Europe

Jews, Communism, and Espionage

In the history of the American Left, Jews have been disproportionately represented—disproportionately, that is, relative to their share of the American population. At the extremes, they have also been active participants in what has sentimentally been called the "romance" of American Communism.

One Woman Army

Andrei Sakharov, the great nuclear physicist and human-rights campaigner, had been dead for two years by the time I came to his Moscow apartment in the early summer of 1991. Elena Bonner, his widow, was there, still defiantly at war with the faceless foe that had slaughtered her family, exiled her and her husband, slandered her Jewish name, and lied about it all.

The Tourist’s Dilemma

On the southwest coast of Albania on the Ionian Sea, opposite the Greek island of Corfu, beneath the modern town of Saranda, lies the ancient city of Onchesmos. That ancient city had a synagogue.

The Russian Wave

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, some one million Jews have come to Israel from the former Soviet Union (FSU), enlarging the country's population by 25 percent and forming the largest concentration in the world of Russian Jews.  They have left their mark in almost every walk of life. And yet, as a group, they are still something of a mystery.

From the Four Corners

Are most Jews white? The impression that this is so is partially the result of the calamitous and decimating events of the 20th century, in which the great centers of Europe were lost to Nazi genocide while those of the Middle East and North Africa were lost to Islam.

Sympathy for the Devil

Occupying a place of particular infamy in Jewish collective memory is an 18th-century serial apostate, sexual deviant, messianic pretender, and chameleonic charlatan. His name was Jacob Frank.

Holocaust without End

Sixty-six years after the end of World War II, the Holocaust remains one of the central puzzles of human history. For Jews, the imperative is clear: to remember and to encourage others to remember. But remember what? Has the earnest dedication of both Jews and non-Jews to seek the meaning of the event and absorb its lessons ended by emptying it of meaning and lessons alike?

Israel: The Miracle

The state of Israel is the product of more than 4,000 years of Jewish history. "If you want to understand our country, read this!" said David Ben-Gurion on the first occasion I met him, in 1957. And he slapped the Bible. But the creation and survival of Israel are also very much a 20th-century phenomenon.

Crimes of Communion

Two years ago, a Muslim reporter for the Malaysian magazine Al Islam attended a Catholic mass in Kuala Lumpur with a companion, surreptitiously took communion, and put the wafer in his mouth, only to spit it out later. The May 2009 issue of Al Islam featured a cover photograph of the soggy, partially-eaten wafer—to the horror of local church authorities.

Calibrating Darkness

A child survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto and then of Auschwitz and Majdanek, Henry Tylbor (1929–2009) eventually settled in New York where he wrote and taught. A polymath, and fluent in several languages, he was especially interested in the fields of linguistics, neuropsychology, the sociology of culture, and their intersections. The present work of autobiographical fiction is among the manuscripts left at his death. In observance of Holocaust Remembrance Day, it appears here for the first time.—The Editors