Saul Friedländer – författare

Diary of a Crisis explores the past tumultuous and traumatic year in Israel-Palestine. The eminent historian Saul Friedländer began a diary of Israeli politics in January 2023 as the country was convulsed by protests against Netanyahu's attempt to overhaul the judiciary. Hundreds of thousands took to the streets to demonstrate against this threat to democracy. But the protests said nothing about the Palestinian question-the "elephant in the room," according to Friedländer, who resumed his diary after Hamas's 7 October assault on southern Israel. Israel was facing one of the worst crises in its history, he observes, under the worst possible internal conditions.Friedländer weaves together profound reflections on a national history in which he has been an active participant. He describes how Prime Minister Golda Meir once flatly declared to him, "There is no Palestinian people." For Friedländer, on the other hand, the fight for democracy is inseparable from equality of treatment for Arab and Jewish citizens and an end to Israeli domination over Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. He argues that despite the continuing bloodshed, a two-state solution remains the only long-term answer to this most intractable of conflicts.

A highly original and engaging appraisal of Kafka’s life, work, legacy, and thoughtFranz Kafka was the poet of his own disorder. Throughout his life he struggled with a pervasive sense of shame and guilt that left traces in his daily existence—in his many letters, in his extensive diaries, and especially in his fiction. This stimulating book investigates some of the sources of Kafka’s personal anguish and its complex reflections in his imaginary world.In his query, Saul Friedländer probes major aspects of Kafka’s life (family, Judaism, love and sex, writing, illness, and despair) that until now have been skewed by posthumous censorship. Contrary to Kafka’s dying request that all his papers be burned, Max Brod, Kafka’s closest friend and literary executor, edited and published the author’s novels and other works soon after his death in 1924. Friedländer shows that, when reinserted in Kafka’s letters and diaries, deleted segments lift the mask of “sainthood” frequently attached to the writer and thus restore previously hidden aspects of his individuality.

In this sequel to the classic work of Holocaust literature When Memory Comes, a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian returns to memoir to recount this tale of intellectual coming-of-age on three continents.   Forty years after his acclaimed, poignant first memoir, Friedländer returns with Where Memory Leads: My Life, bridging the gap between the ordeals of his childhood and his present-day towering reputation in the field of Holocaust studies. After abandoning his youthful conversion to Catholicism, he rediscovers his Jewish roots as a teenager and builds a new life in Israeli politics.Friedländer’s initial loyalty to Israel turns into a lifelong fascination with Jewish life and history. He struggles to process the ubiquitous effects of European anti-Semitism while searching for a more measured approach to the Zionism that surrounds him. Friedländer goes on to spend his adulthood shuttling between Israel, Europe, and the United States, armed with his talent for language and an expansive intellect. His prestige inevitably throws him up against other intellectual heavyweights. In his early years in Israel, he rubs shoulders with the architects of the fledgling state and brilliant minds such as Gershom Sholem and Carlo Ginzburg, among others.Most important, this memoir led Friedländer to reflect on the wrenching events that lead him to devote sixteen years of his life to writing his Pulitzer Prize–winning masterpiece, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945.

Diary of a Crisis explores the past tumultuous and traumatic year in Israel-Palestine. The eminent historian Saul Friedl�nder began a diary of Israeli politics in January 2023 as the country was convulsed by protests against Netanyahu''s attempt to overhaul the judiciary. Hundreds of thousands took to the streets to demonstrate against this threat to democracy. But the protests said nothing about the Palestinian question-the "elephant in the room," according to Friedl�nder, who resumed his diary after Hamas''s 7 October assault on southern Israel. Israel was facing one of the worst crises in its history, he observes, under the worst possible internal conditions.Friedl�nder weaves together profound reflections on a national history in which he has been an active participant. He describes how Prime Minister Golda Meir once flatly declared to him, "There is no Palestinian people." For Friedl�nder, on the other hand, the fight for democracy is inseparable from equality of treatment for Arab and Jewish citizens and an end to Israeli domination over Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. He argues that despite the continuing bloodshed, a two-state solution remains the only long-term answer to this most intractable of conflicts.