Manipulating Memory May Provide a Way to Forget Fear

Depending on your favorite poet, memory is sweet (Cowper), pleasing (Pope), green (Shakespeare) or fond (Moore). If you prefer science to poetry, though, memory is, above all else, faulty. Memory’s essential imperfection is no secret. Everybody sometimes suffers from forgetfulness. And psychologists have long known that not only do people forget, they also misremember. Still, scientists are only beginning to learn just how strangely flawed human memory can be. One new study, for example, suggests that the worst thing you can do for a memory is recall it. In other words, practice makes imperfect. If you use a memory, you can lose it.

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A most hateful way to stifle free speech

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That majority of California voters, who balloted against gay marriage on Tuesday, did so out of “hate,” we are told. Dr. Laura Schlessinger, an Orthodox Jew who has the audacity to actually believe her religion, is excoriated as “the Queen of Hate Radio” for voicing disapproval of homosexuality. And on and on.

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Did Six Million Die for This?

‘Holocaustology’ May Create a New Form of Anti-Semitism

www.jewishworldreview.com — THE HOLOCAUST DOMINATED the moral imagination of the 20th century. Before the rise of Hitler, anti-Semitism was a parochial concern of the Jews; after the war it was everyone’s concern, and everyone regarded it with horror. The cause of anti-Semitism is a mystery to most Jews and most Gentiles. One school of thought, wrongly, I believe, blames anti-Semitism on Christianity itself.

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The Holocaust’s Legacies

Philip Gourevitch’s article on Binjamin Wilkomirski and his memoir “Fragments” (“The Memory Thief,” June 14th) reveals much about the Holocaust industry. In 1996, Suhrkamp, also Wilkomirski’s publisher, published a German translation of my account of a wartime childhood in Poland. It is entitled “Dobryd” — an anagram of the name of the real town where the action takes place. I chose to write it as fiction, because, like Aharon Appelfeld, I did not trust the factual accuracy of my recollections. At the time of publication, it was suggested to me that the book would sell much better if it was reclassified as nonfiction, but I did not accept the suggestion. Though the book has received excellent critical notices, it has never enjoyed the attention given to “Fragments.”

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