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Weekend Reading

04.13.2007 - 3:54 PM

This Sunday, April 15th, is Yom haShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. The Israeli parliament mandated the creation of this day–which falls on the 27th of Nisan in the Jewish calendar—in 1951, to honor the memories and the unimaginable sufferings of the victims of the Holocaust. Reflecting on the deeper meaning of the Holocaust in COMMENTARY’s very first issue (November 1945), the magazine’s founding editor Elliot Cohen wrote presciently:

[T]he kind of thinking and feeling that set loose this nightmare phenomenon still burns high in many countries, and lies latent in all. We have no gauge to measure the potentialities of this great Nazi secret weapon of World War II. But there are many—and they are not guided by personal hurt alone—who believe that here is a force that, in the political and social scene, can wreak destruction comparable to the atomic bomb itself. It was the ignis fatuus that lured the German people to their doom. It was the flame of the torch that kindled World War II. To resist it; to learn how to stamp it out; to re-affirm and restore the sense of the sanctity of the human person and the rights of man: here, too, our world is greatly challenged. How that challenge is to be met is, of course, of particular interest to Jews, but hardly less to all mankind, if there is to be a human future.

Over the ensuing decades, COMMENTARY has honored the commandment of remembrance by publishing many important articles on the Holocaust—memoirs, fiction, works of historiography, philosophy, religious thought, and literary criticism—by some of America’s and Europe’s most important writers. We present a small selection for this weekend’s reading.

Hannah Arendt on Eichmann: The Perversity of Brilliance
Norman Podhoretz — September 1963

Belsen Remembered
Lucy Dawidowicz — March 1966

Jewish Faith and the Holocaust: A Fragment
Emil L. Fackenheim — August 1968

Iron—A Memoir
Primo Levi — August 1977

Lies About the Holocaust
Lucy Dawidowicz — December 1980

The Lost Transport
Joseph Polak — September 1995

The Rights of History and the Rights of Imagination
Cynthia Ozick — March 1999

Krystyna’s Gift—A Memoir
Lydia Aran — February 2004

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