When World War I ended in 1918, a wave of antisemitic violence erupted in about 500 cities, towns and villages in territory contested by Ukrainians, Russians and Poles. During the course of this blood-soaked era, which coincided with the outbreak of a civil war in the newly-created Soviet Union, almost two-thirds of all Jewish homes […]
Canadian historian John-Paul Himka has written an illuminating, important, ground-breaking and grim book about an exceedingly dark chapter in Ukraine’s history. It goes without saying that most Ukrainians would probably prefer to shove this terrible, blood-soaked interregnum under the carpet, all the more so since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24. Himka, a professor […]
David Friedman, the U.S. ambassador to Israel from 2017 to 2021, is a true believer. A committed Orthodox Jew, he fervently believed that U.S. policy toward Israel was insufficiently supportive. A hardliner, he thought that Israel was entitled to build settlements in the West Bank, annex parts of it, and block the creation of an […]
Father Charles Edward Coughlin, a Roman Catholic priest, was the voice of the Christian Front, an extreme right-wing organization dedicated to cleansing the United States of Jews and communists. One of the most popular American broadcasters of the 1930s and 1940s, he was also the editor of Social Justice, a widely read newspaper that disseminated […]
The biggest threat to Israel’s long-term stability is its lack of a formal constitution, says Arye Carmon, the founding president of the Israel Democracy Institute, which is dedicated to promoting and strengthening democratic values in the Jewish state. Carmon, a philosopher and historian, expounds on this theme in Building Democracy On Sand: Israel Without A […]
Meir Kahane, the founder of the Jewish Defence League, was an exponent of counter-culture politics and a voice of illiberalism. Assassinated more than three decades ago, he is the subject of Shaul Magid’s erudite and penetrating book, Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical, published by Princeton University Press. […]
Harry Frank Guggenheim was an American capitalist titan who guided his immensely wealthy family into modernity. He was also a visionary who foresaw that aviation would be fundamental to the transportation infrastructure of the United States and a financial backer of the father of modern rocketry, Robert Goddard. In addition, he was instrumental in the […]
The Holocaust was set in motion not by one single momentous decision, but by several key events. The Wannsee conference of January 20, 1942 was one of those pivotal moments, or turning points, in Nazi Germany’s inexorable march toward genocide. Eighty years on, British historian Peter Longerich has written Wannsee: The Road to the Final […]
Karol Modzelewski was an iconoclast writ large, one of Poland’s leading dissidents during the communist era. A dyed-in-the-wool contrarian, he was Jewish by birth, yet identified as a Pole. He belonged to the Communist Party, yet openly criticized it. His fearlessness cost him dearly. During the 1960s and 1980s, he languished in prison for a […]
Israel’s strategic alliance with the United States took shape between the 1967 Six Day War and the 1975 Sinai II disengagement agreement. This historic process was pushed forward on the American side by politicians in the House of Representatives and the Senate, Kenneth Kolander argues persuasively in America’s Israel: The U.S. Congress and American-Israeli Relations […]