Harvard University Press Blog

Great State Autism

In The Rise of China vs. the Logic of Strategy, published last year, Edward Luttwak introduced the concept of “great state autism,” a collective national lack of situational awareness that reduces a country’s ability to perceive international realities with clarity. While the U.S. and Russia each suffer from obvious cases of the condition, Luttwak labels China’s autism an “especially virulent” strain, due to its ancient development in relative isolation and its sheer size, among other factors. Luttwak sees the affliction when, say, China flexes its military muscle in the face of a neighbor one day and then is surprised by the rebuff of a trade delegation to that same neighbor the next.

“In all great states,” writes Luttwak, “there is so much internal activity that leaders and opinion-makers cannot focus seriously on foreign affairs as well, except in particular times of crisis.”

They do not have the constant situational awareness of the world around them that is natural in small countries of equal advancement. After all, individual sensory and cranial capacities are much the same in smoothly operating states of a few million people, and in megastates such as the Russian Federation, the United States, India, and China, whose leaders face internal urgencies if not emergencies each day somewhere or other, in addition to their ordinary decision-making sessions and ceremonial obligations.

The result is not mere inattention. On the contrary, it is not only possible but common for great-state leaders and even entire ruling elites to make much of foreign affairs if only as welcome diversion from the harder choices of domestic politics, in which almost any decision that pleases some must displease others—and not mere foreigners whose political support will not be missed.

Great-state autism is worse than inattention because in the absence of the serious and earnest study that domestic urgencies make impossible, decision-makers cannot absorb in-depth information with all its complexities and subtleties, even if it is offered to them (which is unlikely: when intelligence officers adhere to the rule that their highest duty is to tell top leaders what they do not want to hear, their careers suffer). Instead, decisions on foreign affairs are almost always made on the basis of highly simplified, schematic representations of unmanageably complex realities, which are thereby distorted to fit within internally generated categories, expectations, and perspectives.

Now, in the recently-published Israel Has Moved, Diana Pinto describes Israel as suffering from its own case of autism, despite being a nation of far less territory than Luttwak’s Russia, China, India, or the United States. Pinto’s book is an unsettling take on Israel’s decades-long drift away from the European shadow in which it was founded and towards a new insularity. On the one hand are the country’s world-leading science and technology sectors, on the other its less successful international relationships.

Super-Israel at the technological heart of the new world economy suddenly becomes Israel the autistic with Asperger syndrome, the bipolar, the schizophrenic, the paranoiac, the psychotic, and even the psycho-rigid: in other words, an entity that denies the very principle of reality. These are very powerful, even terrifying, metaphors. They are not mine. Israelis from all camps—whether ultraorthodox or extremely secular, young or old, and coming from the most diverse cultural origins—used them freely before me as so many self-evident truths.

She writes of Israeli autism:

This condition, which occurs among the young (and Israel is both very young as a state and very old as a people), who are often quite brilliant in certain fields, defines those who cannot think of themselves as living in a world populated by others. They do not register the gaze or the emotions of others and are therefore unable to communicate or interact with them, because they do not grasp or understand what might motivate them… As with autistic people who feel threatened, Israel can reply to the aggressions of others (in its case most often real and not imagined) only by an excessively forceful and uncontrolled reaction, of which it often becomes its own victim.

Interestingly, while Luttwak makes no mention of Israel in his discussion of great state autism, Pinto cites China as the only other civilization whose “self-centeredness” resembles that of the Jews. Also striking are the contrasting conditions of each affliction’s incubation: Luttwak points to China’s ancient history of isolation from other states, whereas Israel’s defining characteristic is its keystoning of the lands along the Mediterranean Sea. In either case, the label seems a useful lens through which to observe these two major factors in the pursuit of geopolitical stability.

A Portal into a Vanished Jewish World

At the turn of the twentieth century, Russia’s Pale of Settlement was home to 40% of the world’s Jews—and so foreign to the rest of the country that Russian Jewish intellectuals called it “our own kind of dark continent.” How to capture this rich, mysterious land, its people and traditions? For peripatetic playwright and journalist S. An-sky, the answer was the 2,087-question Jewish Ethnographic Program, a survey now translated into English for the first time in The Jewish Dark Continent: Life and Death in the Russian Pale of Settlement. While world war and revolution prevented the survey from ever being distributed, in Nathaniel Deutsch’s hands the unanswered questions (a selection of which can be found below) and the story behind their assembly disclose a riveting account of a lost world.

Beginning with a query about a person’s soul before it enters the body, and ending with the question “What kind of life will there be after the resurrection of the dead?,” An-sky’s survey covers all aspects of Jewish life, from birth to childhood to education to marriage to aging and death.

In an introductory section, Deutsch sites The Jewish Ethnographic Program in its intellectual, historical, and cultural contexts, and in the context of An-sky’s life and work. He describes his own history with the translation project, including ultimately quixotic attempts to elicit responses to the questions from subjects ranging from elderly people who had once lived in shtetls, to rabbinical students, to observant Jews. As he was translating the questions, Deutsch also lost himself in the project of their annotation:

Initially I planned on providing explanatory notes to only those questions that seemed especially obscure. After all, one of the things that I had always found most compelling about The Jewish Ethnographic Program was the very fact that it was a book of questions without answers and, therefore, a kind of stripped-down, elemental version of a classical Jewish text. And yet as I went through The Program looking for questions that needed clarification or commentary, I soon found myself creating more and more notes. Before I knew it, I had completed notes to one hundred questions, and then two hundred, and then three hundred, and so on.

By this point, practically every countertop in the house—and not a few floors—were covered with books: memoirs about growing up in the Pale of Settlement, yizker bikher (memorial books) for Eastern European Jewish communities, scholarly works on Russian Jewish history and culture, and traditional sforim, or books on Halakhah and minhag. In one sense I was reverse-engineering the creative process that had led to the composition of The Jewish Ethnographic Program in the first place, with of course the critically important difference being that I was a single individual living in twenty-first-century America, whereas The Program had been created by a team of people born and raised in the Pale of Settlement. In another sense, and despite my best—at least conscious—efforts not to do so, I was also attempting to answer all of the questions myself.

Through Europe’s Shattered Spaces: A Guide to Jewish Berlin and Warsaw

Michael Meng’s Shattered Spaces is a study of the physical legacy of destruction left in many German and Polish cities that were once rich with the sights and sounds of Jewish life. It’s also a study of remembering, an examination of how memories of the war have shaped encounters with Jewish ruins. In the piece below, Meng takes us through a series of sites that reflect the past in different ways.

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Multiple histories and layers of time interact in Berlin and Warsaw, two capitals with deep traditions of Jewish history, culture, and religion. Before the Holocaust, few other cities in the world had such dynamic Jewish populations as Berlin and Warsaw. In 1945, little more than Jewish ruins—silent synagogues, empty homes, deserted streets—marked what was left of Jewish life in both cities. Some Jews did rebuild their lives in Warsaw and Berlin, but absence dominated the early postwar decades. In East Berlin and Warsaw, this absence was made all the more palpable with the emigration of Jews in the wake of two major antisemitic campaigns in 1951-53 in East Germany and 1967-68 in Poland.

Today, antisemitism exists among segments of German and Polish society, but things have changed dramatically in both countries over the past four decades. Since the 1970s, a profound interest in Jewish culture, history, and religion has emerged among many non-Jewish Germans and Poles. At the same time, the Jewish communities of both countries have grown, especially after the collapse of Soviet Communism in 1989.

This complex, multilayered history unfolds today along the streets of Berlin and Warsaw. The knotted threads of past, present, and future run through the built environment as with few other objects of human experience. Time oozes through physical sites, saturating them with meanings, contexts, and stories, whether spaces are new or old, preserved or neglected, occupied or vacant, present or absent, fragmented or whole. Indeed, Jewish spaces uncover Europe’s myriad histories of renewal and ruination—its histories of acculturation, emancipation, tolerance, genocide, forgetting, remembering, and rebuilding. While the Holocaust runs wide and deep in our imaginations of Jewishness in Germany, Poland, and Europe, it exists among many other histories and temporalities, including the contemporary revival of Jewish life.

Experiencing Jewishness in Berlin and Warsaw involves, then, reflecting upon the webs of past, present, and future. Below are a few sites that reflect the intricacies of time.

Berlin

Unveiled in 1866, the New Synagogue (Oranienburger Str. 28/30) stands today as one of Berlin’s most distinct Jewish sites. Christian architect Eduard Knoblauch designed the synagogue in Moorish style, topping the building with a magnificent golden dome. Located in the district of Mitte, the synagogue existed among other Jewish institutions, bakeries, and bookstores in an area that was the closest thing Berlin had to a Jewish neighborhood. While the synagogue survived the Nazi attack against Jewish property in 1938, it was severely damaged by allied bombs. From 1945 to 1989, the facade stood as a ruin in East Berlin. In 1995, the surviving shell was restored, but the rest of the building was not. The bombed-out sanctuary remains, integrating the ruination of genocide, war, and postwar neglect into the building’s structure. The synagogue serves as a small prayer house for Berlin’s Jewish community, an archive for historical research, and a museum that narrates the building’s history.

Who Was Walter Benjamin in 1910?

How best to describe Walter Benjamin? Philosopher? German-Jewish Intellectual? Marxist? Moralist? Critic (as argued by Daniel Bell when we began to publish Benjamin’s work)?

Benjamin was all of those things and more, of course. Much of his reputation is based on his writings of the ’20s and ’30s, when he produced works like his best-known essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.” But where did that Benjamin come from? How did he develop? Who was he as a young man? Our latest Benjamin volume, Early Writings, 1910-1917, shows that, even at 18, Benjamin was already Benjamin.

A quick digression: this fall we’re publishing Becoming Dickens, a new bio of Dickens that looks just at the first half of his life, with a particular focus on the pivotal years of 1833-1838. That book lays bare all of the contingency of becoming, with Robert Douglas-Fairhurst showing that the man who became Dickens actually nearly didn’t. As origin stories go, Benjamin’s is strikingly different. The early writings in this new volume make especially clear the philosophical foundations on which Benjamin never stopped building—the concern with the role of the present in historical remembrance, the concern with truth in the work of art, and the anxiety over language’s mediation of life.

Benjamin was heavily involved with the German Youth Movement in the years before WWI, and much of the writing in this volume reflects that association. Howard Eiland, the editor and translator of this volume and others, including The Arcades Project, notes that these zealous youth- and education-focused writings clearly reflect what we know of the adult Benjamin:

In these polemical writings, exhorting the sons and daughters of the German middle class to “awaken,” we see the young Benjamin in his various roles as moralist, cultural critic, school reformer, and poet-philosopher. The pieces are concerned with matters ranging from the spiritually fruitful appropriation of history to the intellectual relevance of Romanticism in particular, from the theory of education to the idea of experience and the idea of love. The diversity of interest and profundity of thought characteristic of his better-known work from the Twenties and Thirties are already in evidence here.

Of the forty-five pieces in this volume, over thirty are presented here in English for the first time. Many are articles that were published by Benjamin in various outlets; others were never published in any language in his lifetime. The works fall into four principal subject areas: personal writing (poetry, fiction, diary); education and its reform; youth (with essays on love and eroticism); and literary subjects. These early writings lack some of the polish of his later work, and also absent are the sociological perspectives and montage techniques that Benjamin wouldn’t develop until his freelance writing days after his student years. But, as Adam Kirsch notes, through these seven years one can see Benjamin develop “from a precocious, pompous adolescent into a daring and profound thinker.”

We’ll just end here with a snippet of the 1916 essay “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man”:

What does language communicate? It communicates the spiritual essence corresponding to it. It is fundamental to recognize that this spiritual essence communicates itself in language and not through it. Hence, there is no speaker of languages, if that means someone who communicates through these languages. Spiritual being communicates itself in, not through, a language: this is to say, it is not outwardly identical with linguistic being. Spiritual being is identical with linguistic being only insofar as it is communicable. What is communicable in a spiritual entity is its linguistic being. Language, therefore, in each case communicates the linguistic being of things, but their spiritual being only insofar as this is directly included in their linguistic being, insofar as it is communicable.  

As this short excerpt makes clear, one other notable Benjaminism was already well-developed in his youth: his –abilities.

New Edition of the World-Renowned Washington Haggadah

After the Bible, the Passover haggadah is the most widely read classic text in the Jewish tradition. Among the countless editions that have been published, few are as exquisite as the Washington Haggadah, which was created in Germany in the 15th Century by the artist and scribe Joel ben Simeon. One of ten surviving Hebrew manuscripts that bear Joel ben Simeon’s signature, the Washington Haggadah resides in the Library of Congress, where it has long been considered a centerpiece of the Hebraic Section collections.

Though a beautiful work of art, the Washington Haggadah was, of course, intended to be used at the seder table, as indicated by wine stains on the parchment. So that this document can be both widely appreciated and used as intended, we have worked with the Library of Congress to produce a beautiful new full-color facsimile edition of the codex.

The image below, depicting an entire family balanced on the back of a donkey, is typical of the enchanting, sometimes-mysterious images that illuminate the pages of the Washington Haggadah.

A selection of additional images from the volume can be viewed online here.

In addition to its faithful, right-to-left reproduction of the original manuscript, our new edition includes introductions and commentary from the scholars David Stern and Katrin Kogman-Appel. In their hands, the manuscript reveals the contours of an evolving Passover ritual; the nature of European Jewish life in the 15th century; and the practice of religious and secular art in the early modern era. This edition also includes a translation of the text, along with notes on the illustrations.

In celebration of the publication of this facsimile edition, the Library of Congress has lent the Washington Haggadah to New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, where it is on display through June 26th within the context of the museum’s permanent medieval collection. Peggy Pearlstein, Head of the Hebraic Section of the Library’s African and Middle Eastern Division says of the loan: “Like the new facsimile edition itself, this unprecedented loan is a wonderful opportunity for us to share the crown jewel of the Library's Hebraic Section collections with a wider audience, and to make the public aware of the richness of the Library's holdings in this field.” Its presentation inaugurates a series of loans planned for the next several years, each of which will focus on a single, illuminated medieval Hebrew manuscript.

Listening to Louie on St. Patrick’s Day

George Bornstein’s The Colors of Zion is a challenge to the story told by the often-chronicled fissures in the relationships between Blacks, Jews, and Irish in the years from the Irish Famine until the end of World War II. In this revelatory transatlantic study, Bornstein shows that the sympathies and cooperative efforts between these three oppressed groups were far greater than generally acknowledged. In the piece below, Bornstein takes the occasion of St. Patrick’s Day to reflect on Louis Armstrong, who embodied the interethnic, cross-cultural affinity that The Colors of Zion documents.

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When making his breakthrough recordings with his Hot Five in 1926, young Louis Armstrong took care to include a new song on which he had collaborated with Percy Venable. Sandwiched between the better-known “You Made Me Love You” and “Willie the Weeper,” came “Irish Black Bottom,” a Celtic take on the original New Orleans jazz classic “Black Bottom.” With Armstrong breaking into raucous laughter at the line “And I was born in Ireland,” the tune ends with the lines, “All over Ireland you can see / The people dancin’ in / Cause Ireland’s gone Black Bottom Crazy now.”

The playful racial masquerade, a reversal of more traditional Irish contributions to blackface minstrelsy, signaled Armstrong’s lifelong artistic devotion to racial and cultural hybridity. “It’s no crime for cats of any color to get together and blow,” he once remarked. “Race-conscious jazz musicians? Nobody could be who really knew their horns and loved the music.”

Such boundary crossing started early for Satchmo. In an interview with Life magazine he listed among his early influences the all-white “Original Dixieland Jazz Band,” the Italian tenor Enrico Caruso and sopranos Amelita Galli-Curci and Luisa Tetrazzini (for whom the dish turkey tetrazzini is named), and especially “the Irish tenor, John McCormack—beautiful phrasing.” Later Armstrong became one of the first jazz musicians to play to large audiences in Ireland, with his wildly successful Belfast concert of 1962 and two shows in Dublin five years later attended by 4,000 people.

Armstrong’s connection to other groups than his own didn’t stop with the Irish. Perhaps most important among the others were Jews, beginning with the Karnovsky family who hired, mentored, and looked after him as a boy after he left the Colored Waif’s Home in New Orleans. According to his moving late memoir Louis Armstrong + the Jewish Family in New Orleans they fed him regular meals and staked him to his first horn. In tribute to them he wore a Star of David around his neck regularly after that. The jazz photographer Herb Snitzer created a famous photo of Louis on bus tour in 1960 with striped white shirt open, cigarette in hand, and the necklace clearly visible. “He wore the Star his entire life,” recalled Snitzer. “He was the least prejudiced musician I ever knew.”

Satchmo practiced what he preached, welcoming musicians of all backgrounds into a majority African American enterprise. He even dedicated Louis Armstrong + the Jewish Family to his Jewish manager Joe Glaser, calling him “the best friend that I've ever had.” Similarly, he featured in concerts and recorded numerous hits by white composers, including Irving Berlin's early “Alexander's Ragtime Band.” Louis recorded duets with Ella Fitzgerald of celebrated Berlin classics like “Cheek to Cheek,” “Isn't This a Lovely Day,” and “I've Got My Love to Keep Me Warm.” He liked Jewish-themed songs, too, such as his “Shadrach” retelling of the Biblical story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego from the Book of Daniel.

Such crossovers pervade the history of jazz and of popular music. The African American stride pianist Willie “The Lion” Smith born four years before Satchmo described his own ancestry as French, Spanish, Negro, and Mohawk Indian, calling himself “an American pianist” in the subtitle of his autobiography. After discovering that he had a Jewish ancestor too, he converted to Judaism, had a Bar Mitzvah, and even served as a cantor between jazz stints. Reciprocally, the Jewish-born clarinetist and saxophonist Mezz Mezrow, who briefly became Armstrong's manager, did his best to be as Black as possible. He moved to Harlem, married a Black woman, and even insisted in prison on being housed with African American inmates. Like Armstrong, he believed that jazz transcended color and brought one of the first mixed-race bands to Broadway. Mezzrow wrote of Jewish religious music that “when I add Negro inflections to it they fit so perfect, it thrills me.”

The linkages and mixtures favored by Armstrong and the others pervade our past. A son of Irish immigrants, mayor John Hynes of Boston slyly undercut fantasies of purity half a century ago in introducing at a rally the first Jew to become mayor of Dublin. “We have here with us two fine fellows—an Irishman and a Jew,” he told the crowd. “I give him to you now, Lord Mayor Robert Briscoe.” Satchmo would have agreed in his consistent opposition to barriers that divide us into separate categories. As he told a group of journalists who challenged his including Israel on a tour of the Mideast with his All Stars, “Let me tell you something, man. That horn. You see that horn? That horn ain't prejudiced. A note's a note in any language.”

Putting "Blood Libel" in Historical Context

In an address following the tragic shootings in Tucson earlier this month, Sarah Palin’s use of the phrase “blood libel” to describe the intentions of those linking the violence to political rhetoric drew swift criticism. Many took exception to her loose use of a term that refers to a very specific accusation against Jews that has a long history of painful employment. We asked Magda Teter, a professor of History and of Jewish Studies at Wesleyan University, to explain the history invoked by the term “blood libel.”  Teter is the author of the forthcoming Sinners on Trial: Jews and Sacrilege after the Reformation. Her piece, below, gives much-needed historical context to this modern political moment. 

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When Sarah Palin used the term “blood libel” in response to the shooting in Arizona that left six people dead and severely injured others, including Democratic Representative Gabrielle Giffords, she stirred a controversy. To defend herself in the midst of the controversy, Palin defined the term “blood libel” very broadly as “being falsely accused of having blood on your hands.” Despite her broad definition, blood libel is a term that refers very specifically to the historical accusation that Jews killed Christian children to obtain their blood. A false accusation, to be sure, but one with a long and painful history, marking centuries of Jewish-Christian relations.

As an anti-Jewish accusation, the blood libel emerged in the Middle Ages, first in the twelfth century following the massacres of the First Crusade, when Jews were accused of an act of “ritual murder”: crucifying a Christian in enmity of Christianity and reenactment of the Passion of Jesus. But in the thirteenth century, “ritual murder” accusations turned into the “blood libel,” perhaps because of the increasing centrality of blood imagery in Christian ritual and worship at the time. In 1236, Jews in Fulda, Germany, were accused of killing several Christian children in order to collect their blood for medicinal purposes. Emperor Frederick II ordered an inquiry, which, of course, found no Jewish need for blood.

Still, many more such accusations took place, resulting in 1247 in a papal bull condemning “the unpraiseworthy zeal” and “detestable cruelty on the part of Christians” who had launched such accusations. The bull prohibited any similar charges against Jews under “ecclesiastical punishment without appeal.” Despite such strong condemnations, the accusation against Jews became an enduring transnational phenomenon, which lasted for over eight hundred years, from the twelfth to the twentieth centuries, and, as the Sarah Palin incident suggests, still has a resonance in the twenty-first. Other medieval anti-Jewish tales waned, such as that of the desecration of the host or poisoning of wells, but the blood libel adapted to changing cultural climates.

Indeed, Sarah Palin is not the first to use “blood libel” in a political context. Despite being condemned by popes and monarchs alike, “blood libels” against Jews can, in fact, be barometers of the reach and limits of the power and authority of European rulers, certainly in the premodern era, and can reflect cultural and political transformations of the society at large, since the efficacy of condemnations of such accusations were related to the power and influence of the individuals who issued them. Similarly, the way in which blood libels were used illustrates political aspirations of those who raised the charges.

On Tracking a Wandering Soul

Gabriella Safran’s Wandering Soul is the first full-length biography of S. An-sky, the author of the best-known Yiddish play, The Dybbuk. An-sky, born Shloyme-Zanvl Rappoport in 1836, lived an extraordinary yet emblematic life across multiple identities, countries, and careers, amidst the cultural and political upheaval of his era. In praising Wandering Soul as a “rich and lucid biography,” the critic Adam Kirsch observed that “Today, when ‘liminality’ is a buzzword in literary studies, a figure like An-sky seems to hold a profound truth about the modern condition.” Here, Gabriella Safran recounts her time among An-sky’s papers in Ukraine, and finds parallels between the lives of her subject and her Ukrainian hostess.

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Doing the research for Wandering Soul, I followed S. An-sky, the peripatetic Russian-Jewish writer and revolutionary who was my subject, through the territory that he knew as the Russian Empire. In the summers of 2003 and 2004, I worked at Kiev's Vernadsky Library and stayed with friends of friends, a couple with two college-age children. I admired the grace with which these tall people inhabited their small rooms, the proportionality of plates to cabinet, chairs to table. It was my first time in Ukraine, and my hostess Natasha, a stylish woman with big glasses, told me about her life there. She had come to Kiev in the 1970s, a poor girl from the provinces, to work in a weapons factory: young women, with their sensitive fingers, are best at this delicate assembly work. Then she studied engineering and learned to design the warheads that the Soviets directed at the West. It was a prestigious, well-paid profession, and being forbidden contact with foreigners did not trouble her. When Ukraine became independent in 1991, the job vanished. To support her family, Natasha became a smuggler, buying cheap clothes across the border in Turkey and selling them in Kiev. At the time of my visits she had a capitalist-era job at a company selling organic, hypoallergenic cosmetics and detergents. Her co-workers were all post-communist kids two decades younger than she was. As I walked from the archive to the metro and the metro to the apartment, I looked forward to talking with Natasha and answering her practical questions about life in the United States. (I sensed that she remained mystified about why Stanford University would want to pay my expenses to sit in a Kiev archive and read hundred-year-old papers, but she was too polite to keep asking.)

In the intervals between chats with Natasha, I read letters people had sent to An-sky and the rough drafts of his own letters. I imagined his delight when he wrote to his patron, the rich Baron Gintsburg, to report that the legends he had gathered on his ethnographic expedition to Ukrainian shtetls had inspired him to draft a play, The Dybbuk. I felt the pain and frustration in the five drafts of the letter he would eventually send to Edia, his young, unfaithful, wife, to ask for a divorce. I read letters from his publishers about deadlines, from his relatives asking for money, from another writer about how his daughter was crippled during a wartime pogrom. Like Natasha, An-sky lived at a time when political changes in the Slavic territories made ordinary people's lives unpredictable and hard. In the 1890s, a budding radical, he had left Russia for France and Switzerland. At the end of 1905, in the wake of revolution, he came back to Russia. He reported on the Dreyfus Affair, the bloody 1906 pogrom in Bialystok, the 1913 Beilis blood libel trial in Kiev. He was in turn—and simultaneously—a revolutionary propagandist, a Jewish cultural impresario, an amateur social scientist, a negotiator with the Bolsheviks. When the occasion demanded, he became an expert on peasant literacy, European education, the redistribution of land in Romania.

Ghettostadt

The Christian Science Monitor checks in with a review of Gordon J. Horwitz's Ghettostadt: Łódź and the Making of a Nazi City, a terrifying examination of the Jewish ghetto’s place in the Nazi worldview.

By the way, if you're ever in Boston and get a chance to check out the Monitor's digs in the Back Bay, it's something not to be missed. There's no better place to relax on a nice day than the Christian Science Church Park with its giant reflecting pool, upon which the Monitor's offices face.

Strangers in the Land

From Elisa New's enthusiastic review in The New Republic of Eric J. Sundquist's Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America:

Eric J. Sundquist's immense and serious book pays the closest attention ever given to the symbiosis and the alienation of Jews and African Americans in the aftermath of World War II, even as he traces the emergence of major works of Jewish and black literatures in this same period. The argument of Sundquist's magisterial book of 1993, To Wake the Nations, was that the most significant American achievements of the nineteenth century--Melville's, Twain's, Chestnutt's--were ineluctably engaged with the problem of the color line. Shifting his focus to post-Holocaust literature, Sundquist's new book reveals not only how much of the literature we will remember from the last half of the twentieth century is literature of America's "strangers"--blacks and Jews. He also reveals how the tragic alliance and the estrangement of these groups from each other emerged as late twentieth-century American literature's most haunting obsession.

||| Learn more about Strangers in the Land.