What Elie Wiesel saw in Moscow on Simchat Torah in 1965
Defying the KGB agents milling around, thousands of Jews tried to get into the great hall of the synagogue
Soviet Union
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Opinion Is Communism Worse Than Nazism?
In the new normal of 2017, in which far-right and far-left militants clash openly in America’s public square, a contentious 20th century debate is newly relevant: is the extreme left as dangerous and repugnant as the extreme right? Should the hammer and sickle be as offensive as the swastika? Was Communism as evil as Nazism…
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Culture Three Cities of Yiddish: St. Petersburg—Warsaw—Moscow
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Three Cities of Yiddish: St. Petersburg—Warsaw—Moscow. Edited by Gennady Estraikh and Mikhail Krutikov. Oxford: Legenda, 2017, 201 pages The British book series “Studies in Yiddish,” published by Legenda (and known among academics as “the Legenda series”), is in my estimation the most important venue for contemporary research…
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Culture This Soviet Avant-Garde Journal Published Some Of The 20th Century’s Greatest Minds
There’s a line in one of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s poem-play “Vladimir Myakovsky” (the young poet was nothing if not confident) that strikes me as among the most ferocious lines ever put to paper: “We will eat this century like meat, we’ll eat our fill, licking the plates!” The oeuvre of Mayakovsky, one of the great early…
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Fast Forward Julia Ioffe Opens Up About What It’s Really Like To Be a Refugee
Being a refugee is no abstract idea for Julia Ioffe, the high-wattage political writer who fled the Soviet Union as a 6-year-old back in 1988. As President Trump’s executive order that temporarily and indefinitely bans immigrants from seven Muslim-majority countries take effect, she published an essay in the Atlantic Sunday that recalls some of those…
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Opinion How Russia Came to America — and Gave Us Trump
I first left the Soviet Union 37 years ago as a teen with my Russian Jewish family, full of excitement about America and freedom; I officially left it again nearly 25 years ago, on the day the USSR was formally dissolved and my birthplace simply became Russia. America fast felt like home. It wasn’t perfect,…
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News Babi Yar at 75—Looking Back, From the Pages of the Forverts
Nazi forces in the Soviet Union committed the Babi Yar massacre 75 years ago, over two days, on September 28 and 29. But like most of the world’s news media, the Forverts published news of the Babi Yar massacre only in 1943, when Kiev, the neighboring city, was liberated by the Red Army. A feature…
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News Babi Yar at 75: How Will Changing Ukraine Remember Infamous Nazi Atrocity?
We stand at the edge and watch a family play with a remote-controlled toy car by a playground that’s inside the ravine. A girl tosses a ball in the air as she walks past a monumental menorah and asks her grandmother, “What’s with the celebration?” as she takes note of the flowers and wreaths placed…
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Holy Ground A Jewish farmer broke ground on a synagogue in an Illinois cornfield. His neighbors showed up to help.
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Opinion I discovered anti-Zionism at the University of Michigan. I’m glad it lives on there
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Culture An Israeli genocide scholar looks to Israel’s history to understand ‘what went wrong’
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Opinion An alarming new battleground in campus fights over Israel
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