“Part of remembering,” historian David Blight once observed, “is forgetting.” Perhaps nowhere is this truer than the nation of Poland, where so-called memory wars have been waged over the country’s role in the Holocaust. These battles are at the heart of Judy Rakowsky’s new book, Jews in the Garden: A Holocaust Survivor, the Fate of His Family, and the Secret History of Poland in World War II.
A nostalgic, or elegiac, sense that the most exciting and glamorous days of journalism and intellectual life are gone is no doubt part of what has driven a slate of documentaries, in recent years, on dead or dying writers, including Joan Didion, Nora Ephron, James Baldwin, William F. Buckley, Gore Vidal, Jimmy Breslin, and Pete Hamill. Of course, Tom Wolfe should get the same treatment, and now he has in the limited-release documentary Radical Wolfe. Directed by Richard Dewey and drawing on a 2015 Vanity Fair article by Michael Lewis (Moneyball, The Big Short), the film, narrated by the actor Jon Hamm, strives to get to the heart of Wolfe and his legacy. It only somewhat succeeds.
If you combine the berserk energy of a college basketball arena, the traditional pomp and circumstance of a royal parade, the unbridled passion of a European soccer cup final, and the studied intensity of a championship chess match, you might begin to approach a facsimile of one of the world’s great sporting experiences: watching a Japanese baseball game.
Perhaps Polish writer Czesław Miłosz’s most unsettling poem, “Campo dei Fiori,” compares the Warsaw Ghetto to Giordano Bruno’s execution. Just as Rome’s taverns were full even before the flames had died, so Warsaw’s citizens enjoyed carnival tunes and carousels outside the Ghetto. “The bright melody drowned / the salvos from the ghetto wall, /and couples were flying / high in the cloudless sky.” He had in fact witnessed that very sight when his tram carriage stopped outside the Ghetto while the Germans were extirpating the Uprising. “The wrenching irony of the poem,” writes Eva Hoffman in her new, sensitive study On Czesław Miłosz, “comes from the spectator’s utter indifference to the tragedy unfolding in such close proximity.”
House Republicans failed to pass legislation to fund Agriculture, Rural Development and the Food and Drug Administration late Thursday night after more than two dozen moderate Republicans came out against a provision that would limit access to an abortion pill. The chamber voted down the measure in a 191-237 vote, with 27 Republicans joining all...
House Republicans late Thursday night approved legislation to fund the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for fiscal year 2024. The legislation cleared the chamber in a 220-208 vote. Passing the bill will not help prevent a government shutdown Saturday night, but House GOP leaders are hoping that moving single-subject appropriations bills will help the conference...
Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) said he thinks there is “overwhelming evidence” that President Biden is involved in his son Hunter Biden's business schemes. Comer is the Chair of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, which held its first hearing Thursday to weigh evidence into impeaching Biden. “There’s overwhelming evidence that Joe Biden was involved in...
The House late Thursday night overwhelmingly approved $300 million in new aid to Ukraine. The 311-117 vote came after House GOP leaders on Wednesday stripped the Ukraine assistance from a Pentagon funding bill. All "no" votes came from Republicans. Though it drew broad support, the funding has been a source of controversy for the past...