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 [...]

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 [...]

A Historian-Soldier Bridges His Identities

FORWARD — February 2, 2007
Sitting on a stage in a mahogany-paneled study of the townhouse on Manhattan’s Upper East Side that contains the venerable Council on Foreign Relations, Michael Oren, the historian, was getting frustrated with the questions the standing room-only audience was lobbing at him. He had come to talk about his new book, [...]

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 [...]

Scholars Debate ‘Israel Lobby’ Article

FORWARD — October 6, 2006
John Mearsheimer, the University of Chicago professor who co-authored a controversial article last winter about the power of the “The Israel Lobby,” met his critics head-on last week for a debate before a rowdy audience on the stage of New York’s historic Cooper Union. It was a vigorous exchange, replete with [...]

Reassessing FDR’s Legacy

FORWARD — September 22, 2006
In his counterfactual vision of the United States during World War II, “The Plot Against America,” Philip Roth imagines a world in which Franklin Delano Roosevelt loses the 1940 presidential election to Charles Lindbergh, the famous aviator turned America Firster and Nazi sympathizer. President Lindbergh soon signs a nonaggression pact with [...]

Grasping at Branches in a Search for Mideast Peace

FORWARD — August 18, 2006
Imagine that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could be settled by a misery contest. Each side would be able to pick its most tragic, catastrophic story to go up against the other, and the whole long history could be settled in one no-holds barred, mano a mano fight between two narratives. Who would [...]