The Polish philosopher Jozef Tischner wrote, “When reflected in a crooked mirror, the face of a neighbor is distorted. The neighbor is always worse than we can imagine, he is false, treacherous, evil.” Tischner’s observations may be applied to Louise Steinman, an American Jew of Polish descent for whom Poland was “a black hole, a […]
U.S. President Barack Obama finds himself on the sharp horns of a dilemma following the barbaric beheading of James Foley, an American freelance journalist, on Aug. 19. Foley was the second American reporter since Daniel Pearl to be killed by crazed Islamic radicals. Foley was murdered by Islamic State, an extremist, bloodthirsty outfit bent on […]
Israel and Hamas have resumed fighting, having rejected each other’s irreconcilable demands at fruitless talks in Cairo under the auspices of Egypt. On Aug. 19, eight hours before the latest truce was to have expired, gunmen in the Gaza Strip fired rockets into Israel. In response, the Israeli and Palestinian delegations left Cairo, while Israel […]
It’s hard to believe that American universities, supposedly the havens of enlightenment, were once the nests of bigotry. But that’s exactly the point of Antisemitism on the Campus: Past & Present, published by Academic Studies Press. The first volume of a multidisciplinary series on antisemitism in the United States, this book of 21 essays, edited […]
A lush, palm-fringed island in the southern Indian state of Kerala, Fort Cochin is a cosmopolitan blend of cultures and an oasis of calm. Inhabited by Hindus, Muslims, Christians and Jews, it’s a mirror image of India’s rainbow of ethnic and religious groups. Part of greater Cochin, or Kochi, Fort Cochin faces the Arabian Sea […]
Who could have known? Heinrich Himmler was born into a “normal” German family, yet he would become one of the architects of the Holocaust. “Nothing in Himmler’s childhood and youth, spent in a sheltered, conservative Catholic home typical of the educated bourgeoisie of Wilhelmine Germany, would suggest that someone with clearly abnormal characteristics was growing up […]
Since 1949, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, a body supported by the international community, has spent billions of dollars tending to the humanitarian needs of more than one million Palestinian refugees in the Middle East. The refugees, having been displaced from their homes in 1948 and 1967, certainly require assistance. But should the […]
The demise of Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi in 2011 has led to Islamic militias fighting for control of the country. The overthrow of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein in 2003 has seen the country collapse, as a full-scale insurgency by Sunni Islamists has been mounted against the Shi’ite government in Baghdad. In Syria, a weakened Bashar al-Assad’s regime is […]
In what was an epic failure of intelligence during its most recent war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Israel stumbled upon a cross-border tunnel network of frightening proportions of which it had scant knowledge. The discovery prompted Israeli pundits to speculate whether Hezbollah, Israel’s Shiite enemy to the north, possesses the same array of […]
Joachim Fest’s thoughtful memoirs of his boyhood and youth, Not I (Other Press), transport a reader to a terrible time and a horrible place. Born in Berlin into a conservative Catholic family, Fest was seven years old when Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany. Fest’s father, Johannes, a German patriot and a supporter of the […]