Modern Times

The Night of the Murdered Poets

On August 12, 1952, thirteen major Soviet Jewish figures were executed for espionage, bourgeois nationalism, "lack of true Soviet spirit," and treason, including a plot to hand the Crimea over to American and Zionist imperialists.

The Challenge of Eilat

In a country where the sky is mostly blue, the southernmost city of Eilat has nonetheless laid claim—with justification—to being Israel's sun capital. Reliably good weather does not, however, solve all problems.

Slaughterhouse Rules

Pending approval by its upper house of parliament, the Netherlands will join Switzerland and a handful of other Western countries in mandating that animals slaughtered for food must first be stunned unconscious, generally by a hammer blow to the skull.

The State of the Arab State

From the Mashriq to the Maghreb, one end of the Arab world to the other, people are contemplating where the six-month-long upheavals that began with the Arab Spring are fated to deliver them. Those with longer memories may recall an earlier experiment at reshaping the political contours of Arab governance.

In the Wake of the Altalena

Ships and their comings and goings have lately been a fixation over at Haaretz, Israel's chief left-wing newspaper. One of the paper's advocacy journalists has been writing enthusiastically about joining up with a pro-Palestinian flotilla that intends to smash Israel's naval blockade of the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip.

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 Osirak Precedent

In May 1981, eight Israeli fighter jets were on the runway waiting for the go-ahead to execute the most daring operation ever undertaken by the Israeli air force: flying more than 1,000 miles east over enemy territory to destroy Osirak, Iraq's nuclear reactor.

Hebrew School

Samson Benderly, one might say, had crusading in his blood. A direct descendant of Jacob Emden, the zealous 18th-century European battler against Sabbateanism, he spent his youth in Palestine before coming to the United States in 1898 with the aim of becoming a physician.

Is Israel’s Labor Party Finished?

What has become of Israel's left-wing Labor Party some five months after its leader, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, abruptly defected to establish his breakaway Atzmaut (Independence) Knesset faction?