The default mode of modern writing about art is to despise any notion of singularity as so much overheated genius-fetishism.
— Simon Schama
By the end of the nineteenth century, the stereotype of the ugly American - voracious, preachy, mercenary, and bombastically chauvinist - was firmly in place in Europe.
The notion that religion can actually be something... attached to progressivism seems so bizarre. But all you have to say is that Abolition wouldn't have happened without it. The way in which African Americans managed to achieve a degree of self-determination was through the church.
It's not right to think about all of Jewish-German history as shrouded by the smoke of the crematorium.
The British who arrived in the United States in the eighteen-thirties and forties had imagined the young republic as a wide-eyed adolescent, socially ungainly and politically gauche, but with some hint of promise.
We seem wired to grieve with greenery. Allowing the dead to dissolve into the earth, to become part of the cycle of the seasons, has, for millennia, held the promise of cheating mortality.
The Jewish story is the story of wandering. It is the story of extraordinary heterogeneous complication.
I understood when I was quite small that there were two special things about the Jews. That we'd endured for over 3,000 years despite everything that had been thrown at us, and that we had an extraordinarily dramatic story to tell.
In the early nineteenth century, with Enlightenment optimism soured by years of war and revolution, critics were skeptical of America's naive faith that it had reinvented politics.
I would want the British reader to feel that religion in America isn't an absurd thing - a sign of a pin head athwart a gigantic body.
Jews can live their own life as Jews and yet be part of a different country.
