Since the end of the 19th century, more Jews have lived in NewYork than in any other city. And for a time in the mid-20th century, Jews comprised one-third of its population, surpassing the number of Jews residing in both Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. The city’s status as a Jewish center is such that, in […]
As she lay dying in Chicago in 2ooo, Dalia Maria Kucenas, a rag doll of her former self, implored her daughter, Silvia Foti, to finish one last task she had begun. “You have to write the book,” she said shortly before succumbing to cancer at the age of 60. Kucenas, the recipient of a PhD […]
Saudi Arabia, the only country created by and named after a family, the Al Sauds, emerged as a unified state only in 1932, but since then it has established itself as one of the most important nations in the Middle East. As David Rundell writes in Vision Or Mirage: Saudi Arabia At The Crossroads (I.B. […]
I started reading The New York Times as a university student, which means that a lot of water has flowed under the bridge since I discovered it decades ago. I enjoy reading the Times mainly because its coverage of international news and American domestic affairs is superior, a cut above the tepid and often superficial […]
When I dropped into the cool and elegant marble lobby of the Peace Hotel, an exquisite Art Deco building overlooking the Huangpu River in central Shanghai, I was only vaguely aware of its storied history. Although I did not know it was once called the Cathay Hotel, I knew it had been built by one […]
Alma Rachel Heckman has written an original and important book concerning the role that radicalized Jews played in Morocco’s struggle for independence from France and in newly independent Morocco. The Sultan’s Communists: Moroccan Jews and the Politics of Belonging (Stanford University Press) is billed as the first volume of its kind. These Jews, members of […]
When Joe Biden became the first American president to recognize the Armenian genocide, the United States joined a select list of about 30 countries that already had recognized the Ottoman Turkish massacres of 1915. Reacting to Biden’s move this past April, Israel’s Foreign Ministry issued a statement recognizing the “terrible suffering and tragedy of the […]
Climate change is likely to cause severe repercussions in the Middle East in the future. It could exacerbate water shortages, result in failed crops, drive displacement in populated areas, and sow political destabilization, according to Dan Rabinowitz, a professor of sociology and anthropology at Tel Aviv University and the former chairman of Greenpeace Mediterranean. In […]
Most Jews in Russia after the 1917 communist revolution were anti-Bolshevik. But within two years of that historic upheaval, which transformed tsarist Russia into the Soviet Union, the majority of Russian Jews had flocked into the Bolshevik camp. At the root of this transformation were the 1,500 pogroms unleashed by the Russian civil war from […]
Ami Ayalon describes himself as “a strange bird” and an “outsider” in his frank and heartfelt memoir, Friendly Fire: How Israel Became Its Own Worst Enemy And The Hope For Its Future (Steerforth Press). Ayalon’s self-portrait is true, yet false. Having held top-level governmental posts in Israel, he is very much of an insider. But […]