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…
On the night of April 9, 2015, masked men belonging to an anti-Russian militant group launched an audacious nighttime raid in the northeastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv. Their targets were not pro-Russian partisans, but rather three Soviet-era statues of Bolshevik…
The silver thread of the Dnieper stitches a winding seam through the fabric of the Ukrainian steppes, binding together a variegated national patchwork. Its dark-rolling waters “pierce the stone hills,” as the ancient Tale of Igor puts it, irrigating Ukraine’s…