It’s not exactly a story filled with Jewish particularity, normally the stuff of this column, but the fellow I find myself thinking of this week is Raymond Joseph. He has been in the news because he is Haiti’s ambassador to the United States, and it was Joseph who went on the air to defend his ...

As 2010 begins, I find myself thinking of Ariel Sharon. There has been only a bit of discussion on the anniversary of the stroke that felled him four years ago Monday and left him in the coma in which he remains. Jeffrey Goldberg had a couple of posts on his blog, while Sharon’s defenders are ...

A bit of a brouhaha has erupted regarding Sarah Palin and the Jews. It seems that the former governor of Alaska went on television to promote her new book, Going Rogue, and was asked by Barbara Walters what she thought of Israel’s West Bank settlements. “I disagree with the Obama administration on that,” Palin replied. ...

Next week the world will mark the fall of the Berlin Wall, which took place 20 years ago. It happens that I was there at the time. I think of it as one of the most memorable events I’ve covered in a long newspaper life, though it is not unalloyed. It instructs that in our ...

A wonderful novel could be written about the year 1897. That’s the year of the first issue of the newspaper known as the Jewish Daily Forward, which became a tribune of the idea that Jews could become Americans. It’s also the year in which Theodor Herzl convened at Basel the First Zionist Congress, which stood ...

The latest disclosure in respect of Iran’s work on an atomic bomb—the International Atomic Energy Agency says the mullahs have the technical data needed to make a weapon—has me thinking about what happened in 1981, when Israel sent a flight of American-built warplanes to destroy a reactor that Iraq was building as part of a ...

The journalistic sagacity of Irving Kristol, who died Friday at 89, can be glimpsed in hundreds pieces that he turned out over the years, but the one in which I first came to appreciate his seichel was a column he wrote for The Wall Street Journal about the Argentine newspaper publisher and ex-political prisoner named ...

One day in the fall of 2001, not long after a final salute to the portrait of Abraham Cahan in the lobby of the Forward, I entered Borough Hall in Brooklyn to vote in the New York City mayoral primary. Greeted by a very nice poll watcher, I asked for a ballot that would permit me to vote for Herman Badillo. The lady leafed through the voter registration lists, looked up at me and said: “I’m afraid you can’t do that. You’re registered as a Democrat.” “What?” I exclaimed. “Badillo is a Republican?” She turned her palms up and gave me a look of finality. So it was that at the age of 55, after decades of being set down as a right-wing extremist and arch-collaborator of Robert L. Bartley of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, I actually changed my registration. If I couldn’t vote for Badillo that year, I would be prepared should he ever make another run for high office.

One of the questions at least some of us are wondering about as President Obama returns from vacation is what he is going to do about Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi. He is the Libyan agent who was convicted of bringing down Pan Am Flight 103 in 1982 only to be—in the face of American protests—freed by Scotland and returned home to celebrate with his countrymen. For our country to be so mocked by the British, not to mention the Libyans, is no small thing, and the question is whether Obama is going to let it pass.

Jews this week will be marking the 80th anniversary of the Hebron massacre that began on August 23, 1929. It is one of the most horrible pogroms in all of history. With a new American administration seeking to portray Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria as obstacles to peace, one wonders what would happen—what would ...