A Season for Healing: Reflections on the Holocaust

by Anne Roiphe

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 067166753X
• Release Date: January 1988
• Publisher: Summit Books
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Dealing with the unspeakable

Jews and Christians alike know that in the time of the Holocaust the world looked the other way. After the Holocaust Jewish life has gone on. Elias Canetti said that one could not say God anymore. Religion, arguably, is an attempt to make the universe humanly significant. One cannot conceive of a way to bind sin, punishment, and the Holocaust together. One of the products of the disaster is that attendance at the synagogues is growing and the Orthodox movement has increased sevenfold. Also, the State of Israel was established as a sort of world atonement. When Jews lose connection with impoverished people they become a sort of broken link to the American dream. Currently there is much hard feeling between Jews and African-Americans. This is regrettable since Jews were in the forefront of the Civil Rights Movement. Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman died in Mississippi. In Poland today Jewish life exists only in photographs. At the start of World War II three and a half million Jewish people lived there. Nearly all of them perished. Poles were victims, Jewish protectors, and Jewish betrayers. In 1946 forty-two Jewish survivors of the camps were murdered in Kielce. After the Russian Revolution Jews had a brief resurgence. Over time, though, there was folk anti-semitism prevailing. Ten public institutions in Israel are devoted to the Holocaust. Jewish-American politics have been altered by the Holocaust. The author presents a cogent discussion of the many ways Jewish life in America has changed and been recast since the days of the Holocaust and the long aftermath of coming to terms with, (trying to understand), that hideous event.