ABSTRACT
To pay tribute to Joe's rich life of service is also to honor his own sense of who mattered as well as what mattered. Joe was very much a Jewish survivor with a powerful appreciation of the American democratic credo. His military experiences in postwar German reconstruction stimulated his passionate commitment to the restoration of Jewish burial sites, synagogues, and institutional places of congregation that gave Jewish life its meaning before the Nazi effort to destroy Judaism as History. The search for physical restoration, for representation in artifacts as well as ideas, gave special meaning to Joe's post-academic career in America. It permitted him to see history as memory, the unique instrument for resolving the contradictions of tradition and modernity. In this he understood Vico well. It is a tribute to Joe that a brief piece on Vico, with its sly, but unmistakable critique of the Frankfurt School, represented his own contribution to the Festschrift edited by Judith Marcus.
