Like most bibliophiles, I was saddened by reports that Islamic militants fleeing Timbuktu had set fire to a library containing irreplaceable medieval Islamic manuscripts. I don’t know whether Michael Covitt, chairman of the Malian Manuscript Foundation, is right to claim…
Prof. Robert Aumann is an Israeli-American game theorist who won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2005. In an interview with an Israeli newspaper in 2010, he described “the blackmailer’s paradox,” and its impact on Arab-Israeli negotiations: “Someone offers Reuven…
About 15 years ago, I served on the staff of a Senator who was an ardent opponent of gun control. Once I asked him why he was so adamantly opposed to any restrictions on gun sales, when even the police…
The current disagreements between the United States and Israel over how best to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons bring to mind an old Jewish joke: In a small town in 19th century Russia, two men brought their complaints to the…
The Neoconservative Persuasion: Selected Essays, 1942–2009By Irving Kristol; Edited by Gertrude Himmelfarb; Foreword by William Kristol (Basic Books, 390 pages, $29.95) ALTHOUGH HE IS largely forgotten today, Albert Jay Nock is a major figure in the history of American conservatism….
The Prime Ministers: An Intimate Narrative of Israeli Leadership By Yehuda Avner (The Toby Press, 730 pages, $29.95) Yehuda Avner is a retired Israeli civil servant who served as an adviser and speechwriter to four prime ministers — Levi Eshkol,…
One of the many unintended consequences of the political crusade for increased homeownership among minorities, and low-income people in general, has been a housing boom and bust that left many foreclosed homes that had to be rented, because there were…
The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers, and the Lessons of Anti-Communism by Michael Kimmage (Harvard University Press, 419 pages, $45) On the face of it, no two American intellectuals in the late 1940s were more dissimilar than Lionel Trilling…