to-read
(284)
currently-reading (8)
read (45)
must-reads (6)
fiction (27)
2024 (23)
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currently-reading (8)
read (45)
must-reads (6)
fiction (27)
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2025 (18)
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progress:
(5%)
"Already very good. I had to pull up an ebook version. You cannot just passively listen to these poems on a first go. I have to pause in between each and sit with them for a few seconds. Write my reflections. Honestly, I think I may have to get a physical version and annotate within it." — Jan 09, 2026 10:43AM
"Already very good. I had to pull up an ebook version. You cannot just passively listen to these poems on a first go. I have to pause in between each and sit with them for a few seconds. Write my reflections. Honestly, I think I may have to get a physical version and annotate within it." — Jan 09, 2026 10:43AM
progress:
(page 20 of 365)
"The language takes some getting used to. I have to read a bit slower, so as not to get confused." — Jul 31, 2025 07:55PM
"The language takes some getting used to. I have to read a bit slower, so as not to get confused." — Jul 31, 2025 07:55PM
“When a young employee at the Anne Fank House tried to wear his yarmulke to work, his employers told him to hide it under a baseball cap. The museum's gal was "neutrality," one spokesperson explained to the British newspaper Daily Mail, and a live Jew in a yarmulke might "interfere" with the museum's "independent position." The museum finally relented after deliberated for four months, which seems like a rather long time for the Anne Frank House to ponder whether it was a good idea to force a Jew into hiding.”
― People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present
― People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present
“Love rarely comes up; why would it? But it comes up here, in this for-profit exhibition. Here it is the ultimate message, the final solution. That the Holocaust drives home the importance of love is an idea, like the idea that Holocaust education prevents antisemitism, that seems entirely unobjectionable. It is entirely objectionable. The Holocaust didn’t happen because of a lack of love. It happened because entire societies abdicated responsibility for their own problems, and instead blamed them on the people who represented—have always represented, since they first introduced the idea of commandedness to the world—the thing they were most afraid of: responsibility. Then as now, Jews were cast in the role of civilization’s nagging mothers, loathed in life, and loved only once they are safely dead. In the years since I walked through Auschwitz at fifteen, I have become a nagging mother. And I find myself furious, being lectured by this exhibition about love—as if the murder of millions of people was actually a morality play, a bumper sticker, a metaphor. I do not want my children to be someone else’s metaphor. (Of course, they already are.) My husband’s grandfather once owned a bus company in Poland. Like my husband”
― People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present
― People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present
“People do not seem to realize that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.”
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“(For the record, the number of actual “righteous Gentiles” officially recognized by Yad Vashem, Israel’s national Holocaust museum and research center, for their efforts in rescuing Jews from the Holocaust is under 30,000 people, out of a European population at the time of nearly 300 million—or .001 percent. Even if we were to assume that the official recognition is an undercount by a factor of ten thousand, such people remain essentially a rounding error.)”
― People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present
― People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present
“The line most often quoted from Frank’s diary are her famous words, “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.” These words are “inspiring,” by which we mean that they flatter us. They make us feel forgiven for those lapses of our civilization that allow for piles of murdered girls—and if those words came from a murdered girl, well, then, we must be absolved, because they must be true. That gift of grace and absolution from a murdered Jew (exactly the gift that lies at the heart of Christianity) is what millions of people are so eager to find in Frank’s hiding place, in her writings, in her “legacy.” It is far more gratifying to believe that an innocent dead girl has offered us grace than to recognize the obvious: Frank wrote about people being “truly good at heart” before meeting people who weren’t. Three weeks after writing those words, she met people who weren’t.”
― People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present
― People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present
Z’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Z’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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