Today I began reading Simon Schama's first volume of The Story of the Jews.  I ordered it last winter when the PBS documentary aired, and it kept getting bumped in my reading for other things pertinent to stuff I was doing at church.  I am mesmerized by Schama's prose in this book (in 2008 I read his Landscape and Memory).  Here are some excellent excerpts only from the four page Foreword:

For a couple of hours after supper, the sages, false messiahs, poets and rabble-rousers came into our little company as we cracked walnuts and jokes, and drank wine and the brimming cup of Jewish words.

***

Over everything else, understandably, the crematoria smoke still hung its tragic pall.

***

But, whatever the cost of breaking it, silence is not a historian's option.

***

We would moor under the willows to wrestle with the pain of Shylock.