The Banality of Good and Evil, by David R. Blumenthal, a scholar/rabbi of Judaic Studies at Emory University, is a welcome addition to the understanding of good and evil. What makes this work unique is that Professor Blumenthal has been able to combine the research from social and experimental psychology, philosophy, education, literature on the Holocaust and rescuers during the Nazi era, and religious teachings from the Jewish tradition.

It is arduous to review an anthology that has the ambition of presenting the large spectrum of movements and schools of contemporary Jewish religious thought. Limits of space prevent us from discussing individually the many authors selected in it. Instead, we must consider the criteria by which the authors have been chosen and how the editors have organized the anthologized materials. Such criteria are reducible to the idea that is expressed by the editors in the brief preface. In these last decades of the twentieth century, the Jewish world has experienced an extraordinary flourishing of thought that produced an enormous quantity of works of theological, philosophical, and ethical reflection, whose development was unthinkable right after World War II. This production was especially widespread in the Anglo-American area, where the English-speaking Jewish communities emerged as the most learned, wealthy, and pluralistic communities in the diaspora. Nobody can deny this sociological fact, which is also a cultural phenomenon. This anthology objectively reflects this situation. Nonetheless, it also shows the great open-mindedness and the vivacity with which the Jewish thinkers of this century have tried to answer the questions posed by history.

While The Star of Redemption is widely recognized as a great work, if not the single greatest work of modern Jewish thought, it has persistently had difficulty finding its readers. Written in an almost private language for a circle of friends and relations, it has taken almost a century to gain an audience that can find a way into its imposing architecture. The situation began to change in 1982 with Stéphane Mosès' System and Revelation, which offered a detailed reading of the whole text. I, for my part, tried to offer a philosophical interpretation of the methodology of each of the three parts in 1992, in Correlations in Rosenzweig and Levinas; Richard Cohen's Elevations offered a set of readings that linked Levinas and Rosenzweig in 1994. Yudit Kornberg Greenberg contributed a reading that emphasized the relation to the Kabbalah in her Better Than Wine, in 1996. The decade ended, however, with the two books under review here—both impressive, novel, and complex readings of The Star. Norbert Samuelson has given us a paragraph-by-paragraph paraphrase—or perhaps we need a new term, for Samuelson's book is a real commentary, leading us through the text and offering insight continuously, as well as pausing at key moments to guide us into richer connections. Ernest Rubinstein, for his part, has offered a demanding and challenging book that interrogates The Star, reading it not once but twice, and each time not only introducing the various key concepts and developments, but also measuring Rosenzweig against a rich theoretical framework.

When Hannah Arendt wrote, in Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), that “the holes of oblivion do not exist. Nothing human is that perfect, and there are simply too many people in the world to make oblivion possible,” she was referring to the survivors of the Holocaust who would live to tell the Shoah's many “forgotten” stories. Nearly forty years after, there are fewer survivors to do the job. And scholars have taken up the burden of witness to help us fill in the gaps.

The study of art in Judaism now takes center stage, as works of considerable intellectual ambition appear from year to year. The ones before us, a topical anthology and a coherent collection of essays, some of them groundbreaking, and all of them remarkably fresh and interesting, signal the advent of a new field within Jewish studies. The books complement one another, the one illuminating, the other argumentative, and both of them exceedingly interesting.

As one century, not to mention one millennium, passes into the next, the past obsesses us. We are beset by fears of forgetting it or twisting it out of recognition. Polemics about what to remember and what to forget divide societies all over the world. One of the most fruitful academic perspectives on this anxiety was initiated in the 1980s with the work of the French historian Pierre Nora. Nora formulated a “fundamental opposition” between memory (“the remnants of experience still lived in the warmth of tradition, in the silence of custom, in the repetition of the ancestral”) and the “problematic and incomplete . . . reconstruction” that is history.1. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations 26 (Spring 1989), 7–8. The essay was first published in 1984. He then launched the encyclopedic project of documenting the “memory sites” (lieux de mémoire) of French consciousness, those sites, both material and symbolic, located “between memory and history,” which had become invested with historical meaning in modern France. His original purpose had been to deconstruct such sites, in modern scholarly fashion to reveal their mythic nature, but, as the reviewer of an English translation of part of the resulting 5,600-page collective work points out, at its completion Nora conceded, that as a consequence of the speed with which even these constructed sites were passing out of popular memory, “commemoration ha[d] overtaken” his project and it had become “a sort of scholarly lieu de mémoire in its own right.”Tony Judt, “A la Recherche du Temps Perdu,” New York Review of Books, December 3, 1998, 54. Les Lieux de mémoire was first published in seven volumes between 1984 and 1992.