On Sunday, March 1, 1953, Joseph Stalin’s longtime maid, Matryona Petrovna, found him lying on the floor in his library. He was unconscious and his night clothes were drenched in urine. The supreme leader of the Soviet Union had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and was at death’s door. Petrovna quickly alerted his guards, who promptly […]
Terrorism is the scourge of our times. We live in a dangerous and uncertain epoch, when jihadists rake restaurants with gunfire, suicide bombers detonate explosive vests and terrorists plant bombs aboard airplanes. Since the horrific events of September 11, 2001, when 19 Arabs commandeered three American commercial airliners and ruthlessly crashed them into the World Trade […]
In his prime, from the late 1960s to the opening years of the 21st century, Seymour (Sy) Hersh was one of the great investigative reporters of our times. A dogged journalist with a nose for news, he uncovered the 1968 My Lai massacre in Vietnam, which earned him the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting, […]
Politicians tend to be very mindful and careful in public settings. Being on their best behavior, they strive for political correctness, avoiding comments or gestures that might be deemed offensive or inappropriate. Germany’s vice chancellor, Sigmar Gabriel, a Social Democrat, dispensed with these weighty calculations during a recent election campaign event in Lower Saxony as about […]
Weimar, a pleasant city in the eastern state of Thuringia, is where the tangled and irreconcilable strands of Germany’s history meet abruptly. Although Weimar was the birthplace of the short-lived Weimar Republic, Thuringia was a bastion of the Nazi movement, having been the first state in Germany where two Nazi officials, Wilhelm Frick and Fritz […]
Islamic State, the jihadist organization which has cut a swath of death and destruction across the Middle East and Europe, fully exploits social media to recruit new recruits. Thousands of Muslims and Muslim converts from around the world have been brainwashed by its postings on the Internet. Having been seduced by its radical Islamic message, they’ve […]
I was disappointed, though not really surprised, by the news that the 19th century villa of Yechezkel Sasson, in central Baghdad, was recently demolished. Sasson, who was usually known as Sir Sassoon Eskell, was the scion of a distinguished Iraqi Jewish family and one of the founders of modern Iraq. Along with T.E. Lawrence, Gertrude […]
A month has passed since the July 15 failed coup in Turkey, and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has consolidated his power like never before. Indeed, not since the days of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the father of the modern Turkish Republic, has any figure dominated the country for as long as Erdogan has. Fethullah Gulen, a […]
Ever since the ancient Olympic Games were revived in 1896 by Baron Pierre de Coubertin of France, they’ve been organized around the exemplary principles of mutual understanding, tolerance, friendship and fair play. As 11,000 athletes from around the world converged on Rio de Janeiro for this summer’s games, I gamely hoped that these hallowed principles […]
The place Israel occupies in the consciousness of the American Jewish community has, alas, become a contentious issue. It is not exactly what early Zionist ideologues had in mind when they dreamed of a Jewish state in Palestine, the ancestral home of the Jewish people. Dov Waxman, an American academic, advances this thesis in his […]