You don't have to be Jewish to understand the history of Europe in the 20th century, but it helps.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I find it very hard to write about Jewish history.
I really don't even think of myself as being Jewish except when I'm in Germany.
I read a lot of history. The passive Jews in Germany didn't survive. The smart ones got out.
Jewish history has been in my cultural DNA since I was a child growing up in post-war London. In the midst of that dark, gray, lamenting monochromatic world of the '50s, I had a sense that both Jewish and English history were full of color and light and animation.
Jewish intellectuals contributed a great deal to insure that Europe became a continent of humanism, and it is with these humanist ideals that Europe must now intervene in the Middle East conflict.
To be Jewish is to be specifically identified with a history. And if you're not aware of that when you're a child, the whole tradition is lost.
My grandparents were very well-educated people, but in the Jewish tradition. They knew everything about the Bible. And then they had to come to Brussels, to run away from Poland, because there was too much anti-Semitism. They lost everything they had.
Jews had an outsider's eye on a lot of Western tradition.
Only through acknowledgment of the erasure and void of Jewish life can the history of Berlin and Europe have a human future.
You can't understand European history at all other than through religion, or English literature either if you can't recognise biblical allusions.