Recent Articles
Staying Alive in Wartime Berlin
Ian Buruma has written many fine works of nonfiction, which include books about Spinoza and Churchill. But his book Stay Alive: Berlin 1939-1945 is personal. It is a story of anti-Nazi Germans, mischlings (people of non-Aryan origin), and the odyssey and observations of Buruma’s own father, Leo, who was sent from Holland to work in Germany…
The War and the Election
Last June, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave a press conference at the conclusion of the 12-day war against the ayatollahs’ regime in Iran. He went into great detail about how the Israeli operation had removed “the existential threat of Iran”; how the serried ranks of Iranian nuclear scientists had been liquidated; how factories producing centrifuges…
Jews and Nazi-Soviet Collaboration
■Review of WORLD ENEMY NO. 1NAZI GERMANY, SOVIET RUSSIA, AND THE FATE OF THE JEWSBy Jochen Hellbeck, Penguin Press, 560 pages; $22 Nazis called the Soviet Union “the most powerful Jewish organization in the world.” Hitler viewed the Jews as the guiding force behind Bolshevism, and the preponderance of Jews in its upper echelons – Trotsky, Zinoviev,…
Nigel Farage and the Silence of the Lambs
During the last couple of weeks, President Trump’s helter-skelter ride – from Minneapolis to Venezuela, from Iran to Greenland – has transfixed onlookers around the world. White House acolytes have genuflected amidst a standing ovation on his every word. Europeans have wrung their hands in silence and hoped for a parallel universe. Many concerned Diaspora…
The Nazis and Argentina
Last month, the Argentinian government declassified an official file relating to the Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele. He was known as “the Angel of Death” for his sadistic experiments on prisoners in Auschwitz. The release of documentation came about after pressure from Republicans in the US Senate and indicates that the Argentinian authorities knew exactly…
The Complex Legacy of Margaret Thatcher
Forty years ago, as a member of a delegation to discuss the plight of Soviet Jewry, I met Margaret Thatcher prior to her 1987 visit to meet Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow – someone she said she “could do business with.” She was remarkably informed about the Soviet refuseniks – Ida Nudel, Vladimir Slepak, and Natan…