Lithuania
The Last BooksWednesday, May 1, 2013 by Jonathan Brent | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
The invisible structures created by the Jewish people of Eastern Europe over a thousand years were given shape and transmitted through the books and the documents collected by YIVO. These structures still move us. If we do not know what they are, we do not know ourselves.
A Pillar with a PastTuesday, January 8, 2013 by Lawrence Grossman | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
Gil S. Perl’s The Pillar of Volozhin sheds light on the Netziv, one of Lithuanian Jewry's greatest leaders, whose own intellectual development is reflected throughout the yeshiva world today.
Where Did the Gaon Go?Tuesday, December 18, 2012 by Lawrence Grossman | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
Eliyahu Stern's new book portrays the Vilna Gaon as Eastern Europe's Moses Mendelssohn. But can the ascetic, who backed the persecution of Hasidim, seriously be associated with individualism and democracy?
Yeshiva RevolutionFriday, September 7, 2012 by Yoel Finkelman | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
Shaul Stampfer, one of Israel's foremost experts on Eastern European Jewry, is the most unlikely of iconoclasts. A thin, quiet, unassuming man, he gives the impression that he would have been happy as a simple melamed (elementary school teacher) in the shtetls he describes.
Through Night and FogMonday, August 20, 2012 by Eitan Kensky | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
My father and I visited Auschwitz for the first time this summer. It was toward the end of a long trip to Eastern Europe. We had already gone to the killing fields and forests of Lithuania, and to Warsaw, where my father broke down . . .
Editors' Picks
The Paper Brigade Adam Soclof, JTA. When the Nazis occupied Vilna, they planned to destroy large numbers of Yiddish texts. A group of Jewish scholars worked to save the books from destruction.
The Forgotten Firebrand Sue Vice, H-Net. Appalled at the secularism of inter-war Anglo-Jewry, poet Izak Goller bemoaned “the gods of the shops and the warehouses / Hollow papier-mâché imitations of the Golden Calf of our ancestors!”
Jewish Studies without Jews Geoff Vasil, DefendingHistory.com. The Lithuanian government lavishes funding on museums dedicated to commemorating the country's extinct Jewish culture. The problem is that Lithuania's Jewish culture is still alive.
Calumny and “Closure” Allan Nadler, Forward. Struggling to remain impartial, a writer’s memoir of a summer in Lithuania ends up little more than a collage of wide-eyed postcards from a land whose history she struggles, and mostly fails, to decipher.