- The Help Story Can Improve Yom HaShoahVicky Levy In his April 14 Times of Israel blog, “The Angel of Death Visited Us this Passover,” Naftali Schiff wrote, “Some people have suggested that by confining us at home, the coronavirus crisis puts our lives ‘on hold.’ I disagree. I…
- Holocaust “Stealth Altruism” : Victims as UpstandersAlways the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question, or so maintains the poet e.e. Cummings (Collected Poems, 1926, p. iii). Sufferers worldwide can be understood to ask a comparably soul-stirring question – “How can bystanders be indifferent to…
- Survivor Memoirs and Stealth Altruism: Neglected Story of Forbidden CareIt is hard to imagine an American Jew (or gentile, for that matter) whose grasp of the Holocaust cannot be significantly improved by reading just three pages (pp. 106-109) of a memoir authored in 2001 by survivor Ruth Kluger. In…
- Holocaust Nobility: Jewish Stealth AltruismIf asked at the war’s outset in 1939 what was its least likely outcome, Nazi Overlords would have undoubtedly named their own military defeat. Since Hitler’s democratic takeover in 1933 Germany had developed the strongest military force the modern world…
- Survivor Memoirs and Stealth Altruism as YiddishkeitWhat has been missing from memorialization? Recognition that perpetrator atrocities and also forbidden high-risk care were inseparable aspects of the same complicated reality. Both belong in an accurate and nuanced account of the European Jewish experience. In her 2006 memoir, The End of…