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 [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

50 Years Later a World of Holocaust Memories is Exposed

JERUSALEM POST — April 14, 2006
For most Holocaust survivors coping with life after the war meant forgetting the past placing the memories of lost people and places in a metaphorical box and leaving it shut.
This was what Sala Garncarz did. After five years in seven different labor camps and losing her parents and much of [...]

The Shadow That Never Went Away

FORWARD — March 10, 2006
If the Oedipal complex didn’t exist, we might have to invent it to explain the frustrated, stunted career of Yaacov Herzog. A shadow hovered over him from the day he was born — his father, Isaac Halevi Herzog, was the brilliant chief rabbi of Palestine (and later, Israel) from 1936 to [...]