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Author’s Note
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153 Author’s Note I am aware that this book is unusual, that its balance between the use of scholarly categories and its concern for lived Judaism makes it anomalous to both enterprises. The book was designed to be accessible to broader audiences as compared to most academic works, and in this regard I am very much an attentive student to Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s call at the end of Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory, even if this work is not one of history per se.* In the opening chapter, I cite Zakhor as one of my anchoring “moments” in the broad landscape of modern Jewish memory anxiety . Zakhor entered an already vibrant field of memory studies and touched off a great deal of discussion. The critiques of Yerushalmi fall roughly into three categories: those who disagree entirely with his conceptual framework, those who deal less with the thesis but disagree with some of his specific historical or historiographical examples, and those who address Yerushalmi only in the context of broader discussions of historical method. Other scholarship in *Full citations for works mentioned in this appendix can be found in the bibliography that follows. Author's Note 154 overall agreement with Yerushalmi has tinkered with or fine-tuned his thesis, often with reference to specific historical cases. Full bibliographies and a discussion of the details of the debate are best found in David Myers’s discussion of Zakhor a decade after its publication ; the Yerushalmi Festschrift edited by Elisheva Carlebach, John Efron, and David Myers; and the special edition of the Jewish Quarterly Review dedicated to Zakhor on the occasion of its twentyfifth anniversary. As should be clear in my discussion of Zakhor, I am less interested in the historical/historiographical debate than in using Zakhor as a conceptual moment, as a peg on which modern Jewish identity hangs in a way that is productive for the broad programmatic and analytic approach in this book. In this way I am viewing Yerushalmi through the lens of the philosopher Paul Ricoeur, who emphasizes the correlation between history/historiography and secularization as features of the modern Jewish experience. Zakhor has become required reading for graduate students in Jewish history, a key piece of virtually every “methods” course. A whole generation of graduate students has matured under the austerity of its warning—be relevant while still being good! Some would argue that this conversation should continue to take place within the academic discipline of history, and I do not contest this; my argument here is that perhaps we have not fully considered the ethical and behavioral costs of staying within that discipline, and that we might consider a return to the memory model that has been left behind. To that end, however, I do want to acknowledge that in memory, too, there are ethical implications. I believe this is implicit in the concept of false/poor memory in my discussion of Holocaust memory , and in my taking for granted that selective memory comes with serious costs, including the deep possibility of a sociopathic narcissism . But for further discussion, I recommend the reader consider Avishai Margalit’s The Ethics of Memory, wherein he explores some of the ramifications that follow on the assumption of a memory consciousness. The chapter on hurban, too, concerns a place of great scholarly and literary foment. I have attempted to summarize what I see as trends in the field, especially as they bleed into the world of Jewish [100.24.20.141] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 23:48 GMT) Author's Note 155 public policy around memory and custody of the past, and into the public formats in which these issues are debated. I was first sensitized to this issue by reading Istvan Deak’s cautionary words in the New York Review of Books: “An accurate record of the Holocaust has been endangered, in my opinion, by the uncritical endorsement , often by well-known Jewish writers or public figures, of virtually any survivor’s account or related writings.” I have learned a lot from Ruth Franklin’s essays in The New Republic on this issue, much of which is included in her recent book, although perhaps with less polemical sharpness than the journalistic medium enabled . I also made use of Ruth Wisse’s important essay in Commentary on the correct deployment of memory when it is made into museums , although I hesitate to draw conclusions about what political outcomes are inevitable from our choice to more programmatically...