The strategic relationship between the “mosque” and the “market” is explored by Aisha Ahmad in her bracingly original book, Jihad & Co.: Black Markets and Islamist Power, published by Oxford University Press. Ahmad, an assistant professor in the department of political science at the University of Toronto, focuses her attention on unstable and ungovernable parts […]
When the Israeli journalist Anshel Pfeffer was researching his now-published biography of Benjamin Netanyahu, he requested interviews with him. All his requests, formal and informal, were ignored. But when Pfeffer — the Israel correspondent of The Economist — and senior editors of the British magazine met Netanyahu in his office one day, the Israeli prime minister turned […]
It was, as Steven J. Zipperstein writes in his cinematically vivid book, Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History (Liveright Publishing), “a dreadful moment” burned into the souls of Jews. He is referring to the unbridled anti-Jewish violence that broke out in Kishinev — a provincial Bessarabian city on the edge of the Russian empire — […]
During the interwar period, Poland, with a Jewish population of 3.3 million, was an incubator for the development of right-wing Zionism. Its foremost proponent, the Russian-born Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky, was the founder of Betar, one of the most popular Zionist youth movements in Europe. Claiming a world-wide membership of some 60,000, of whom 45,000 lived […]
In one of the most iconic photographs of World War I, printed by the mass-circulation Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung in August 1914, a young German soldier mounted on a horse reaches down to two civilians to bid farewell as his cavalry battalion makes its way to the front from Berlin’s elegant Unter den Linden thoroughfare. Unbeknownst to readers […]
Israel has the dubious distinction of being the only country whose very existence is challenged. Given its array of enemies, ranging from Iran and Hezbollah to Hamas and Islamic Jihad, Israel has devised a policy of assassinating its foes. Since its founding 70 years ago, Israel has assassinated more people than any other Western nation. […]
Whether Islamic State was merely a flash in the pan or an organization still capable of regenerating itself after devastating battlefield defeats, it has already cast a dark shadow. Spreading fear and terrorism throughout the Middle East and Europe following its extensive territorial conquests in Iraq and Syria, IS established a caliphate in 2014, the […]
Syria and Iraq, two of the most important countries in the Arab world, have fallen into an abyss of unbridled strife and violence. The American-Anglo invasion of Iraq in 2003, resulting in the ouster of its president, Saddam Hussein, touched off a deadly Sunni insurgency that was successively taken over by Al Qaeda and Islamic […]
In the spring of 1933, a Los Angeles Police Department captain submitted a report indicating that “considerable quantities” of antisemitic literature had been found littering the streets of the city’s downtown core. A new group, Friends of the New Germany, was believed to be behind this sudden burst of Nazi propaganda. An undercover detective was […]
Shimon Peres, a member of Israel’s founding generation, was one of its most distinguished sons. A wunderkind who was deputy director of the ministry of defence at the age of only 29, he held a succession of ministerial posts from the 1950s onward, the most important of which were the defence, foreign affairs and finance […]