Religion, Faith, and Alchemy

I am constantly on the lookout for new ways to explain my own ambivalence about religion. I despise it, and yet it has made who I am, and it forms the basis for nearly all of my endeavors: academic, spiritual, psychological. I am drawn to religion, but only in the sense that it must necessarily be an ongoing process, rather than a product of one group of people's musings on the nature of God. Religion, for me, is beautiful only when it is allowed to be fluid, constantly evolving and in flux, and when it teaches people to love other people. Why? Because I think that is how God must be.

When I was 19 or 20, my then-boyfriend, a year younger than me, gave me The Alchemist, by Paul Coelho--he said the book had meant a lot to him. I loved the book, though I didn't really get it all at the time, since I was so immersed in a community that privileged rules and rituals over real spiritual inquiry.

Today I was reminded of this when I saw that over at Jewcy.com there is an interview with novelist Paulo Coelho that gets at some of my evolved ideas of God and religion in a very insightful way.

Paul Coelho:

"I think that traditional religions face this backlash because they overlook the necessity of personal faith. To follow rituals is extremely important for the cult, but religious leaders should understand our individual faith, our need for actions that truly stir the souls of the men and women. Because these institutions have been ineffective in doing this, we have been seeing a gradual disinterest in all segments of society.

I always say that religion and faith have to be thought of separately—mainly because faith is sometimes at odds with the cult. You can find this difference in other realms, including politics. We all know that laws are different from rights. We all know that certain laws may be unjust and that we have the right to oppose them if we think they are unfounded. The same goes for religion: individuals don’t accept rules that are no longer tied to their personal lives and questionings. People need meaning and only life and faith can supply this, not merely rules."

Joey Kurtzman, the interviewer, asks:

"Along the same lines, as we try to remake our faith so that it can serve some purpose for us, how careful should we be about violating the 'authenticity' of the tradition?"

Paulo Coelho:

"First you need to be clear about the 'authenticity' of tradition. In my eyes, personal faith is the beating heart of this authenticity. This is the living fabric of all religions."

It's true--when tradition stops meaning something to people, and when it loses its ability to move people, perhaps it has stopped mattering. And perhaps, when that happens, people must create new traditions.

Why Do the Wicked Prosper?

I've been working on my dissertation all evening. I'm tired of writing about theoretical things, so this post is going to be something different.

I was driving home from the library late this afternoon, and I heard myself say, out loud, "God has blessed me with so many things I do not deserve." I don't really know where it came from, other than that it is an idea that is built into the tenets of the religion in which I was raised. Somehow there are still so many remnants of that religion, both good and bad, in my consciousness. I tend to be a person who is always surrounded by some trauma, disaster, or catastrophe of some kind. Somehow, though, I never feel sorry for myself, because I always have a crazy story to tell.

The latest catastrophe was me falling on the ice and crushing my dog's foot--not one broken bone, but countless broken bones. It's so my style to go extreme, all the way. But there have been a few really great things that have happened for me over the past couple of weeks as well. And so tonight, without realizing it, I was reflecting on them in a rare moment of positive thinking; I say "rare," since I tend to be a "my glass is two thirds empty" kind of person.

But as soon as the word "blessed" came out my mouth, it was crushed with the resounding biblical lament of King David: "Why do the wicked prosper?" And I thought to myself, how would one know if she was blessed? Then it occurred to me, that perhaps I am not blessed. Perhaps I am downright wicked, and that is why I prosper--a chilling thought.

From Boilermaker to Bruin: The Journey Begins

It's official: as of July 1, I will be a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Jewish American Literature at UCLA. The teaching load is extremely light, and I will have ample time and resources for research.

But, more importantly, I will have warm weather. I've had my fill of Midwestern winters. A couple of weeks ago, as a matter of fact, I slipped on the ice while carrying my little dog. When we fell, I crushed pretty much every bone in his little foot. Now, post-surgery, I will be taking care of him for the next six weeks. He's my little invalid.

We both look forward to the impending move back to Southern California. I don't want to live in a place where ice forms on the ground--very dangerous. This week is spring break, here at Purdue, and the weather was typical for this time a year: snow showers and highs of 35 degrees.

Tagging: Bringing Michael Chabon and Giorgio Agamben Together

Oh, what fun! Not to mention a great reason to take a break from dissertation-writing. It seems I've been tagged, and apparently the rules are as follows:

1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).

2. Open the book to page 123.

3. Find the fifth sentence.

4. Post the next three sentences.

5. Tag five people.

As you can see from the above picture of one corner of my desk, which I took just minutes after realizing I'd been tagged, there are two books that seem to be equally closest to me: Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union; and Giorgio Agamben's Remnants of Auschwitz. And if you think they are an unlikely pair, note the strangely close proximity, in my stack of books above, of Amy Tan and Linda Hutcheon.

Anyway, I'm going to cheat and give you both. First, here's Chabon:

Zimbalist struggled for the next hour to understand that move, and for the strength to resist confiding to a ten-year-old whose universe was bounded by the study house, the shul, and the door to his mother's kitchen, the sorrow and dark rapture of Zimbalist's love for the dying widow, how some secret thirst of his own was quenched every time he dribbled cool water through her peeling lips. They played through the remainder of their hour without further conversation. But when it was time for the boy to go, he turned in the doorway of the shop on Ringelblum Avenue and took hold of Zimbalist's sleeve.

And now, Agamben:

For the one who knows, it is felt as an impossibility of speaking; for the one who speaks it is experienced as an equally bitter impossibility to know. [new paragraph] In 1928, Ludwig Binswanger published a study bearing the significant title The Vital Function and Internal History of Life. Introducing into psychiatric terminology a phenomenological vocabulary that is still imprecise, Binswanger deelops the idea of a fundamental heterogeneity between the plane of the physical and psychical vital functions that take place in an organism and in personal consciousness, in which the lived experiences of an individual are organized into an inner unitary history.

I couldn't resist rendering the first sentence in bold. This is why I love Agamben, and this is also why I actually have a good idea for my dissertation.

And now, I choose to tag: Wishydig, Blog of Laughter and Forgetting, A Chair and Two Apples, Mxrk, and Mithical Mindi.

Kosher Boy

Oh, my. I can't decide whether this is hilarious or dangerous. I'm leaning toward the former.

Which Would Jesus Choose?

So I've blogged about something naughty over at Jewcy.com. But, hey, I found the subject matter on NPR, so it's kosher, right?

At the Heart of the Jewish Ethical Conscience: Woody Allen

In a piece on Woody Allen's late films, Jay Michaelson writes:

Judaism is a religion of Job, not just Sunday School, and Allen's extended meditations on the presence or absence of moral order are the essence of the Jewish ethical conscience.

Though Allen has seemingly rejected Judaism as a religion, Michaelson argues that Allen's later films, which aren't typically seen as falling into the same autobiographical vein as most of his earlier ones, are precisely and even traditionally Jewish. Rather than accept theodicy or assert that God knows all, the films depict an internal conflict about what, exactly, constitutes good and evil in this world. They are, in Michaelson's view (and I think I agree to a certain extent), more or less meditations, like the book of Job, on justice and what it means to be ethical.

Throwing God Overboard

I just finished reading Dara Horn's In the Image. It's one of those novels I've been meaning to read for quite some time since it's in my area (Jewish American literature). I think Horn is a spectacular writer, and I like this particular novel because it integrates all sorts of ideas about God, religion, memory, ethics, philosophy, culture, and love. And, it's a great story that's easy to read and easy to get sucked into--not overly experimental or "academic."

Like most academics, I'm an obsessive highlighter and note-taker. Here, however, I found myself highlighting not the things that I would go back and try to integrate into an academic essay, but those things that somehow resonated with me on a personal level. One of the most intriguing things about this text is the idea of hundreds of tefillin being cast over the sides of ships by people who were fleeing the pogroms and their former lives in Russia and Eastern Europe. It's not the main point of the story, but it surfaces and re-surfaces on a few occasions.

I'm not quite sure what to make of it. There's something useful in thinking about the tefillin, instruments used to bind quite literally "the law" (biblically speaking) to the human body, being cast away into a sea of forgetfulness. I am interested in what Commandment looks like today, in a post-Holocaust world, and I like to think that the casting away of tefillin symbolizes an effort to reject literalist readings of the bible and of the notion of Commandment.

At one point in the story, Leora, the main character, is in an old store full of used clothing, furniture, and other odds and ends. She finds an old set of tefillin that is so damaged (having resided at the bottom of the ocean for many years) that the parchment inside is exposed:

Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.

Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. And these words which I command you this day shall be on your heart. . . You shall bind them as a sign upon your hand, and they shall be frontlets between your eyes. And you shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

What, I wonder, does it mean today, in our world--a world that has been disappointed by the silence and inaction of any divine being--to love God? Is it not possible that a dogmatic and unwavering commitment to the law, and literalist interpretations of it, disallows the possibility to love God?

It is in this spirit that I like the idea of the discareded tefillin. On the other hand, not to be cliche or anything, but is this also an instance of throwing the baby out with the bathwater (okay, so I am cliche)? Must religion and ritual and everything we have perceived of as sacred be cast away in order for us to truly know and "love" God? Sometimes, in some instances, yes, I think so. But sometimes, casting everything "sacred" into the sea of forgetfulness might be the worst mistake we have ever made.

Forgetting, itself, is what might be the most transgressive element of this impulse. I have never believed even in the saying "forgive and forget." And, what is forgiveness, anyway? I know that when I talk about it in class with my students no one can agree on its meaning.

As Leora keeps reading the parchment, she sees:

And if you listen to my commandments...then I will give the land rain in its proper season, early rain and late rain, and you will harvest your grain and wine and oil. I will give grass in the fields for your cattle, and you will eat and be satisfied. Take care, lest your heart be deceived and you turn away and serve other gods and worship them. For then the anger of the Lord will be kindled against you, and he will stop up the heavens and there will be no rain; the earth will not yield its produce, and you will soon disappear from the good land which the Lord gives you (110).

The commandments (and blessings), she realizes with a jolt, are conditional. And it all seems suddenly false to her.

"Surely," she thinks "there were people who listened to the commandments and still found themselves going hungry--not to mention others who ignored the commandments and watched all their dreams come true. . . . If people really had thrown their tefillin overboard on their way to America, people who had been starving to death in Europe and probably still starved in New York, perhaps it wasn't just because tefillin were archaic. Maybe it was because tefillin were wrong" (111).

And yet, it still, sometimes, seems that it would be so much easier to believe in a God who hands out rewards and punishments like an overbearing parent does to his naive and ungrateful child. It would be so much easier to believe in God as the benevolent provider, rather than the God who has shown himself to be so forgetful, apathetic, and downright unloveable at times.

Sometimes I just want to say, "Be who I always believed you were, who I used to imagine you were. Be that. Fix this mess." But I know that the responsibility was never his, that it was always mine.

Levinas, Bak, and Interpretation

I'm currently co-guest-editing an issue of Modern Fiction Studies. The topic is Levinas and Narrative, and we have finally chosen an image for the cover of the issue (above). It's a piece called "Interpretation" (2003) by Samuel Bak, who is one of my favorite artists of all time. Isn't it lovely?

You can see more of Bak's work here.

This is Feminism?

According to an article over at the Forward, Ms Magazine has
refused to run the above advertisement, which features images of Israel’s top female political leaders, and the American Jewish Congress is not too happy about this.

The ad was submitted by the American Jewish Congress to Ms. Magazine, and spotlighted photographs of Dorit Beinisch, president of Israel’s Supreme Court; Tzipi Livni, Israel’s foreign minister, and Dalia Itzik, speaker of the Knesset, over the text, “This is Israel.”

According to the AJCongress, Ms. initially approved the ad but then reversed course, saying that the ad would “set off a firestorm.”

Says AJCongress President Richard Gordon: “Since there is nothing about the ad itself that is offensive, it is obviously the nationality of the women pictured that the management of Ms. fears their readership would find objectionable. For a publication that holds itself out to be in the forefront of the women’s movement, this is nothing short of disgusting and despicable.”

But according to Ms. Magazine’s executive editor, Kathy Spillar, it's not "the women’s nationality but their party affiliation that was the problem. Two of the featured officials, Itzik and Livni, are both members of the Kadima political party," and thus, Spillar said, "the ad would leave Ms. Magazine open to the charge of political favoritism."

The AJCongress created the ad to highlight the fact that women now occupy leading positions in Israel’s executive, legislative and political branches. In response, a Ms. representative said that “we would love to have an ad from you on women’s empowerment, or reproductive freedom, but not on this,” according to the AJCongress.

But, for me, this is the kicker:

“Not only could the ad be seen as favoring certain political parties within Israel over other parties, but also with its slogan, ‘This is Israel,’ the ad implied that women in Israel hold equal positions of power with men,” she said. “Israel, like every other country, has far to go to reach equality for women.”

Now, I don't think anyone is going to argue that the equality gap between men and women has completely closed in any nation. But it's hard to deny that there are some countries that have done a much better job of narrowing this gap than others. In particular, I can think of many countries in the same region as Israel (i.e. Saudi Arabia, where women can't even drive cars) that have done virtually nothing to rectify this situation. In my opinion, the position of women in Israel is one of the best in the world, and the fact that women can hold positions of political influence in Israel should be celebrated by a feminist magazine, especially when considered in contrast to other countries in the Middle and Near East.

I don't know that I agree with the political ideologies of all three of these Israeli women, but I do appreciate the fact that they have been given the opportunity, as women, to hold these positions of power, and I think that is something worth celebrating (or, at least, acknowledging). But the only thing worth acknowledging here is the ease with which Ms. Magazine is able to flaunt its own political and ideological biases at the expense of their own cause.

Who Knew the Nazis Were So Fashionable?

I just discovered this link over at Jewcy.com. It's a piece about five brands the Nazis gave us.

The list includes:

1. Volkswagen -- At this point, is there anyone who does not know that Volkswagens were little Nazi-mobiles designed by none other than Ferdinand Porsche?

Porsche's partner in masterminding the Beetle was also the mastermind of World War II: that crazy, affable buffoon Hitler. Hitler specifically wanted a cheap, sturdy vehicle everyone in Germany would be able to drive. Being the opportunistic businessman that he was, Porsche quickly whipped up the Volkswagen Beetle and lobbied heavily for the Fuhrer's approval. Soon, Porsche had his slave labor factories churning them out by the thousands, and eventually, flying out of dealerships.

2. IBM -- Yeah, I didn't know about this one, but it's kind of creepy.

According to a book a guy wrote about it, as soon as the Nazis invaded a country, they would overhaul the census system using IBM punch cards. Then they'd track down every Jew, Gypsy and any other non-Aryan until they were all rounded up onto cattle carts. And, next stop wasn't Space Mountain.

3. Bayer -- Once proud partial owner of the company that churned out Zyklon B, which means that Bayer was invested not only in getting rid of headaches and other physical ailments, but also in snuffing out Jewish vermin.

On one hand, the company that actually manufactured the gas was just partially owned by IG Farben, and Bayer was just one part of IG Farben. It's like the way we don't think of General Electric as a military contractor, because they make so many other things.

Bayer, though, has continued some of its old douchebaggery into the modern era. First off, Aspirin was invented by a Jewish man, Arthur Eichengrun, whose name Bayer still refuses to acknowledge. To this day, the "official" history of the company denies Eichengrun's involvement in the invention of aspirin, and states that an Aryan invented the drug, because as we all know, Aryans are better at everything.

One such Bayer-employed Aryan was a nice, thoughtful fellow by the name of Josef Mengele, who Bayer sponsored to seek out medical discoveries in the important field of torturing people to death.

4. Siemens -- Oh, yeah, I'd forgotten about this one. These guys think it's cool to trademark the name "Zyklon" for a range of home products. No, that's not offensive at all.

Though they weren't the only company at the time supplying the German war effort, they were certainly the most prolific. Siemens was in charge of Germany's rail infrastructure, communications, power generation ... the list goes on. If the Reichstag was the brain behind the war, Siemens was definitely the right hand that stroked Hitler to ecstatic glory.

5. HUGO BOSS -- Now, this came as a shocker. I had never heard this, but apparently SS soldiers and even Hitler Youth were stylin' in Hugo Boss uniforms. I just bought a Hugo Boss shirt for someone this past holiday season. It's nice to know that I spent $155 on Nazi wear.

Members of the Hitler Youth were also decked out in Boss wear, teaching children an early lesson in looking good whilst beating up minorities.

Koshering the White House

According to Nathan Guttman, over at The Forward, Bush had a "day full of Jews yesterday."

Bush’s Hanukkah tradition exceeds any other Jewish celebration offered by his predecessors. While former presidents held one “holiday celebration” for all religions, it was Bush who started the tradition of having a Hanukkah event for the Jewish community, as well as an Iftar dinner for Muslims during the month of Ramadan.

We don't often have reason to say this, but good for him.

The bigger event was the evening Hanukkah celebration. For the past three years, the party has offered a chance for the White House to make its entire kitchen kosher for a day. The operation was overseen by Rabbi Levi Shemtov, Chabad’s Washington representative. Shemtov said it was first lady Laura Bush who insisted the whole kitchen be koshered instead of bringing in only a limited amount of kosher food.

Well, my goodness, at least something is kosher in the White House. It's a shame that it lasted for only a day . . .

Chanukah Sameach!

Contrary to what you might think, this is not a virtual menorah. It is a virtual chanukiah. I learned this only today, from Tamar Fox, over at Jewcy.com.

A Blasphemous Bit of Theatre

I've posted this over at Jewcy.com.

Death of a Celebrity Writer

A month or so ago, I received a telephone call from a friend who was at a Norman Mailer conference, somewhere in Texas I believe. I didn't know they organized such things. Today, sadly, I read that Norman Mailer has died.

"He's always been at the center of a number of cultural storms and issues," Sipiora says. "He engaged the feminist movement in the '60s and '70s. He's been a prolific sports commentator. He's also been a critic of contemporary fiction forms. So in that sense, he's been very influential in a cultural way."

Conflict seemed to be at the core of Mailer's life and his work. Whether writing about war, murder or boxing, he seemed fascinated by the idea of violence But if critics sometimes found this fascination excessive, Mailer never apologized for pursuing life with a vengeance. Everything, he told Fresh Air's Terry Gross, was fodder for his writing.

"You know, if you're just bookish, there's a tendency to get terribly bitter about people who are physical," Mailer said. "My feeling from the beginning always was, if you are going to be a novelist, I've got to be a novelist who can encompass all kinds of experience. Don't ever narrow down the horizons of what you want to write about."

Although many people have had some quite despicable things to say about Norman Mailer, I kind of like that he was so volatile, complicated, and controversial.

Mailer always wanted to be taken seriously as a writer. But his private life often got as much attention as his prose. Married six times, he was jailed briefly in 1960 for stabbing his second wife, Adele Mailer. And his feuds with fellow writers, including William Styron, Truman Capote and Gore Vidal, were infamous. Biographer Mary Dearborn says Mailer was one of the first true celebrity writers.

"This is somebody who aggressively sought out fame," Dearborn says. "He understood the politics of celebrity before anyone else did. The person comparable is Hemingway — who also had celebrity thrust upon him and then came to embrace it."

And What of Dreams

I began this blog a couple of years ago in the context of dreams and darkness, nightmares and absences, memory and the immemorable. I wrote, in the beginning, of segments of dreams that I had, in the event that they somehow connected themselves to an idea, philosophical or otherwise, that I found interesting and applicable beyond the scope of me me me. Of course, this has always been a blog that focuses primarily on issues of religion, philosophy, literature, and Jewishness, but always along with an undercurrent of dreams.

And then a curious thing happened. I stopped dreaming. Or, perhaps my ability to re-member dreams the next morning ceased abruptly. Or, maybe the possibility exists that we might get to a point at which dreams become indistinguishable from reality, a point where there is no such thing as waking up and realizing that we are awake, and that we have dreamed: truth and fiction fused so seamlessly that they are one and the same. And we find that we are happy.

For many months I did not experience the sensation of dreams and dreaming. This is exceptionally odd because I have always had very intense, often disturbing, and always vividly-detailed dreams. And then, nothing.

But now, for the past few weeks actually, I awake with a jolt nearly every morning (and sometimes at various points in the night) and find that I have been dreaming. The dreams are always frightening. They typically involve someone I love betraying me in the cruelest of ways, or else I walk outside to find that a loved one has been violently dismembered, and I can see it all there before me. They are so detailed, and contain so many elements straight out of my "real" life, that I find myself starting to confuse the boundary between my daydreams and my nightmares.

But the real nightmare is the daytime realization that I can't necessarily extrapolate what has truly happened, from what has happened nonetheless. I wonder if that is really a bad thing, though. I wonder why I need to think in polarities: dream vs. reality.

It is all real.

Tonight I was reading Blanchot:

We cannot recall our dreams, they cannot come back to us. If a dream comes--but what sort of coming is a dream's? Through what night does it make its way? If it comes to us, it does so only by way of forgetfulness, a forgetfulness which is not only censorship or simply repression. We dream without memory, in such a way that the dream of any particular night is no doubt a fragment of a response to an immemorial dying, barred by desire's repetitiousness. There is no stop, there is no interval between dreaming and waking. In this sense, it is possible to say: never, dreamer, can you awake (nor, for that matter, are you able to be addressed thus, summoned).

I think, also, of Delmore Schwartz's In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, and wonder if, indeed, responsibility is somehow connected to dreaming. And yet, writes Schwartz, "I am a book I neither wrote nor read,/ A comic tragic play in which new masquerades/ Astonishing as guns crackle like raids . . ."

Zion Ozeri

I must be on a photography kick. I discovered a new favorite photographer today.

Against Ahmadinejad: A Rally in Pictures

Over at Jewcy.com, Eli Valley has posted some incredible pictures (including the one above) of the UN rally against Ahmadinejad.

Iran's President on Gays, Women, and 9/11

According to a piece in the NY Times today, "President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, facing a hostile reception at Columbia University this afternoon, said that Palestinians were suffering because of the Holocaust, proclaimed that there are no homosexuals in his country and said he wanted to visit the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan during his trip to New York 'to show my respect.'"

Only in America. Here are Ahmadinejad's pearls of wisdom regarding gays, women, and the World Trade Center. Pardon my language, please, but I have only one word in response to all three of his assertions: bullshit.

In answer to criticism Mr. Bollinger had made about Iran’s treatment of women and gays, Mr. Ahmadinejad had much to say.

“In Iran, we don’t have homosexuals like in your country. We don’t have that in our country,” he said to boos and hisses and even some laughter from the audience.

“In Iran, we do not have this phenomenon,” Mr. Ahmadinejad continued, undeterred. “I do not know who has told you that we have it. But as for women, maybe you think that maybe being a woman is a crime.

“It’s not a crime to be a woman. Women are the best creatures created by God. They represent the kindness, the beauty that God instills in them. Women are respected in Iran.”

Mr. Ahmadinejad also said he hoped to visit the site of the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan, although police had forbidden him to do so. Mr. Ahmadinejad said he wanted to “show my respect.”

SS Soldiers Have Feelings Too!

I've cross-posted at Jewcy.com.


I have always been a fan of Hannah Arendt.

I have not always, however, been a fan of the "banality of evil" argument. I get it--we are all capable of evil. I agree with that. But when applied to the "logic" of the Holocaust, I think the argument becomes problematic and potentially even transgressive. By saying that anyone could have been capable of the atrocities committed by Nazis and their sympathizers during World War II, we also, whether we intend it or not, minimize the extent to which each individual is responsible for his or her own behavior. We cut the perpetrators a bit of slack by implicitly suggesting that they only did what anyone else would've been equally capable of.

My point: okay, yeah, maybe it could've been anybody, but it wasn't. Each person who contributed in any way to the destruction of Jews and others during the Holocaust is individually responsible. The "it could have been anybody" argument is dangerous because it lessens the degree to which we are all responsible for our actions. And this goes for any genocide or act of violence--not just the Holocaust.

But then . . . there are times when I want to re-think this position.

Today there's a piece in the NYT about a letter received by a young archivist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The letter, written by a former US Army Intelligence officer, contained photographs of Auschwitz he had found 60 years ago in Germany.

It's not uncommon for someone to send old photos from the Holocaust to the museum, but these particular pictures depict something that is not often seen.

. . . a scrapbook of sorts of the lives of Auschwitz's senior SS officers that was maintained by Karl Hocker, the adjutant to the camp commandant. Rather than showing the men performing their death camp duties, the photos depicted, among other things, a horde of SS men singing cheerily to the accompaniment of an accordianist, Hocker lighting the camp's Christmas tree, a cadre of young SS women frolicking and officers relaxing, some with tunics shed, for a smoking break. . . . The album also contains photos of Josef Mengele, the camp doctor notorious for participating in the selections of arriving prisoners and cruel medical experiments. These are the first authenticated pictures of Mengele at Auschwitz . . .

Museum curators have avoided describing the album as something like "monsters at play" or "killers at their leisure." Ms. Cohen said the photos were instructive in that they showed the murderers were, in some sense, people who also behaved as ordinary human beings. "In their self-image, they were good men, good comrades, even civilized," she said.

I still don't like the "banality of evil" argument, but needless to say, these kinds of pictures give it a lot more credibility.

I highly suggest watching the slideshow here (turn your speakers on for the audio) -- it's only around two minutes long.