The Birth of Jewish American & Israel

Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History by Steven J. Zipperstein examines the influential and, at this point, little known attack on the Jewish community of Kishinev in 1903.  At the time, the pogrom became international news, and brought the spotlight to the desperate plight of Russian Jews.  Zipperstein sees Kishinev as at the tilt of history, as a moment when Jewish history began an irreversible slip.

Zipperstein writes that although the pogrom had government sanction, it was only on a local level. Victims were blamed for the pogrom, both because of a spurious blood libel charge, and because there were too many Jews in Kishinev for gentile comfort.  Zionists leaders also blamed the Jews of Kishinev for their supposed passivity during the pogrom.  H.N. Bialik, "The City of Slaughter" outright condemned victims, and accused Jewish men of cowardliness.  

And this leads to the main point: This book shows the intersection where Russian Jews realized that all roads led out of that  troubled land.  Russia hated its Jews. Burgeoning Zionism hated old world Judaism.  Jews could either fight or flee.  Those who fought went to Palestine; those who fled, to American, to form the backbone of American Jewry today.  Before the Holocaust forged Judaism into the binary (but spurious)  Israeli and an American identities, the violence at Kishinev cleared the path.

Really? Really??

Philip Short’s Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare documents the rise and fall of both Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.  Pol Pot was not a madman; he did not have Hitleresque personal qualities.  Quite the contrary, he was social in a retiring way, not wanting the spot light, and seeking, throughout his “career,” to avoid scrutiny in part by frequently changing his name and hiding his location.

As a student in Paris, he was not the most intelligent, or even the most ideologically driven among expat Cambodian students.  But as he entered political life, he became a more fervent advocate of complete and total social engineering.  Small believes that Pol Pot was just as influenced by the more bloody aspects of the French Revolution as by Marx, Lenin, or Mao.

When he gained power in 1975, he emptied Cambodia’s cities, and started year zero, an attempt to create a new kind of person who was not a person at all; an entity that was devoted to the state.  This was a pure totalitarian vision.  Pol Pot only cared for this vision; human life meant nothing alongside of this ideal.  More than a million Cambodians died in the process.

Short make some interesting assertions.  One is that America and China, new allies, supported the Khmer Rouge against the trio’s common enemy, Vietnam.  In that case, our government is an accessory to genocide. 

Short also makes a great many negative generalizations about Cambodians (if he  wrote such things about African-Americans, they would be deemed racist).  It is disturbing to read that Cambodians are lazy, or prone to extreme violence despite their outward smiles and politeness.  He also believes that the kind of Buddhism practiced in Cambodia, with its world denying theology, was one of the elements that molded the Khmer Rouge nihilistic joyride.

Really?  Really??

Jewish Law as Rebellion: A Plea for Religious Authenticity and Halachic Courage

If you are at all serious about observing Jewish religious practice and want to shake up your notions of why you follow religious Jewish practice, then you must read Jewish Law as Rebellion: A Plea for Religious Authenticity and Halachic Courage by Nathan Lopes Cardozo.   

Rabbi Cardozo is as courageous as his book’s sub-title. He reminds us, again and again, in different contexts, that halacha is meant to disrupt our lives; it is designed to make us live more authentically, and not automatically.  Halacha itself makes us question halacha – when we approach it properly.  

It is difficult to praise this book enough.  Rabbi Cardozo's voice is essential, and probably the most accomplished book on Judaism I have read in some time.  

A View of Hell

Ponary Diary, 1941-1943: A Bystander’s Account of a Mass Murder by Kazimierz Sakowicz, are pages from a diary kept by Sakowicz that offer a first person account of the murder of the Jews of Vilna, and others.  

Sakowicz was a journalist who left Vilna to live in  a cottage in the forest outside of the city, Ponary, at  the outbreak of the war.  There, Nazis and their Lithuanian collaborators murdered Jews by the tens of thousands in pits dug by the Soviets to store fuel.  His house was both near the train depot, and the pits.  Sakowicz was determined to document what he saw, and he does so dispassionately, with a reporter’s eye for detail.  Much of what he writes about is appalling and realistic.  The pits at Ponary were hell and  Sakowicz does not spare us.

This journal was unavailable for years.  The Russians wanted to downplay the specifics of the Holocaust, and instead view all as Communist martyrs, and the Lithuanians did not want to be implicated in the Nazi mass murder (which the journal accomplishes).  Now the diary is available for all to read, in English; it is a vital resource.

Sakowicz was murdered in 1944, and supposedly kept his diary up to the day before his death.  We only have pages up to 1943.  We can only hope the rest of his journal will someday come to light.