David Wolpe: evaluation

Transcript context

…Primo Levi, the Italian writer. Primo Levi is a problematic figure in some sad way because, although it’s not a universal consensus, most people believe he committed suicide and Elie Wiesel said that he “died at Auschwitz 40 years later. ” The thing about Levi that is so remarkable is that he’s one of those rare — almost like [Anton] Chekhov — he’s a scientific mind that is a brilliant literary writer. So when you read him on Auschwitz, you’re reading very careful, detailed prose that is heartbreaking. He doesn’t appeal to your heart. Instead he just tells you in a crystalline way what happened. I’ll give you one analogy that I’ve never actually written about or seen written about, and I thought of it years ago and I hope that I’m remembering it right. There’s one place I think in Survival in Auschwitz where Primo Levi talks about a bricklayer, that the Nazis asked him to build a wall, and he couldn’t persuade himself to build it badly. He just couldn’t because that was his pride. And it reminded me that there’s this great — that I haven’t read for years and I’m sure I could find it — but there’s a [Guy de] Maupassant story about a guy who’s a circus performer, and what he does is he fires arrows into an apple on his wife’s head, and that’s their circus act, and he starts to hate his wife and he wants to kill her, but he can’t bring himself to do it wrong. [laughter] He can’t do it. And weirdly, when I read the Levi thing and I thought of the Maupassant thing, and I thought that in some ways, that sense of, “I must be accurate all the time,” that’s what Levi is. It’s like, “I can’t get this wrong,” and when you read that on Auschwitz and you know that the person that you’re reading won’t exaggerate or distort — it makes it that much more painful. Now I’m sure you know Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. In his new book Essays on Ethics, he wrote the following, and I quote, “The entire burden of the Torah from the beginning of Exodus to the end of Deuteronomy is about what it is to create a free society as opposed to the slavery the Israelites experienced in Egypt.” Agree or disagree?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.