It snows history, which means what happens to somebody starts in a web of events outside the personal... We’re all in history, that’s sure, but some are more than others, Jews more than some. If it snows not everybody is out in it getting wet. He had been doused. He had to his painful surprise stepped into history more deeply than others... Why he would never know... It was, you could say, history’s doing. —Bernard Malamud,The Fixer
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Exact references to book titles cited will be found in the forthcoming work from which this symposium is drawn. For those seeking the exact references, see The Jewish Divide over Israel, edited by Edward Alexander and Paul Bogdanor, New Brunswick and London, 2006.
Alvin Rosenfeld, professor of English and Jewish Studies at Indiana University, is the author ofA Double Dying: Reflections on Holocaust Literature, Imagining Hitler, and Thinking About the Holocaust After Half a Century.He was named by President George W. Bush to the United States Holocaust Memorial Council in May 2002.
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Rosenfeld, A. Modern Jewish intellectual failure. Soc 43, 8–21 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02687349
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02687349