Absent Unflinching Intellectual Honesty, We Are Lost...

For Benjamin, history was not...just a sequence of events without sense. Rather, narrative sense had been imposed on those events--that was what made them history. But imposing meaning was hardly an innocent act. History was written by the victors and its triumphalist narrative had no place for losers. To tear events out of that history as Benjamin did and set them in other temporal contexts--or what he would call constellations--was both a revolutionary Marxist act and also a Jewish one: the former because it sought to expose the hidden delusions and exploitative nature of capitalism; the latter because it was inflected with Judaic rituals of mourning and redemption.

~ Stuart Jeffries, Grand Hotel Abyss, 19.