Holocaust

This Way to the Gas Chambers, Ladies and Gentlemen (Auschwitz 2003)
It occurred to me that one is always imagining how one could live in Auschwitz. But almost everyone died in Auschwitz.

For Every Life Saved
The last Yiddish writer. A story from the newest book to come out of KtB, Sweet Heaven When I Die.

Anne Frank at the Fringe
I first met Carol Lempert while a student of Gary Austin, founder of the Groundlings. Her one-woman shows include That Dorothy Parker and The Camino: Walking the Pilgrim Road. The latest, After Anne Frank, will open at the this year’s FringeNYC Festival. Prior to seeing it, I decided to ask Carol a few questions about the spiritual and religious…

Have You Heard of Rashi?
The day my essay, “The Self-Thinking Thought,” appeared on the New York Times blog Happy Days, I received a letter that went thusly: I read your blog on Anselm; quite interesting. Your name sounds Jewish, and although you said you are Catholic, do you have Jewish ancestry? What do you know about Rashi, the great…

Regions of the Great Heresy
At the 92nd Street Y tonight, I joined KtB author Ann Neumann for a lecture by the Israeli novelist David Grossman on Bruno Schulz. Jonathan Safran Foer, in turn, introduced Grossman. Grossman said that everybody remembers when and how they discovered Bruno Schulz—I am no exception. It was in my first college fiction writing class,…

Religion & Revisionism
There may be no right way to talk about the Holocaust, but there are certainly wrong ways — and the Catholic Church keeps finding them. Last month, an excommunicated bishop was let back in the fold despite his record of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial. The Vatican claimed it didn’t know the worst of it, but…

Revising Night: Elie Wiesel and the Hazards of Holocaust Theology
Editors’ note: This essay was first published in April 2001, long before Oprah’s Book Club chose Night as its latest selection. Yet especially in light of doubts concerning the reliability of Oprah’s previous pick, the question raised here remains relevant: In making the Holocaust a matter of theological concern, does Elie Wiesel’s classic memoir court historical revisionism?