The Claims of Memory December 22, 2021
Iwrite in defense of memory. Not Memory in her gaudy mythological form, the Titan goddess Mnemosyne, mother of the nine Muses—but memory as the glue that holds our lives together and imposes order and continuity amid the blooming buzzing confusion of...
‘Under Jerusalem’: Layers of History and Faith December 20, 2021
In “Civilization and Its Discontents,” Freud compared memory and its recovery to the archaeology of Rome. The visitor cannot see the earlier layers of civilization, but the guidebook says where they once were. This allows us to look at the Colosseum ...
Books of the Year 2021 December 15, 2021
I read a lot of books. Probably well over sixty in the last year. I’m not saying that in some little-kid braggadocious way. After all, I’m fifty-one years old. Though some have said I read on a fifty-two-year-old level. In addition to the couple of b...
A Challenge to the Modern Cult of Memory June 12, 2019
There is a huge literature on the Third Reich and the explosion of state violence it provoked, first in Germany and then across Europe. The destruction of tens of millions of people culled from ethnic groups, above all European Jewry but also Slavs, ...
The Illusion of Memory June 06, 2019
ulia Shaw's book The Memory Illusion is a breakthrough in the jurisprudence of memory: the main question posed is not whether our memory is wrong on any given occasion but how wrong. It is thus essential reading for police, lawyers, judges, juries, i...
A Challenge to the Modern Cult of Memory February 06, 2019
There is a huge literature on the Third Reich and the explosion of state violence it provoked, first in Germany and then across Europe. The destruction of tens of millions of people culled from ethnic groups, above all European Jewry but also Slavs, ...