Solzhenitsyn's 'Gulag Boss: A Soviet Memoir'

Upon completing Gulag Boss: A Soviet Memoir, a book detailing Solzhenitsyn’s account of the terrors of the Soviet Gulag, I picked up my copy of Krauthammer’s article At Last Zion and read through its seven pages. I am uncertain which text is more terrifying. Grandiose fatalistic vaticinations abound in Krauthammer’s piece. American Jewry, we are told, will decline and ultimately disappear. Later on we read that Israel, the renascent Jewish homeland, is “the last hope.” Though we are afforded little in the way of argument, Krauthammer asserts that despite the Jews having survived exile and national tragedy twice-over, a third time would apparently prove fatal. Doubtless, these concerns justify advocating for the United States to continue providing generous unmarked aid to Israel, bomb Syria, and occupy Iran. Before we lobby Capitol Hill to activate the 5th fleet though, we ought to ask ourselves, do Krauthammer’s bold oracular claims survive sustained analysis? Krauthammer’s two primary contentions, namely, the putrescence of American Jewry …show more content…
Judaism is a little bit country, a little bit rock-and-roll, and perhaps even some screemo. No doubt the concept of Jewish nationhood and cultural particularity predate the reception of the Torah at Mount Sinai, yet it seems clear that Judaism was fundamentally transformed by that encounter with the divine. Without a mooring in traditionalist dogma and normative law, the cultural component of Judaism is but a vacuous construction. Here I employ the Straussian calculus reducing cultural Judaism to religious Judaism. To quote, “But the heritage to which cultural [Judaism] had recourse rebelled against being interpreted in terms of “culture” or “civilization,” meaning as an autonomous product of the genius of the Jewish people. That culture or civilization had its core in the Torah, and the Torah presents itself as given by God, not created by Israel.” (Progress or Return