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“Diasporism seeks to promote the dispersion of the Jews in the West, particularly the resettlement of Israeli Jews of European background in the European countries where there were sizable Jewish populations before World War II. Diasporism plans to rebuild everything, not in an alien and menacing Middle East but in those very lands where everything once flourished, while, at the same time, it seeks to avert the catastrophe of a second Holocaust brought about by the exhaustion of Zionism as a political and ideological force.
“Whatever hatred for Jews may be present in Europe—and I don’t minimize its persistence—there are ranged against this residual anti-Semitism powerful currents of enlightenment and morality that are sustained by the memory of the Holocaust, a horror that operates now as a bulwark against European anti-Semitism, however virulent. No such bulwark exists in Islam. Exterminating
I didn’t understand, nor do I yet understand, the motives of the murderers.
The ingenuous person is always a shlimazl, a clownish victim of misfortune, never hearing the danger signals in time, getting mixed up, tangled up, and finally falling into the trap.
Reality, as you know, is always stronger than the human imagination. Not
only that, reality can permit itself to be unbelievable, inexplicable, out of all proportion. The created work, to my regret,
cannot permit itself ...
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Can there be a naive modern art? It seemed to me that without the naiveté still found among children and old people and, to some extent, in ourselves, the work of art would be flawed. I tried to correct that flaw. God knows how successful I was.
The triumph of the untragic. Brenda Patimkin dethrones Anne Frank. Hot sex, fresh fruit, and Big Ten basketball—who could imagine a happier ending for the Jewish people?”
On I went, usurping the identity of the usurper who had usurped mine,
No, a man’s character isn’t his fate; a man’s fate is the joke that his life plays on his character.
Cynicism increases with age because the bullshit piles up on your head.
“You’re the Dostoyevsky of disinformation,”
Our final solution to the Ukrainian Christianity problem. Not Zionism, not Diasporism, but Gigantism—Golemism!
An ordinary person who purely by accident gets caught in the historical struggle.
But assigning myself a leading role when I couldn’t have felt more like everyone’s puppet was the most debilitating mental
development yet, and I fought off the idea with what little rationality I retained after almost three hours of waiting alone in that room.
Our poor Chofetz Chaim! He prayed to God, ‘Grant me that I should say nothing that is unnecessary and that all my speech should be for the sake of Heaven,’
the Chofetz Chaim decreed that a person must not utter loshon hora even about himself.”
The Chofetz Chaim reminds us, and I believe it, that ‘the world rests on those who silence themselves during an argument.’
This man, your monster, is, in fact, your salvation—the impostor is your innocence.