Over 2 million Ukrainians have fled their country in the 14 days since the aggressive Russian invasion began, creating the fastest refugee crisis in modern history. Ukraine’s neighbors — such as Poland, Hungary, Moldova and Belarus — have been the first destination for most of these refugees, as the rest of the world watches in…
Read this article in Yiddish. Transatlantic Russian Jewishness: Ideological Voyages of the Yiddish Daily Forverts in the First Half of the Twentieth Century Gennady Estraikh Academic Studies Press, $119, 354 pp In the history of American journalism, the Forverts is a genuine outlier. Over the course of the first half of the last century, the…
In the dark days of the Cold War, photographer Bill Aron, the son of a Russian émigré to Philadelphia, traveled to the Soviet Union. In Moscow, Leningrad, and Minsk, he took portraits of refuseniks— Soviet Jews who were demanding their freedom— as well as photographs of the Jewish synagogues and those worshipping there. Starting Nov….
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…
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