Sixty years ago this week, for the first time in human history, one of our species ventured beyond the atmosphere. That man was Yuri Gargarin, a young Soviet cosmonaut who manned the Vostok 1 spacecraft. On April 12, 1961, he became the first human being to orbit the planet. Despite rumors to the contrary, Gargarin…
This week, 33 years ago, I stood on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. for the first time in my life, amid 250,000 American Jews and allies, listening to the legendary refusenik Natan Sharansky speak. “No missiles and tanks, no camps and prisons can extinguish the candle of freedom,” he told the throngs of people….
Generation Z and Millennials, born between the early 1980s and the early 2010s, are having tough conversations with their parents, siblings, children and friends as America reckons, once again, with issues of police violence, privilege and white supremacy. They use FaceTime, Zoom, text message, email and the kitchen table. They talk about articles, news clips,…
NEW YORK (JTA) — The Genesis Prize Foundation has announced that Natan Sharansky, a Jewish Refusenik, prolific leader in the Soviet Jewry emigration movement and former Israeli politician, will be awarded the 2020 Genesis Prize. Natan Sharansky will be honored in Jerusalem on June 18, 2020. The Genesis Prize, dubbed the “Jewish Nobel,” was started in…
The skeleton of the unknown warrior lay beneath the courtyard of a ninth-century Czech castle, one hand on the pommel of an iron sword. 1,000 years after his death, his life became the subject of speculation in the emerging field of race science — with potential global consequences. Two great powers strained to link the…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. And in English February 21, 2018. The Forward is republishing April 9, 2019 in honor of Robeson’s 121st birthday. The American singer Paul Robeson is mostly remembered today for his hauntingly beautiful bass voice, his groundbreaking career as an actor and his political activism and involvement in…
It’s 1988. My Dad and my teenage self are in our tiny Zhiguli car, stuck at a railway crossing in my Siberian home town of Novosibirsk. The road is narrow, the pavement is full of potholes. As the traffic begins to move, our car stalls in front of a massive Kamaz truck coming in the…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. It’s not every day that a manuscript gets discovered in an attic, let alone a complete book written by a distinguished Yiddish author. Well, in the world of Yiddish, where even published books are often relegated to synagogue basements, occasions like these are not entirely unusual. Nonetheless,…
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