In assessing my own liberation, I recall a conformity that feels terrifyingly familiar today
Newly discovered oral histories and memoirs depict horrifying Jewish experiences of Nazi brutality that were silenced and erased under Soviet rule
Journalism doesn’t have to stifle the truth in the service of fashionable causes and personal narcissism. It’s a choice.
How the demise of the Soviet dictator changed the history of basketball in Israel and gave my father’s famed jump shot an unexpected role in Cold War politics
How Russian Jewish socialists found their cause in Communism, in an excerpt from ‘The Spy Who Changed History’
Rokhl’s Golden City: This week in 1952, five Yiddish poets were executed in the Soviet Union. How have their deaths been framed since then?
For the crime of acknowledging Jewish identity, the committee’s members were killed in a Stalinist pogrom
How a political fantasy became an excuse for genocidal anti-Semitism
Stalin-victim Dovid Bergelson’s ‘The End of Everything’ is about the demise of Eastern European Jewish life
Victor Sebestyen’s engaging ‘Lenin’ and Anne Applebaum’s meticulous ‘Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine’ help explain why a century later the central amorality of the unfulfilled Utopian ideal is still with us
Liberty and servitude in the new philo-czarist age
On his 98th birthday, the sad story of one writer’s struggle with the bullying from within his own political party
The BLM movement is spreading the libel that the Jews of Israel practice genocide. Self-hating Jews, once again, poison whatever they touch.
As Joshua Rubenstein’s new ‘The Last Days of Stalin’ makes clear, an empire that sows fear reaps it
My father used to share his harrowing childhood memories every year at the Seder. Now I make sure his memories will survive.
Jews have lived in the area since ancient times, and leaders from Catherine the Great to Stalin encouraged their settlement there
A new history and film remind amnesiac Russia of the individual lives shattered and disfigured by Stalinist oppression
The strange, fascinating story of Martha Dodd