Longreads

The Choice by Bob Woodward Simon and Schuster, 462 pp., $26.00                                      …

eid Coolsaet is wide awake, sprawled the wrong way on his hotel bed so he can prop his legs up against the headboard. Outside the window, a strong breeze scuds briskly across Toronto’s Lake…

Photo: Bryan Nguyen/The Aggie. 22-year-old UC Davis student Willee (last name withheld by request) was one of the students pepper-sprayed at point-blank range Friday by Lt. John Pike while seated on…

For American Jews, the problem of the “ordinary German” is especially troubling, because it brings us directly to the darkest and most unassuageable suspicions about Jewish vulnerability. The most controversial books about the Holocaust, from Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem to Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners, have been the ones that try to explain how the Germans—citizens of an advanced society, famous for its culture and education—could be led in the space of a few years to commit a genocide of the Jews. For if this people could do it, the strong implication is that under the right (or, better, the wrong) circumstances, any people could do it. And the history of the world since 1945 seems to bear out this implication. Cambodians, Serbs, and Rwandans have all shown that people do not have to be Nazis, or anti-Semites, in order to slaughter their neighbors.