Antisemitism and Israel

For sixty years, the Anti-Defamation League has been profiling Americans to try to monitor antisemitic beliefs. For the first half century of doing that, they found a fairly steady and ongoing decline in anti-Jewish sentiment….


Review: Pale Horse, by Boris Savinkov

This novel by Russian terrorist icon Boris Savinkov is remarkably similar to his final work, Black Horse, leading one to believe that he chose the titles deliberately. The format is the same: short, dated entries…



Review: The Black Horse, by Boris Savinkov

Boris Savinkov was possibly the most dangerous man in Russia. A leading figure in the Socialist Revolutionary Party’s Combat Organisation, he was the scourge of the Romanovs in their final years. When the tsarist regime…


“Putin has murdered Navalny”

When I studied at university, I had access to reprinted editions of many American left publications. Among them was Labor Action, the weekly newspaper of Max Shachtman’s Workers Party. I have never forgotten the headline…


“Someday this war’s gonna end”

One of the great speeches in Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now” is made by Robert Duvall, playing a somewhat insane U.S. Army colonel in Vietnam. After delivering his oft-quoted “I love the smell of napalm…



Stalin and the angels

Keke would have been so proud. When her son Joseph was growing up in the small, dusty town of Gori, she dreamed that one day he would be a priest. He did eventually study at…