More in ‘Benjamin Disraeli’

Daily Beast columnist Simon Doonan thinks the new face of cool is the old face of Benjamin Disraeli, “who, despite a penchant for wearing his hair in Shirley Temple ringlets and sporting canary yellow velvet waistcoats, managed to claw his way to prominence.” More praised by Doonan for his foppish self-indulgences than for his ...

• An op-ed calls for a boycott on Ukraine for institutionalized anti-Semitism. [Haaretz]
• A Jewish student attended a dinner with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, where she was reminded that “behind what could be perceived as a charming attitude lurks a dangerous man with a deadly ideology.” [NYDN]
• Meanwhile, deniers aside, Holocaust survivors still suffer from ...

These are dark times for American conservatives. When they aren’t issuing recriminations at one another for the loss of the White House, they’re resorting to increasingly desperate tactics against the new president. Obama’s international allure, many on the right insist, is at odds with his duty to uphold and defend strictly American interests; his cosmopolitan ...

Daniel Deronda was the last novel George Eliot wrote, and the strangest. When it was published in 1876, Eliot was not just at the height of her fame as a novelist; she was revered as a kind of sage, able to combine the most radical religious and social opinions with an absolute commitment to traditional ...

This election, I’ve been thinking a lot about an unlikely political superstar. He belongs to a historically oppressed minority group, and faced down intense prejudice from a political establishment who never believed a man like him could rise to the top. He skyrocketed to the leadership of his party, bringing down a much more established ...

Benjamin Disraeli, from an 1828 portrait by D. Maclise
At a time when most European Jews lived in abject poverty and weren’t even allowed to vote, Benjamin Disraeli’s career reached stratospheric heights. Intimate with royalty and the elite of British society, he was twice prime minister, and served as leader of the Tory party. Yet, because ...

An undated portrait of Disraeli
By the beginning of 1830, when he was twenty-five, Benjamin Disraeli was tired of England. For three years, he had been suffering from acute depression, brought on by the triple fiasco that marked his entrance into public life. Before he turned twenty-two, Disraeli had lost thousands of pounds in stock-market speculations; ...

“Good news,” I said to my wife, Ilana, as the family sat down for Shabbat lunch. “Charles Murray says that you aren’t genetically stupider than me after all.”
She gave me one of those looks that says, “Take your Y chromosome and go to hell.”
“Who is Charles Murray and how does he know about our brains?” ...