Volume 30, Number 2 · February 17, 1983
Memory and Its Discontents
By Harold Bloom
Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory
by Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi
University of Washington Press, 144 pp., $17.50
Leo Strauss, political philosopher and Hebraic sage, in 1962 wrote a long preface for the English translation of his Spinoza's Critique of Religion.[1] Brooding on his book's genesis, some thirty-five years after its composition, Strauss was moved to write his own intellectual elegy for German Jewry. In some sense, the preface is a classical essay on 'Jewish History and Jewish Memory,' the subtitle of the eloquent and disturbing book by Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi under review. Zakhor, the title, is the verb used throughout the Hebrew Bible whenever Israel is admonished: 'Remember!' Strauss, a touch more implicitly than the Bible, also admonished us to remember:
Review, 2601 words
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