJS Forum of spring semester to give a lecture on the challenges in international law when facing restitution for Jewish communities in cases of cultural genocide. Bilsky is the William and Patricia Kleh Visiting Professor in International Law as supported by a grant from the Israel Institute. She previously published a book that examines the role of major trials in Israel, called Transformative Justice: Israeli Identity (2015), and also has an upcoming publication, The Holocaust, Corporations, and the Law: Unfinished Business (2017), that calls for the accountability of major corporations in cases of human rights violations.

Bilsky said genocide must be “understood as more than mass murder” because “the notion of group harm is fundamental to the concept of genocide.” Genocide is therefore not only the destruction of individuals, but also an attack on group identity, which can be seen in the prohibition and appropriation of cultural and religious objects and structures. Bilsky cited the example of how the Nazis targeted Jewish books, libraries, and archives during the Holocaust. The international legal community then faced an unprecedented legal question: How should restitution of cultural objects, many of which were heirless, be implemented?

International law was not prepared for the scale and complexity of legal issues that would arise from this question, Bilsky explained. When it came to restitution of cultural objects, the standard was to return any property to its state of origin. The state would then govern distribution with its own domestic property laws. However, the international community clearly failed to consider a situation in which the state participated in the persecution of its own citizens. Additionally, the concept of restitution was focused on the economic value of objects, which failed to consider the importance of cultural value.

Jewish jurists and cultural groups fought to create a new notion of restitution that would be forward-looking. To do so, they had to establish the Jewish people as a legal entity that might speak on behalf of Jewish victims as a collective. During the 1950s, a radical collectivized restitution was granted that allowed such organizations to act as trustees for the Jewish people, which petitioned for the cultural objects to be put back into use in Jewish communities throughout the world. However, this view of restitution was considered an exception and was not made a legal standard. Bilsky suggests that this concept of moving past ideas of the individual and state towards acknowledging collectives, groups, and organizations would enrich the legal imagination and better equip international law to handle situations of genocide.

After the lecture, Bilsky took questions from the audience, who asked about how one might apply new understandings of restitution to contemporary non-Jewish contexts, the impact on Jewish culture, and regarding further historical information. Both the lecture and discussion provided those in attendance with a thoughtful perspective on the workings of international law in cases where there is collective cultural harm.

What the Shoah has left philosophy with is a failed transcendence. The writings of philosopher Jean Améry in response to his experiences of the Holocaust do not focus on ideology, nor do they focus on the incomprehensible theological meaning behind this destruction. Rather, they focus intensely on the issue of identity. In our second BUJS Forum of the fall 2016 semester, Dr. Jeffrey Bernstein (Philosophy, College of the Holy Cross) led us through a riveting discussion of Jean Améry and his contributions to the question of Jewish identity after the Holocaust.

The quotes of Jean Améry’s that Dr. Bernstein used throughout the presentation were from a highly embodied and visceral perspective. Speaking about what it means to be a Jew, Améry wrote that, “For me, being a Jew means feeling the tragedy of yesterday as an inner oppression.” He then goes on to directly point to his body and writes that, “On my left forearm I bear the Auschwitz number; it reads more briefly than the Pentateuch or the Talmud and yet provides more thorough information.” With poignancy and depth, Dr. Bernstein addressed how radical this statement is when considered in parallel to Deuteronomy 6:5-9 (Sh’ma Y’Israel) – one of the most important passages to Jewish tradition which directly asks Jews to bind G-d’s instructions “ as a sign upon your hand and let them serve as a symbol on your forehead.” Améry inverts this relation and instead points to the stark reality that being Jewish is being inscribed with a punishment, and one that is marked for death.

Dr. Bernstein continued to explain that in Améry’s view, not every Jew is capable of thinking out the relationship between Jewish identity and the historical event of the Shoah. It thus can no longer be a question of tradition, but of grappling with a negative identity. This negative identity, Dr. Bernstein argued, goes much deeper than Jean Paul Sartre’s definition of a Jew in his 1946 book, Anti-Semite and Jew, in which he states that a Jew exists only because the Anti-Semite invents him. Rather, Améry drew closely the concepts of identity and dignity to assert how fate is taken upon oneself as a choice for a Jew. And this choice comes with the decision to revolt against the loss of dignity in a world of indifference, despite any historical distance that exists between the Jew and the Shoah. Following the talk, Dr. Bernstein’s presentation served as a unique source of reflection for the highly engaged audience on the inexhaustible lessons of history for the current state of world affairs.

You can view more images from the event at our Facebook.

In 1962, Elie Wiesel published the final part of his Night trilogy, the novel DAY. The book first appeared in French as Le jour and in English as The Accident. Like Dawn, Day addresses the struggle of the Holocaust survivor to dwell in the world of the living while feeling a ceaseless pull toward the world of the dead.

The novel opens on the streets of New York City where the reader is let into the mind of the protagonist, a young journalist who has survived the death camps but suffers deeply from his experiences. As he walks to the theater with his girlfriend, Kathleen, he is struck by a passing taxi and badly injured. While in the hospital, feverish and in agony, the young man is tormented by thoughts of the damage that his post-Holocaust trauma has caused to both himself and those close to him. When he realizes that his stepping in front of the taxi might not have been an innocent accident, but instead a deliberate flirtation with death, he is forced to face the question of whether he can choose to forge a relationship with life despite the weight of his suffering.

Passage #1:

“You love me, but you don’t look at me?” she asked gloomily. “Thanks for the compliment.”

“You don’t understand,” I went right on. “One doesn’t necessarily exclude the other. You can love God, but you can’t look at Him.”

She seemed satisfied with this comparison. I would have to practice lying.

“Whom do you look at when you love God?” she asked after a moment of silence.

“Yourself. If man could contemplate the face of God, he would stop loving him. God needs love; he does not need understanding.” (235)

Passage #2:

After the war, when I arrived in Paris, I had often, very often, been urged to tell. I refused. I told myself that the dead didn’t need to be heard. They are less bashful than I. Shame has no hold on them, while I was bashful and ashamed. That’s the way it is: shame tortures not the executioners but their victims. The greatest shame is to have been chosen by destiny. Man prefers to blame himself for all possible sins and crimes rather than come to the conclusion that God is capable of the most flagrant injustice. I still blush every time I think of the way God makes fun of human beings, His favorite toys. (264)

Passage #3:

“Suffering brings out the lowest, the most cowardly in man. There is a phase of suffering you reach beyond which you become a brute: beyond it you sell your soul—and worse, the souls of your friends—for a piece of bread, for some warmth, for a moment of oblivion, of sleep. Saints are those who die before the end of the story. The others, those who live out their destiny, no longer dare look at themselves in the mirror, afraid they may see their inner image: a monster laughing at unhappy women and at saints who are dead…”

Kathleen listened, in a daze, her eyes wide open. As I spoke, her back bent over even more. Her pale lips whispered the same sentence tirelessly: “Go on! I want to know more. Go on!”

Then I fell on my knees, took her head in my hands, and, looking straight into her eyes, I told her the story of my grandmother, then the story of my little sister, and of my father, and of my mother; in very simple words, I described to her how man can become a grave for the unburied dead. (271)

Passage #4:

“Do you believe in God, Doctor?” My question took him by surprise. He stopped suddenly, wrinkling his forehead. “Yes,” he answered. “But not in the operating room. There I only count on myself.” His eyes looked deeper. He added, “On myself and on the patient. Or, if you prefer, on the life in the diseased flesh. Life wants to live. Life wants to go on. It is opposed to death. It fights. The patient is my ally. He fights on my side. Together we are stronger than the enemy. Take the boy last night. He didn’t accept death. He helped me to win the battle. He was holding on, clinging. He was asleep, anesthetized, and yet he was taking part in the fight…” (289)

Passage #5:

“Suffering is given to the living, not to the dead,” he said looking right through me. “It is man’s duty to make it cease, not to increase it. One hour of suffering less is already a victory over fate.” (337)

Please join us for the fifth week of selected passages at our Facebook!