An avalanche of books has roared off the presses since the outbreak of the Six Day War on June 5, 1967, yet Guy Laron’s new paperback edition of The Six Day War: The Breaking of the Middle East (Yale University Press), a bracing account of its causes, offers fresh insights into a seminal conflict that tripled Israel’s […]
The Fourth Committee of the United Nations, otherwise known as the Special Political and Decolonization Committee, adopted nine resolutions earlier this month condemning Israel for its refusal to cede territory captured during the 1967 Six Day War. Eight resolutions dealt with the Palestinian problem, Israel’s five-decade old occupation of the West Bank and its construction […]
One more truce has ended yet another round of hostilities in and around the Gaza Strip. But as we all know, none of the previous ceasefires have lasted long and have always given way to more bloodshed. The latest flareup, the most serious since the 2014 war, erupted on November 12 and petered out a […]
Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to Oman on October 26 caught the Middle East by surprise, but it should not have been a surprising event, even though it was the first such trip by an Israeli prime minister in 22 years. For the past several years, Netanyahu has been saying that Israel has unofficial relations and cooperation […]
The death of Stan Lee at the age of 95 on November 12 reminds us of the outsized role of American Jews in the development of low to middlebrow cultural industries such as comic books and Hollywood films in the 20th century. Born Stanley Martin Lieber in 1922 in New York City, the son of […]
Dramatic reunions are the stock-in-trade of We’ll Meet Again, the PBS series hosted by Ann Curry. In the latest installment, Surviving the Holocaust, which will be broadcast on Tuesday, November 20 at 8 p.m. (check local listings), two Jewish men discover the power of friendship. Benjamin Lesser, a Polish Jew from Krakow, is a survivor […]
For as long as I’ve been teaching university courses on nationalism, the literature in the field has contrasted civic and ethnic nationalism. The former was seen as liberal and inclusive, while the latter, in which sovereignty was based on ethnic self-determination, was viewed somewhat suspiciously. It had, some felt, the potential of veering off into […]
Is there a child who has not read the books of the late British author Roald Dahl? Talented and prolific, he wrote such classics as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and The Witches, both of which were read by millions of children, including my two daughters. Dahl’s books, having been translated into numerous languages, have […]
World War I was, without a doubt, the costliest mistake ever made by international leaders. It dragged on for four years and cost some 16 million lives. It also destroyed the European political order, bringing four dynasties to their knees, as the Austro-Hungarian, German, and tsarist Russian empires all collapsed, along with the Ottoman Empire. […]
The founder of the modern Turkish state, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, died eight decades ago, on November 10, 1938. But is his legacy now being buried alongside him in his Ankara mausoleum? Ataturk, known originally as Mustafa Kemal, built the Turkish Republic on the ruins of the decayed Ottoman Empire, which was defeated and stripped of […]