The late Gertrude Himmelfarb, in her 1994 essay “On Looking into the Abyss,” needed only two sentences to diagnose the intellectual ills of our dehumanized age. “The beasts of modernism,” she wrote, “have mutated into the beasts of postmodernism —…
When the British diplomat Robert Ker Porter arrived in the Persian city of Ispahan, having ventured there from St. Petersburg in 1817 to explore the vestiges of ancient Babylonia, and then to follow the route of Xenophon’s Katabasis, he could…
The ongoing and increasingly well-documented enormities being perpetrated in Xinjiang, where the Chinese authorities have subjected the indigenous Uighur and Turkic Muslim populations to mass incarceration, constant surveillance, mosque demolition, forced ingestion of pork and alcohol, forced abortions, and even…
When President Donald Trump described the Washington, D.C. headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Investigation as “terrible” and “one of the ugliest buildings in the city,” as he reportedly did in the mid-summer of 2018, one could be forgiven for…
Standing amidst the bustle of Trier’s central Hauptmarkt, one soon senses the immense weight of history that exerts itself upon the environs. To the north squats the forbidding Porta Nigra, with its roughly hammer-hewn ironstone, while to the south looms…
On the morning of July 10, 1941, the Jewish inhabitants of Jedwabne, a modest town nestled in the marshy Podlaskie Voivodeship of northeastern Poland, found themselves forced from their homes and into the Market Square, where they were set to…
On the morning of July 10, 1941, the Jewish inhabitants of Jedwabne, a modest town nestled in the marshy Podlaskie Voivodeship of northeastern Poland, found themselves forced from their homes and into the Market Square, where they were set to…
The timeworn synagogue of Alqosh, nestled at the base of the Bayhidhra Mountains in the governorate of Nineveh, is one of Iraq’s few remaining Jewish houses of prayer. Vegetation has reclaimed the courtyard, and the outbuildings have been repurposed as…
A national conscience stricken by collective guilt is not easily assuaged. For all the palliative steps that can be taken, from reparation programs and documentation centers to memorial gardens and mea maxima culpae, the blot invariably remains, like an ancient…
The contemporaneous conflicts in the Levant and Ukraine have transformed the Mediterranean and Black Seas into vast bleeding bowls, their basins awash with the unstaunched effluence of prolonged internecine strife. All too common are the epiphenomena of mass graves and…