Memoir has existed for more than a millennium and a half—Augustine completed his Confessions at around 400 AD—but during the past two or three decades, the number of titles has exploded and, in its present form, the genre is distinctly different from what is generally referred to as autobiography. While numerous talented memoirists have produced masterpieces of the genre, for the most part memoir allows the author far more leeway than autobiography in pontificating, even bloviating, freeing him or her from the constraint of literal factuality. Tell a good story about your life, regardless of its truthfulness, and you have got a pretty good memoir. Or so the prevailing logic goes. Witness David Berlin’s The Moral Lives of Israelis: Reinventing the Dream State.
Berlin narrates his family’s move from Israel to Canada in 1953, when he was a small boy, as a result, he says...
Nachman Ben-Yehuda is a sociologist at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where he is the director of the Halbert Centre for Canadian Studies. He has written books on political assassinations in Israel, the Masada myth, betrayal and treason. His most recent book, Theocratic Democracy: The Social Construction of Religious and Secular Extremism (Oxford University Press, 2010), focuses on the secular-religious conflict in Israel.
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