Category: The Western Front

The Jewish population I encountered during my recent month-long tour of Israel was markedly different from anything I had expected. If there are Israeli counterparts to Abe Foxman and Midge Decter, I didn’t meet them. The vast majority of Jews I did meet were Moroccan and Levantine, while most of the security police in the...

A remark I recently overheard on FOX News captured a key difference between Sir Alfred Sherman, whose assessment of the Thatcher years I now have in my hand, and those minicons who float on and off of FOX.  Commenting on the visit of Prince Charles to the United States, one of the news interpreters began...

A book that has failed to go anywhere internationally, contrary to the author’s expectation, is a recent study by a Chilean Jewish academic who teaches philosophy at the University of Berlin, Victor Farías.  His work deals with the youthful thought and career of Salvador Allende, who, between 1970 and 1973, headed the Marxist Government of...

Russell Berman, the Walter A. Haas Professor of Humanities at Stanford, has published a book, Anti-Americanism in Europe, that focuses on European dislike for the United States.  Berman explains that “anti-Americanism has emerged as an ideology available to form a postnational European identity.” In place of the nationalist, anti-immigration mood of the 1990s, anti-Americanism permits...

Agostino Carrino, a Neapolitan legal theorist now associated with the University of Naples Frederick II, has published a series of tracts (available in Italian, German, and French) aimed at the European Union and its claims to legitimacy.  Particularly in his last two works, Democrazia e governo del futuro (2000) and L’Europa e il futuro delle...

My young German friend Karl-Peter Schwarz, a political correspondent for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, sent me an essay last month that was earmarked for his newspaper, about an Italian Christian Democrat and nominee for the post of E.U. commissioner of justice, Rocco Buttiglione.  In early October 2004, the Berlusconi government nominated Buttiglione as part of...

Back in the 1960’s, as a graduate student at Yale, I kept hearing that the Germans had still not confronted their past.  They would do so only when they understood that Hitler, as explained by German leftist historian Fritz Fischer, was not a Betriebsunfall (operational accident) but emerged from Germany’s history, which went in a...

A widely publicized essay, “The Collapse of Globalism and the Rebirth of Nationalism,” by John Ralston Saul, appeared in the March issue of Harper’s.  It is an extended attack on the Enlightenment and its global effects, launched from the multicultural left, which dwells on the happy turn of events that has allowed “positive forms of...

Since the father of the French (and, by now, European) New Right, Alain de Benoist, sent me an inscribed copy of his most recent book, Au-Delà des Droits De L’Homme (Krisis, 2004), I read the text attentively.  Like him, I have wondered why natural rights (now called human rights) have become, in the words of...

On October 3, in an address celebrating the anniversary of German reunification, a Hessian deputy to the German Bundestag and a member of the CDU/CSU steering council, Martin Hohmann, committed a gaffe that led to his removal from his party position five weeks later.  The party leader who justified this sacking, Angela Merkel, complained that...

Having come across several references this spring to a French literary critic, Jean Sévillia, who is criticizing leftist historical reconstructions, I read his two most recent books, Le Terrorisme Intellectuel (2000) and Historiquement correct: Pour en finir avec le passé unique (2003).  An associate editor of Le Figaro magazine, Sévillia makes clear that he is...

A livre à scandale in France this year is a heavily documented work by two veteran freelancers, writer-researcher Pierre Péan and Philippe Cohen, editor of the French satirical publication Marianne.  La face cachée du Monde, which runs over 600 pages, was put out by the very independent press Mille et Une Nuit, over threats of...

In the December 27, 2002, issue of the English edition of Forward, self-described Orthodox Jew David Klinghoffer attacks Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn for his recent book Two Hundred Years Together.  In this historical work, Solzhenitsyn deals with Jews and Russians living side by side from 1775, when Russia came to occupy the heavily Jewish regions of Eastern...

On July 13, the German weekly Junge Freiheit celebrated its 15th anniversary.  This is astonishing, considering the outrages committed against the publication, including the burning of its printing facilities in 1994 and the five-year-long public warning against the paper issued by the provincial government of Nord-rhein-Westfalen for “intimations of a disposition sympathetic to the far...