More in ‘Communism’

One of the convenient aspects of studying Jewish history is its 3,000-year-old paper trail—the texts and records of the rabbinical and intellectual elite allow us to examine contours of Jewish law and history. But we tend to know less about the lives of average Jews, who didn’t receive much attention in the writings of the ...

Yesterday, the New York Times reported that Arnold Beichman died, at the age of 96, last month. A political journalist, intrepid war correspondent, and finally academic, born to Ukrainian Jews on the Lower East Side in 1913, Beichman followed a well-trod path … except the path was his. Everyone else just walked on it.
That path ...

They don’t make ‘em like Rodney Lester anymore. Lester, who died Sunday at 98, had all the bona fides of what was exceptional about his generation of American Jews: a Brooklyn-born grandson of immigrants, he was a left-wing journalist whose only political obsession was civil rights, and whose only real obsession was baseball. His perch ...

When Leon Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico City by an agent of Stalin, in 1940, the American novelist James T. Farrell took to the pages of Partisan Review to memorialize him. “The life of Leon Trotsky is one of the great tragic dramas of modern history,” Farrell’s obituary began, and it only gets more idolatrous ...

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 ...

Ever since the Polish-born Jewish revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg was murdered nine decades ago, the fate of her corpse has been a favorite historical mystery for her admirers. (Luxemburg led a brief, failed Communist uprising in Germany in 1919.) Now, thanks to a spit sample from an elderly resident of Jerusalem, the mystery may be solved. ...

In The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers, and the Lessons of Anti-Communism, the historian Michael Kimmage offers a rich and detailed account of one of the great intellectual dramas in 20th-century American history: the left’s romance with Soviet Communism, and its painful disillusionment. It is a story that took place long ago, in the ...