Olga Litvak holds the Laurie B. and Eric M. Roth Professorship in Modern European Jewish History at Cornell University. The author of Conscription and the Search for Modern Russian Jewry and Haskalah: The Romantic Movement in Judaism, she is currently working on a book about M.L. Lilienblum and his Jewish lives.
What operates in the Jewish suspicion of confession is a kind of epistemological modesty, an unwillingness to examine other minds too closely.