Last month, Israeli researchers discovered a telegram—dated to November 1943—from the SS chief Heinrich Himmler to the former grand mufti of Jerusalem Amin Haj al-Husseini, marking the anniversary of the 1917 Balfour Declaration and their shared hope for preventing its realization. Joel Fishman explains the telegram’s significance:

[Nazi Germany’s] alliance [with Husseini and his followers and supporters throughout the Arab world] was based on mutual support for the destruction of world Jewry, which both sides openly declared to be a shared interest and the basis of their friendship. The purpose of the telegram was to reaffirm publicly the existence of this partnership and the transaction it represented. Any discussion of Husseini’s ideological collaboration must also point out his remarkable claim that Nazism and Islam have a basic affinity. Examples of such shared values are the “Führer Principle,” discipline, and obedience which, according to him, find clear expression in the Quran. . . .

One should not overlook the essential fact that this ideological collaboration was reciprocal. The Nazi elite had a special respect and great admiration for Islam. Although these views have been documented, they have not yet been placed in context. . . . Heinrich Himmler’s doctor, Felix Kersten, wrote [in his postwar biography] an entire chapter on his patient’s “enthusiasm for Islam,” a chapter excluded from the English translation. According to Kersten, “Himmler saw Islam as a masculine, soldierly religion.” . . .

Beyond the discussion of Himmler’s telegram to Husseini, the basic challenge of honest history-writing is to place on the agenda the greater problem of Husseini’s partnership with Nazi Germany. . . . In Israel, part of the elite once argued that forgetting history is necessary in order to advance the cause of peace and understanding with the Palestinian Arabs. On the merits of the issue, it is unsound to argue that there is a virtue in preserving blank spots in our national history.

Reviewing Stranger Than Fiction, a new history of the 20th-century novel, Joseph Epstein draws attention to what’s missing:

A novelist and short-story writer who gets no mention whatsoever in Stranger Than Fiction is Isaac Bashevis Singer. When from time to time I am asked who among the writers of the past half century is likely to be read 50 years from now, Singer’s is the first name that comes to mind. His novels and stories can be sexy, but sex, unlike in many of the novels of Norman Mailer, William Styron, or Philip Roth, is never chiefly about sex. His stories are about that much larger subject, the argument of human beings with God. What Willa Cather and Isaac Bashevis Singer have that too few of the other novelists discussed in Stranger Than Fiction possess are central, important, great subjects.