Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory

A remarkable book that discusses the millennial tension between the age-old Jewish commandment - and tradition - of remembrance and the relatively new Jewish interest in history.

Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi is an exemplary Jewish historian of the Jews, and with Zakhor he becomes an exemplary theorist of the troubling and possibly irreconcilable split between Jewish memory and Jewish historiography. . . [Zakhor] may well be a permanent contribution to Jewish speculation upon the dilemmas of Jewishness, and so it may join the canon of Jewish wisdom literature.

Mr. Yerushalmi's previous writings, on the Spanish and Portuguese Jews . . . established him as one of the Jewish community's most important historians. His latest book should establish him as one of its most important critics. Zakhor is historical thinking of a very high order --- mature speculation based on massive scholarship.