Reviews for History of the Twentieth Century - Bryn O'Callaghan - Hardcover

The average rating for History of the Twentieth Century - Bryn O'Callaghan - Hardcover based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-09-11 00:00:00 Makoto Kitajima A colorfully written, subtle, and compelling examination of the tension between collective memory and modern history in the Jewish context. The book traces brief sketches on Jewish people's relationship to history and looks into the question of why Jews did not exert serious efforts to compose history in the period between the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem and the Spanish Expulsion in 1492. Yerushalmi argues that collective memory serves a role that history cannot replace. He asserts that during the Middle Ages, Jews used their biblical worldview as a blueprint for making sense of the present and used ritual to encase important, and often traumatic, events into the memories of their communities. In the last chapter, Yerushalmi raises interesting questions on the use of history in modern times and its hypertrophic tendency to collect facts for their own sake. Yerushalmi says that while history can provide us with facts and, as a historian himself, is a strong proponent that it continue to do so, collective memory provides a people with a meaningful interpretation of those facts as well as a sense of identity. He asks himself whether Jewish people will ever find a metahistorical myth that may approximate function of collective memory. The last chapter is much more confessional and personal, with the author acknowledging his own positionality to the subject matter as a Jewish historian and the relative loneliness of those "fallen Jews" who have tasted the "forbidden fruit" of the historical lens. The irony of his own work contributing to the hypertrophic accumulations to the Jewish history corpus is not lost on the author. Still, faced with the choice of doing "too much" or "too little" historical research, he sides with doing "too much"; he writes "for my terror of forgetting is greater than my terror of having too much to remember. Let the accumulated facts about the past continue to multiply. Let the flood of books and monographs grow, even if they are only read by specialists. Let unread copies lie on the shelves of many libraries, so that if some are destroyed, others will remain..." For him, failing to remember is ultimately an injustice to mankind. Yerushalmi concludes "is it possible that the antonym of "forgetting" is not "remembering", but injustice?"

Review # 2 was written on 2013-12-17 00:00:00 Bob Williams the first book we were assigned in history class in my 2nd year (1st year stateside) in rabbinic school. One of most important books I have ever read. Required reading :) Brilliant.