I’m beginning to feel that Norman Mailer might have made a strategic mistake in recent interviews plugging his new book on writing, The Spooky Art. A strategic mistake in conspicuously low-balling his life’s work, his achievements as opposed to his once-grand expectations of himself.
He told The Times, for instance, “I may last or I Read More
Holocaust denial is a particularly insidious evil. It was almost painful to read The Times’ earnest struggle to report on the Iranian Holocaust-deniers’ conference in anticipation of its opening on Dec. 11. It will be fascinating to see how the rest of the media reports on this conference of “scholars” whose distinguished keynote speaker is Read More
It’s springtime, I mean sweepstime, for Hitler in Hollywood. I’m sure you’ve all heard of the forthcoming two-night, four-hour, prime-time CBS “Miniseries Event” called Hitler: The Rise of Evil (airing May 18 and 20). Well I’ve finally seen a review copy of the controversial “docudrama,” and there’s a lot I could say-and may say in Read More
I wish I could leave this subject behind. I was hoping to get back to my Jane Austen column, to the way the mocking of literary convention in the sonnet-parody passage in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night is almost exactly echoed by the tone of Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey when she first meets Mr. Tilney! Nonetheless, Read More
This is difficult, because I feel deeply conflicted in some ways about the Jewish Museum’s Mirroring Evil exhibition (opening March 17), so please bear with me. I’m not suggesting a boycott of the exhibition, as some Holocaust survivors have, because the art makes provocative-to some, inflammatory-use of Nazi imagery.
What I’m addressing here is not Read More
The guy in the Nazi uniform and the swastika arm band came up to me and introduced himself. He was reading my book Explaining Hitler , he said. He held out his hand for me to shake it.
A disconcerting moment. He was an actor; we were in a theater; he was playing a Nazi; Read More
The guy in the Nazi uniform and the swastika arm band came up to me and introduced himself. He was reading my book Explaining Hitler, he said. He held out his hand for me to shake it.
A disconcerting moment. He was an actor; we were in a theater; he was playing a Nazi; I Read More
Greetings from Munich, the Black Hole of the Millennium. The perfect place to celebrate, to consummate, the dead end of a low, dark, dishonest century; the place that gave birth to the century’s (the millennium’s?) darkest, most destructive phenomenon, the city that nurtured the Nazi movement. Munich was Adolf Hitler’s adoptive hometown, home of the Read More
Perhaps now is the time. Perhaps the imminent publication of the diaries alleged to be Adolf Eichmann’s makes this the moment to put to rest one of the most pernicious and persistent misconceptions about Eichmann and the Nazi perpetrators of the Holocaust: the fashionable but vacuous cliché about the “banality of evil.” It’s remarkable how Read More
