Excerpt:
In 1985, the French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann released a nine-hour documentary that recounted the individual stories of European Jews who fell victim to the Nazis. For his title, Lanzmann did not use the term that has become most commonly associated with the Nazi exterminations—the Holocaust—but instead, chose a single poignant word: Shoah, Hebrew for "calamity."
In 2003, the Italian journalist Giulio Meotti traveled to Israel to document the latest calamity to befall the Jewish people. A New Shoah is the product of nearly six years of painstaking, often painful, research. A non-Jew deeply committed to the fate of Israel, Meotti interviewed hundreds of the many Israelis whose lives have been shattered by Islamic terrorists, talking to colleagues, relatives, and friends of those murdered by death squads and suicide bombers. His aim is to rescue the memory of those Israelis who have fallen victim to terror, to give them names and faces, and to listen to the stories that their loved ones tell about them, to discover what they had loved, and to recall what they had lived for. Meotti's unflinching narrative is often as emotionally devastating as Lanzmann's documentary, but it also harbors stories of human strength and heroic moral purpose, of hope overcoming despair, of the will to celebrate life even when assaulted by enemies who chant monotonously of death.