They That Were Lost

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW — October 12, 2008
In the eighth century B.C., a hundred years before the Judeans were dropped by the river of Babylon, a different Jewish tribe, the Israelites, were also marched out of their ancient kingdom to begin a long exile. Unlike their Baghdadi brethren who would go on to [...]

Will of Iron, Heart of Stone

FORWARD — August 21, 2008
Golda
By Elinor Burkett
HarperCollins, 496 pages, $27.95.
My moment of eye-openng disillusion with Golda Meir came early on in Elinor Burkett’s new biography of the female premier, titled simply “Golda.” The year was 1950, and Golda Meyerson, as she was then known, was nearing 60 and had just returned from her stint as [...]

Divided Soul

COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW — MARCH/APRIL 2008
Rian Malan’s one and only meeting with J.M. Coetzee took place in the early 1990s. Malan greatly esteemed his fellow South African writer, and when Coetzee won the Nobel Prize in 2003, he declared that the laureate had “described, more truly than any other, what it was to be white [...]

Arrested Development

BOOKFORUM — DECEMBER/JANUARY 2008
The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia
By Orlando Figes
Metropolitan Books, 740 pages, $35

Early in Nadezhda Mandelstam’s astonishing memoir, Hope Against Hope, she remembers the moment when she registered, for the first time, the full horror of life under Stalin. It was not, as one might assume, when she learned that [...]

Hostage to History

FORWARD — September 19, 2007
Terror in Black September: The First Eyewitness Account of the Infamous 1970 Hijackings
By David Raab
Palgrave Macmillan, 288 pages, $24.95.
The Palestinian fedayeen who hijacked David Raab’s plane on September 6, 1970, surely thought they had hit the jackpot. Seventeen-year-old, baby-faced Raab was still so excited from his summer vacation in Israel that [...]

Kissinger, Unearthed

FORWARD — July 25, 2007
Henry Kissinger and the American Century
By Jeremi Suri
Belknap Press, 368 pages, $27.95.
Henry Kissinger is probably going to regret the day in 1979 when he said this: “The convictions that leaders have formed before reaching high office are the intellectual capital they will consume as long as they continue in [...]

Six Days, 40 Years of Controversy

FORWARD — June 1, 2007
The weeks following the Six Day War found Israelis not sure if they were awake or dreaming. Everyone spoke of miracles, of the supernatural forces that had guided the Jewish army to such overwhelming victory. The names of the generals — Rabin, Hod, Sharon, Peled — resounded like the names of [...]

One Man’s Persistent Empathy

FORWARD — April 20, 2007
Once Upon a Country: A Palestinian Life
By Sari Nusseibeh, with Anthony David
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 560 pages, $27.50.
One day, at the end of 1987, Sari Nusseibeh was walking out of a lecture hall at Birzeit University, just having taught his students John Locke’s concepts of liberalism and tolerance, when he was [...]

Review of Primo Levi’s Auschwitz Report

BOOKFORUM — DECEMBER/JANUARY 2007
Auschwitz Report
Primo Levi with Leonardo De Benedetti, Translated by Judith Woolf
Verso 98 pages, $18
In the dark constellation of Holocaust witness, Primo Levi’s voice has always been thought singular. His memoir If This Is a Man, published only two years after the end of his year of slavery at the Monowitz concentration camp [...]

Talking Cure?

FORWARD — October 27, 2006
Prisoners: A Muslim & a Jew Across the Middle East Divide
By Jeffrey Goldberg
Knopf, 320 pages, $25.
The irreducible element at the end of every Israeli-Arab argument is always psychology. Looking at a map, any two reasonable partners could easily delineate the borders. Even the impasses over refugees and settlements, even Jerusalem, seem [...]