These are the days that Vladimir Putin has been aching for since the end of the Cold War. On Dec. 5, 1989, three weeks after the Berlin Wall was torn down, angry crowds stormed the Dresden Headquarters of the Stasi, the brutal secret police of the Soviet...
By Repps Hudson, Special to the Jewish Light
• Published April 17, 2013
Nearly 43 years ago, at the beginning of the resistance movement of Soviet Jews, Josef Mendelevich was facing 15 years in prison for attempting hijacking of a plane to fly himself and other refuseniks to Sweden and to freedom. He was 22 and in the early...
By Burton A. Boxerman, Special to the Jewish Light
• Published July 25, 2012
Numerous books have been written about Europe in the 1930s prior to the holocaust. In Bernard Wasserstein’s provoking book, “On the Eve, The Jews of Europe Before the Second World War” (Simon and Schuster, 552 pages; $32.50), the author, a Professor...
By Gavin Rabinowitz, JTA
• Published June 20, 2012
CHISINAU, Moldova -- To tour the largely empty Jewish communities of Moldova and its capital, Chisinau -- once known by Jews the world over as Kishinev -- is not to wonder where did all the Jews go but why there are any remaining. Overgrown cemeteries...
By Gavin Rabinowitz, JTA
• Published June 10, 2012
OTACI, Moldova -- After just half an hour the little blue tour bus painted with smiling dolphins died with a smell of something burning, leaving Matthew Bronfman stranded next to a muddy field somewhere in rural Moldova. It was a surreal start to what...
By Michael Berenbaum, JTA
• Published June 4, 2012
LOS ANGELES — President Barack Obama made a simple and very basic mistake when he spoke of Polish death camps during the presentation of a posthumous Medal of Freedom to Jan Karski, a Polish resistance fighter who was among the first to report German...
On the heels of the news about Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng, Charlie Brennan on his morning show Monday on KMOX Radio asked a listener, What should the United States have done if Anne Frank had managed to escape from her secret annex in Amsterdam...
NEW YORK—Regina Spektor has a cold—or as she calls it, “a nondescript New York disease.” The singer is onstage at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York headlining a benefit concert for the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, or HIAS, which helped resettle...
JERUSALEM—With Passover nearing, the Israeli army is embarking on one of its biggest operations of the year.Whether in the field, on a base or with family living abroad, “every last soldier has everything he needs for seder night,” asserts Capt....
NEW YORK -- The outcome of a bitterly fought special election between two Jewish candidates in a southern Brooklyn state Senate district remains uncertain the day after the vote. Democrat Lewis Fidler and Republican David Storobin both claimed victory...
BY ROBERT A. COHN, Editor-in-Chief Emeritus
• Published March 14, 2012
Can we “handle the truth” about the Iran-Israel crisis, or has the debate become so partisan, ideological and acrimonious that it is impossible to agree on even the most basic facts? This piece is an attempt to put into perspective where things...
With Vladimir Putin’s re-election as president of Russia pretty much a foregone conclusion, the question facing Russia was never what would result from last weekend’s election but what would happen after the vote. Thousands of protesters turned out...
