“11 It is my sense—and I do not insist that you agree—that at this particular moment, and on these particular questions, the peril of fantasizing our freedom from the past is great. The “critical thinkers” of our present age increasingly reject the possibility that history can tell us anything vital about many of the questions that seem most pressing to us. Particularly on the questions with which this book is concerned, many see the mere invocation of the past as a symptom of special pleading (as, for example, when histories of anti-Semitism or the Holocaust are invoked to silence criticism of the State of Israel).”