On the passing of the great Czech writer and dissident
The collection of essays by disillusioned former communists has been largely forgotten after decades of global popularity. In our age of ideological extremism, it’s well worth revisiting.
Only those who lived in its shadow seem to be worried about contemporary parallels
The Jewish attempt to cancel Israel and Jewish peoplehood
Rokhl’s Golden City: What a dog named Labzik can teach us about communism
Writing off the threat of ‘far-left fascism’ because Trump used the phrase in a speech ignores the deep roots of America’s current revolutionary moment
Newly edited travel journals from 1965 show the poet infatuated and disillusioned with communist Cuba, Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, and Poland
What can American statue-topplers learn from Europe?
The Chinese Communist Party leadership believe they are in the midst of an ‘intense, ideological struggle’ for survival and that to win they must defeat the West
How Jews in Prague and Sofia overthrew their troubled communal leadership with the crumbling of the Soviet bloc
Looking for latkes during the Romanian revolution
On the 30-year anniversary of the Velvet Revolution ending Communism in Czechoslovakia, notes on how to transform a one-party state into a democracy in a matter of weeks
The 30th anniversary of the nation’s liberation is troubled not only by its past but also by its present
How change swept across central Europe 30 years ago this fall
Self-mutilation as a Jewish cultural strategy and the sad history of the Yevsektsiya
A worthy new biography of the late historian Eric Hobsbawm shows the ardent communist in the crucible of the 20th century
How two fundamental pillars of Western thought—classical Greek rationalism and monotheistic Jewish faith—collided in a remote area of the archipelago to produce a short-lived but influential communist
A visit to the only Jewish museum in Albania—Europe’s most Muslim nation and Islam’s most secular
