The Atlantic

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In 1912, the writer S. An-sky set out to record the songs and folktales of a now-lost Jewish civilization. Gal Beckerman visited the treasures he collected, which are under threat in wartime Kyiv. “An‑sky didn’t intend for his collection to be a time capsule,” Beckerman writes. “He saw it as raw material that could help Jews build a secular national identity for themselves. But a time capsule is exactly what it became.” At the turn of the 20th century, some 5 million Jews lived in the Pale of Settlement, a region between the Baltic and Black Seas, and by 1945, almost all of them were gone. In the years following An-sky’s expedition, “the armies of Russia and Germany clashed in that mud, and each took its wrath out on the shtetl Jews, killing more than 100,000 of them; because Jews would leave the Pale after 1917 for cities such as Moscow, Berlin, and New York; because during World War II, the Nazis would bury what was left of this way of life in an archipelago of mass graves. What An‑sky ended up collecting became not the mortar for building a modern Jewish culture, but shards from a now-extinct civilization.” “There was a terrible feeling of continuity, heading into Ukraine right now for this purpose,” Beckerman writes. “An‑sky was desperate to save all that was strange and beautiful about his people; Ukrainians have been dying for four years by the tens of thousands for largely the same reason. They are fighting to preserve their autonomy, which includes the uniqueness of their national and cultural identity—a front line that An‑sky would recognize.” Read more at the link in our bio. 📷: Lesha Berezovskiy

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In Ohio, a trucker tries to make sense of the moment when Pierre Damas Bel, a Haitian immigrant, stepped in front of his path, Stephanie McCrummen reports. She met with Jack Buhring, and reported on his reckoning with what happened. 📸 : Carol Guzy for The Atlantic

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Those who turn their politics into religion are “accepting only half of what religion has to offer you,” Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief of The Atlantic, tells David Brooks. “You engage in judgment, but you don’t really engage in mercy.” Watch the full episode of Permanent Questions at the link in our bio.