Treating Trauma While Living Through It, Israeli Therapists Help October 7 Survivors
By JOTAM CONFINO
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This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
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The first troubling thing about Yuri Slezkine’s “The Jewish Century” (Princeton, 424 pages, $29.95) is its title. The 20th century was the most eventful and terrible in the last two millennia of Jewish history. But to call it “the Jewish century,” as though the experiences of the Jews were uniquely influential or representative in world history, is to engage in an intellectual maneuver that that very century should have taught us to eschew: the use of the Jews as a metaphor. When the Jews, or any people, are turned into an emblem of some grand abstraction – modernity, or capitalism, or socialism, or alienation – the actual lives and destinies of individual Jews are figuratively obliterated. This makes it possible for those lives to be obliterated in fact: No one was more committed to making the Jews “stand for” something else than Hitler. Indeed, the rhetorical exploitation of the Jews is one of the major reasons why, since World War II, the Western humanities, from philosophy to history to literature, have been extremely wary of such abusive metaphors.
By JOTAM CONFINO
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By DONALD KIRK
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By STEPHEN MOORE
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By GEORGE WILL
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By BENNY AVNI
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By MATTHEW RICE
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By BETSY McCAUGHEY
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By THE NEW YORK SUN
|The first troubling thing about Yuri Slezkine’s “The Jewish Century” (Princeton, 424 pages, $29.95) is its title. The 20th century was the most eventful and terrible in the last two millennia of Jewish history. But to call it “the Jewish century,” as though the experiences of the Jews were uniquely influential or representative in world history, is to engage in an intellectual maneuver that that very century should have taught us to eschew: the use of the Jews as a metaphor. When the Jews, or any people, are turned into an emblem of some grand abstraction – modernity, or capitalism, or socialism, or alienation – the actual lives and destinies of individual Jews are figuratively obliterated. This makes it possible for those lives to be obliterated in fact: No one was more committed to making the Jews “stand for” something else than Hitler. Indeed, the rhetorical exploitation of the Jews is one of the major reasons why, since World War II, the Western humanities, from philosophy to history to literature, have been extremely wary of such abusive metaphors.
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