It is Yom HaShoah: Holocaust Remembrance Day. This is the time we remember the 11 million people (including he 5 million non-Jews too often left out of our remembrance) who were killed by the Nazis in WW II.

Written in Pencil in the Sealed Freight Car

Here, in this freight car,
I, Eve,
with my son Abel.
If you see my older boy,
Cain, the son of Adam,
tell him that I…

--Dan Pagis, as quoted in Ariel Hirschfeld’s chapter in Cultures of the Jews, David Biale (ed.)

I read this poem, evoking the emotions of a woman crammed into a freight car on her way to the death camps during the Holocaust, right before I read Elie Wiesel's most recent edition of his book Night, describing his own experiences in the Holocaust. His book is, needless to say, chilling. But the additions in the latest edition make it even more so. If you read earlier editions, you might want to read the intro to the new one because he mentions things edited out of the original.

Grace Paley, 84, dies.. NY Times obit here She was a writer, poet, feminist Jewish radical who was idolized by many of us who grew up in Greenwich Village in the late 50's & early 60's. She had been in the War Resisters League and honored last year by the Jews For Racial & Economic Justice. For a recording of Paley reading her own work including the short story "Friends," click here. Katha Pollitt has a good reminis in the Nation together with a Paley poem you should read right now .

Nicola Sacco and Bartolomo Vanzetti, Italian anarchist-oriented union organizers were executed 80 years ago on August 23, 1927. They’ll be remembered at Union Square at 6PM Thursday Aug. 23, 2007.-+

Genocide Remembered. Do not omit reading this moving story by the LA Times’ Maria La Ganga about a nazi holocaust survivor who remembers concentration camp life at the end of hers (via The Columbia Journalism Review.)

Genocide Forgotten The Anti-Defamation League has very reluctantly left the camp of Armenian genocide deniers.

[editor's note: While I am on vacation I am reposting some of my earlier diaries that I consider particularly important, interesting or well read. This was originally posted on Columbus Day]

I experienced an odd sensation today as I was on the subway today. Today was Columbus Day but I had to go in to work for part of the day anyway. The book I am currently reading is King Leopold's Ghost, a pretty horrifying history of the Congo under colonialism.

Reading about colonial genocide in Africa on Columbus Day. Had a kind of irony to it.

I have been ambivalent, in the litteral meaning of the word, towards Columbus Day for years now. I celebrate America and Columbus' "discovery" of the "New World" because the result of his discovery and the ultimate founding of America is that my family, myself included, is alive and thriving today. Without America, my family would have been exterminated in the genocide of Nazi Germany if not before that in the genocide of the pogroms in Tsarist Russia and later Stalin's genocide in the Soviet Union.