Whenever I visit my dad’s grave at Fort Snelling, Minnesota, I inevitably find myself comparing the headstones there to inscriptions from the Jewish catacombs in Rome. On the one hand, the uniformity of headstones at national cemeteries is in marked contrast to catacomb inscriptions, whose quality, shape, and material vary widely. On the other hand, I find the relatively limited range of imagery and sentiments in each to be strikingly similar. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs gives loved ones a selection of 74 “emblems of belief” that can be used on government markers, but in the immediate vicinity […]
