Overwhelmed and Awed at the Kennedy Center

• By John Podhoretz
• Commentary
• February 25, 2014

Jews of European origin tend to think of their roots in the “old country”—if they think of them at all—with nostalgia for a sweet bygone era of people speaking in cutesy Yiddish, wandering around a picturesquely poverty-stricken farming village the way the characters do in Fiddler in the Roof, eating various smoked meats. In fact, the world of 19th^–century and 20th^–century Jewry in Europe was an extraordinarily complicated, jangly, emotionally fraught, tragic, and soon-to-be-tragic-on-an-unimaginable-scale place and moment in time. This was a historical moment during which a beleaguered, tormented, bedraggled people with no social capital but their connection to an ancient peoplehood and faith made their mark on the world in an almost unimaginably bold cultural ferment.