Jews live in a world of code – words that say one thing and mean something entirely different to the initiated. Religion, nationality, ethnicity, Zionism, anti-Zionism and antisemitism, intersectionality, racism, tikkun olam, peace – alone or next to “process” – Holocaust and holocaust all mean to the speaker what they mean to the speaker. What […]

Start at the end. Elon Musk finalized the purchase of Twitter in October 2022; the book was published in 2023. Two things becomes clear as you read: First, Twitter/X’s financial troubles mirror the troubles of all of Musk’s purchases and inventions; there is always a steep learning and profitability curve. The final accounting hadn’t happened […]

The upheaval in parts of our country makes the idea of a beach vacation even more compelling than usual. But you can’t leave your concerns behind entirely, so take these books off your shelf and look for the best ways forward. Each has a longer review in an issue of inFOCUS Quarterly (date supplied). But […]

There are two morals in this excellent book: For the Arabs, both states and non-state actors: if you encourage, venerate, exalt, hallow, stoke, reinforce, arm, and pour accelerant on violence, when you actually go into battle, you’d better win. When you don’t, responsibility for the destruction is yours and only yours. o Submoral for the […]

The civilized world was appalled by October 7 … for about 24 hours. Then the “pro-Palestinian” demonstrations began, primarily on northeastern American college campuses and in large Eastern cities – both with rather large populations of Jewish residents. In London, more than 100,000 marchers called for the destruction of the Jewish state. In Paris, tens […]

This is the political philosophy class you didn’t take in college; actually, it’s probably better than the political philosophy class you didn’t take in college. Conservatism: A Rediscovery by Yoram Hazony provides lots of information, draws very disconcerting conclusions, and asks disturbing questions – much of it politically incorrect by today’s definition. Which is the […]

It takes a fairly long introduction to get to Danger Zone by Hal Brands and Michael Beckley because China—in spite of or because of Russia’s war in Ukraine—has become a pivotal foreign and defense issue for both the American left and the American right. So, the bottom line first: buy Danger Zone, read it, worry […]

Israel’s 75th anniversary is a good time to review our book reviews and make one essential addition to your library. The Routledge Atlas of the Arab-Israeli Conflict by Martin Gilbert. Maps. Brilliant, necessary, non-political, thought-provoking, and “aha!” moment-provoking maps. Don’t have another argument about Israel with anyone without bringing your atlas. You will win every […]

“Indispensable” should not be confused with correct – or capable.  An “indispensable nation” should never be confused with a country that always does the right thing or does it well. That said, Robert Lieber’s Indispensable Nation is probably an indispensable book. First, the downside. Published early in 2022, it misses the Russian invasion of Ukraine […]

Kenneth Timmerman, Jason Greenblatt, and Manning Rubin have probably never met. But they share characteristics that make them quintessential Americans. They are willing to challenge conventional wisdom – Timmerman by the American left and America’s European allies, Greenblatt by America’s Middle East “peace processing community,” and Rubin by his upbringing as a small town American […]

There are two books inside The New Rules of War by Sean McFate. One explains the failure of the United States to win a single war since 1945. That book is intriguing and worth pondering. The second one makes suggestions for the re-organization of the U.S. military to fight the wars of the present and […]

One ideological goal that has animated foreign policy decision-making over the past three U.S. administrations has been a desire to retreat from “forever wars.” For Israel, such a fantasy-driven ambition is impossible. While she neither seeks nor initiates conflict, Israel has, since her founding, been engaged in never-ending war. It wasn’t until the Abraham Accords […]

Chalk up one enormous, smashing political victory for President Joe Biden and his administration: the imposition of mask and vaccine mandates on the American people in defiance of a number of judicial rulings has moved the discussion of COVID-19 away from what it is, how it got here, who covered it up, and who paid […]

The movement is:  Universal: Dealing with presumed ends of collectives – class, race, history. Teleological, or depersonalized: Not deriving from the aspirations of concrete persons but constituting the “destiny” of some collectivity. Final: Replacing flux with stability. The permanent ordering of the world, the thousand-year Reich, the end of history. Comprehensive: Involving everyone (and) all […]

Take an Iranian to the beach. Take several. Throw in the CIA, State Department, Presidents from FDR to Carter, and shake well. Swallow and digest. These three books will remind you how Shah Reza Pahlavi lost the Peacock Throne (it was a much longer and more interesting process than you might think), how the soap […]

Some books are actually two books. You can read them twice, or buy two copies, or take two sets of notes. The Kennedys in the World: How Jack, Bobby, and Ted Remade America’s Empire by historian Lawrence J. Haas is one of those. Both books are excellent, but one takes a LOT of patience. Haas, […]

If 2020 was, in the memorable words of Queen Elizabeth II, “annus horribilis,” then Supreme Disorder by Ilya Shapiro is a book for 2021. This fascinating history of the Supreme Court and its Justices, and thoughtful exposition of the current and possible future shape of the Court, and the nature of its controversies through the […]

I admit it. I read Appendix II first, and I’m pretty sure you will too. When the book is subtitled “Rivalries in the White House from Truman to Trump” and the Appendix is called “White House Nicknames,” you have to go there. You will be rewarded. Hamas, Yoda, Keyser Soze, Nurse Ratched, Fat Kraut, and GK […]

Are Americans ruled or governed? Before you get to the excellent Young Patriots by Charles Cerami (published in 2005 and still definitely a book for 2020), read the fictional, but very real, A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007) by Khalid Hosseini. Readers follow the (mis)fortunes of two Afghan women from the time of King Zahir Shah […]

I admit it. I read Appendix II first, and I’m pretty sure you will too. When the book is subtitled “Rivalries in the White House from Truman to Trump” and the Appendix is called “White House Nicknames,” you have to go there. You will be rewarded. Hamas, Yoda, Keyser Soze, Nurse Ratched, Fat Kraut, and GK […]

Jews live in a world of code – words that say one thing and mean something entirely different to the initiated. Religion, nationality, ethnicity, Zionism, anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, intersectionality, racism, tikkun olam, peace – alone or next to “process” – Holocaust and holocaust all mean to the speaker what they mean to the speaker. What […]

Ronald Reagan famously observed that “freedom is never more than one generation from extinction. We didn’t hand it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected and handed on for them to do the same ….” In The Utopian Conceit and the War on Freedom, Juliana Geran Pilon brilliantly shows us [...]

The setup: Muslim countries support and sponsor terrorists who kill, capture, hold for ransom, or enslave non-Muslims. Part of it is for profit – the Muslim countries don’t do much in the way of commerce; part of it is religious – Christian and African non-Muslims are fair game in pursuit of Islamic hegemony. Western countries […]

If you think of beach reading as fluffy romance novels with a margarita on the side, these books are not for you. But if you think of beach reading as an opportunity to slow down, learn something, and examine your beliefs without social media interruptions, you’re in luck. Here are four books for your vacation […]

Economics was dubbed “the dismal science” by historian Thomas Carlyle not, as some think, regarding Thomas Malthus’s bleak view of a future balance of population and resources. It was, rather, Carlyle’s belief that slavery was a more moral institution than the free market for slaves and people of color. He was calling John Stuart Mill’s […]

This is a book about past wars. No, it’s a book about present wars. No, actually, it’s a book about future wars. Or it’s a book about your imagination.  Every War Must End by the late Fred Charles Iklé is a book for considering war – this one, that one, and the one we haven’t […]

Sex matters. Really. It does. Sex matters.  But Sex Matters: How Modern Feminism Lost Touch with Science, Love and Common Sense by Mona Charen is not exactly about sex. Really. It’s not. OK, it is about sexes, two of them, and their differences—and differences matter. It is also about culture—and culture matters. But mostly, it […]

What happened to the Europe Americans loved to love? Ancient and modern, “like us” but not too much, clean, good food, low-crime, democratic, and friendly. Was it ever so? Was that view from Sorrento a scrim to cover something much less inviting? Was the post-WWII period just an interlude in a longer history that, while […]

Simon Sebag-Montefiore brings impeccable credentials to the monumental task of writing Jerusalem: The Biography. A history Ph.D. from Cambridge, he has been a banker and a foreign correspondent reporting on, among other events, the fall of the Soviet Union. He is also the great-great-nephew of Sir Moses Montefiore, the international financier who was an extraordinary philanthropist, […]

Some things are just too unpleasant to contemplate, too far in the future, or too complicated to demand attention. Or too scary. Or conflict with other things we know – or think we know. A North Korean nuclear attack on an American island would be one of those. An Iranian attack on Israel would be […]

Books should generally be read as stand-alone. Read them, learn something, and move on. The Invention of Russia by Arkady Ostrovsky, however, cannot be read alone, because as useful as it is, it is enormously (though not quite fatally) limited by the absence of the Soviet Jewry movement and American government policy in the narrative […]

Shall We Wake the President, by former Deputy Secretary of Health and Human Services Tevi Troy, subtitles itself Two Centuries of Disaster Management. The title is a bit of a fraud. Yes, examples of presidential leadership or lack thereof are highlighted across the chapters. President Lyndon Johnson’s reaction to the Watts riots, President George W. […]

This year marks the half-century anniversary of the 1967 war against Israel that shattered Arab hopes for an immediate annihilation of the Jewish state. But Israel’s stunning military victory on the battlefield did not bring peace to that historically contested birthplace of the Abrahamic faiths. Snatching a diplomatic victory from the jaws of his ignominious […]

Read Ike’s Gamble twice – once as history and once as metaphor. The temptation is to insert “Obama” for “Eisenhower” and read on, but if you do, you will miss Michael Doran’s fascinating look at the general-turned-president and the politics of the time in which he served. Retrospectively, Americans tend to think of the mid-1950s […]

“Never Again” is a pledge of Jewish defiance; Israel is the embodiment. If one is an optimist, “Never Again” is a way for the European community to verbalize that it understood the magnitude of its crimes. But Rwanda is proof – if proof is needed – that the world still contains a lethal mix of […]

If you think World War II ended in 1945, Harry & Arthur: Truman, Vandenberg and the Partnership that Created the Free World is a book for you. Taking readers through the politically, economically, socially, and militarily difficult wars that continued after VE Day, Harry & Arthur is also a well-crafted, sympathetic look at a time […]

This book will make you cry. Or stamp your feet or beat your head against a wall. The narrative is familiar. Israel, a (once) poor country in the middle of an arid space, surrounded by enemies, finds a way to make the desert bloom. Then, Israel finds a way to extend what it learned about […]

After 9/11, Americans learned a lot about the Arab/Muslim world: the divide between Sunnis and Shiites; secular and religious – including the secular anti-Assad rebels and the religious jihadists in Syria; Arabs and Persians; and nationalists and pan-Arabs. We learned that President Bush created ISIS by invading Iraq and that President Obama created ISIS by […]

How Do You Divide Up the Past? Why go back and read a book whose locus is outside the Middle East/Persian Gulf region and written before most of the current crises were crises? Because politicians have treated the disintegration of borders in the Middle East and the bloodcurdling advance of ISIS as previously unseen phenomena, […]

China’s Context and America’s You want to root for a book written as a mea culpa for forty years of government service in which the author provided what he now considers bad advice. You particularly want to root for it when it provides something of a corrective for that advice. And even more when it […]

“Sticks and Stones” Friends and supporters are pleased when pro-Israel information appears in the press or social media. They spread it around and hope it will take some of the edge off the growing swamp of nasty charges and commentary about Israel as an “apartheid” state, or a criminal enterprise, or even a Nazi-like regime. […]

Grading Presidents “Whether one agrees with his conclusions or not…” “I doubt many readers will agree with all of his arguments – I don’t…” “You may disagree with him at times, as I did…” That’s three out of the four book jacket blurbs on Aaron David Miller’s new book, The End of Greatness: Why America […]

Ending the Cold War Without A Bang Who won the Cold War? It’s not a question that arises about World War II, the Napoleonic Wars or the American Civil War. But when the Cold War, communism, and the Soviet Union disappeared without a shot, pundits had a free hand theorizing precisely which act by which […]

What America Never Sees Perhaps with the withdrawal of American focus from the Middle East, Southwest Asia, and South America, what remains is for the international community to focus on North Korea. With a few exceptions—notably Claudia Rosett of FDD, and AEI’s John Bolton—North Korea has been largely ignored until recently, showing up mainly as […]

One Slice of the Iraq War Americans, by a fairly wide margin, tell pollsters that the Iraq war “wasn’t worth it.” This reflects, perhaps, an isolationist sentiment and desire to ignore a divisive and painful episode—a public more interested in “cocooning” than in foreign policy. The public can turn away and does. Policymakers and analysts, […]

It takes a certain chutzpah to write a book that announces something will—or won’t—happen, and that if it does or does not happen the world will look considerably different than it does today—or not. This is not like predicting snow for Thursday. But Ilan Berman’s Implosion: The End of Russia and What it Means for […]

Fear of Terrorism Versus the Loss of Freedom Exploding expenditures. Indefinite expansion of the Department of Defense. An unprecedented fear of an enemy that could strike anywhere, anytime without warning. These are no longer the results of two embattled superpowers waging a Cold War. This is the rise of the new American security state. This […]

History is Only Inevitable in Retrospect Asking readers not to think about World War II in a book about the rise of Hitler is a tall order. But if you can read the public and private correspondence of American diplomats and journalists in Berlin between the wars as they were written—as contemporaneous commentary—Andrew Nagorski’s Hitlerland […]

Two Books and an Agenda The Western temptation to view the Middle East and North Africa as part of the “Muslim World,” of which the “Arab World” is a subset, makes politics simpler but does a disservice to what has historically been a multi-cultural, religious, and ethnic region. It also provides cover for the systematic […]

Four Years of Idealism It has been a bumpy road in the Middle East during the course of Barack Obama’s term in office. Nearly two years ago the Arab uprisings began in Tunisia and spread throughout the Middle East and North Africa, in some cases tossing decades-old dictatorships aside. A year ago America’s war in […]

If you think you’ve read enough Holocaust-related literature, and if you think there isn’t anything left that can upset you, buy IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black. It is at many levels terrible, filthy, and disgusting (other than the author, there is only one hero in the whole 592 pages), but it is an […]

Wanted: Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards As the U.S. and its Western allies ramped-up sanctions against Iran in recent years, one group in particular was targeted: the Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution (Sepah-e Pasdaran-e Enqelab-e Eslami). Commonly referred to in the U.S. as Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Sepah (army), or Pasdaran […]

Walk With Caution, Washington Mobs of people hit the streets of the Middle East and remained there through the last day of 2011—the year that may go down in history as the most profound for the Arab World since the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in 1924. And no one knows exactly what to make […]

To the Arab Spring, Lessons from Lebanon In the battle between Israel, the Arab states, and Iran, Lebanon’s Fatima Gate has become the front-line. The gate, once a border crossing between Lebanon and Israel, is today padlocked; it has been closed since Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000 after years of holding the area as […]

Change in ‘Palestine’? While not much has changed in the status of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations since 1993, facts on the ground have. From the destruction caused by the second intifada from 2000-04 to Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza in 2005; from Hamas’s victory over Fatah in the first Palestinian elections held in over ten years to Hamas’s […]

Palestine’s Self-Inflicted Catastrophe When it comes to the birth of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the Palestinian narrative has become the most widely repeated version of events: After World War I, Jews began immigrating to areas within Britain’s Mandate of Palestine with the Zionist dream of building a Jewish state. Jewish immigration dramatically increased at the end […]

Retaking the Offensive Against Radical Islam Three years after the September 11, 2001 attacks, the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, better known as the “9/11 Commission,” famously concluded that the most important failure leading up to the attacks was “one of imagination…. We do not believe leaders understood the gravity of […]

The Business of Zionism The modern State of Israel has been many things to many people over the years. A century ago, it was merely a Zionist dream. In 1948, it became the homeland for Jewish people and an inspiration for Jews around the world. Concurrently, however, Israel also became the object of hatred for […]

In the nearly seventeen years since the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993, radical Islamic terror and failed Middle East peace processes have claimed the lives of thousands of Israelis and Palestinians. Ironically, one of the greatest casualties of this conflict has been diplomatic creativity. Today, a common view in Western capitals is that the […]

US President Barack Obama is now offering dangerous regimes an “outstretched hand” in the hopes they will “unclench” their fists. He seeks to shut down the maximum security prison holding hardened terrorists in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In an attempt to mend fences with the Muslim world, Obama even called America “one of the largest Muslim […]

The Palestinian world is not united. Jonathan Schanzer’s new book, Hamas v. Fatah, proves this beyond any reasonable doubt. Schanzer explores the depth of the history and the elevated degrees of tension which evolved into an internal struggle between the religious revolutionary extremist Hamas party and the mainstream Fatah movement which was created by Yasser […]

Fleshler vs. Fleshler “A liberal,” wrote the great American poet Robert Frost, “is someone who can’t take his own side in an argument.” Dan Fleshler, a self-described Jewish liberal, can’t take his side or the other side in his new book, Transforming America’s Israel Lobby. The book is a rambling, largely incoherent and often competing […]

Forty years ago, in assessing the foreign policy direction of the regime of Hafez Assad in Damascus, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency concluded that “[t]he question in regard to Syria’s future… is not whether it will be moderate or radical, but what will be the kind and intensity of its radicalism.” Four decades later, the […]

Unwelcome Back Carter Jimmy Carter does not apologize for the historically inaccurate and inappropriate use of the word “apartheid” to describe the security wall that has effectively prevented Hamas suicide bombers from killing and maiming Israelis in restaurants and discotheques. He does not acknowledge that it has saved countless lives. But this should come as […]

Raymond Ibrahim, an Arabic language specialist at the Library of Congress at the time he wrote The Al Qaeda Reader, has compiled in this book a collection of screeds by al-Qaeda’s top figureheads, Usama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, that reveal in full the deranged world-view that drives the global Islamist terrorist network. Ibrahim’s translations […]

As a new American administration takes office promising renewal of the Middle East ‘peace process,’ and Israel looks to national elections in February 2009, the Palestinians have no real government at all. Bitterly divided between their internal factions, Hamas and Fatah, they maul each other with a savagery that mocks the world’s hopes for a […]

The Battle For Peace What happens when a new US president makes Middle East diplomacy his top foreign policy objective? Former US ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk, a key player in the failed bid for Middle East peace in the 1990s, takes us back to the future to find out. Innocent Abroad is a page-turner. […]

The Devil We Still Don’t Know Iran is waging bloody proxy wars throughout the Middle East. The fighting in the Gaza Strip was only the latest example. Yet, a former CIA officer is calling for the US to “take its medicine and sit down at the negotiating table with Iran” and to treat the Islamic […]

Jonathan Schanzer’s new book, “Hamas Vs. Fatah,” is an account of the infighting of the Palestinian people, something that the mainstream media generally ignores. His book is detailed, easy to read and incredibly informative. Mr. Schanzer sets out to tell the news behind the headlines and to explain why a peace agreement with Israel has […]

Hitler’s ‘Grossmufti von Jerusalem’ For the better part of a century, violence against Jews has arguably been the top export of the Palestinian people. True, they have olives and citrus, but ask any man on the street what the Palestinians are best known for, and you are likely to hear “suicide bombings” or “rockets.” While […]

Within months of the stunning electoral victory that heralded the rise of Hamas atop the Palestinian Authority, two known apologists for the Islamist, terrorist organization brought forth strikingly similar sympathetic histories of Hamas. Both chronicle Hamas’ meteoric rise from a splinter of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1987 to a successful political party in 2006. Both […]

The Palestinian Gambit The Palestinians are at war. But their war is not only against Israel. The two most prominent Palestinian factions, Hamas and Fatah, continue to battle on the streets of Gaza and the West Bank. But the war does not end there. There is also a war for the soul of the Palestinian […]

A Map for the Road Not Taken It is often said that either you are an idealist or a realist. Indeed, these two worldviews almost always clash. But Jerusalem Post deputy managing editor Caroline Glick, an American-Israeli with strong Zionist convictions, somehow embraces both with vigor. This has helped her produce consistently compelling commentary that […]

The Fall Of Noah Feldman Determined to prove that Islamic law (Shari’a) is compatible with democracy, Harvard law professor Noah Feldman is still laboring to fit a square peg into a round hole. Five years ago, I reviewed Feldman’s After Jihad: America and the Struggle for Islamic Democracy in The Jerusalem Post and concluded that […]

Defeating al-Qaeda will require more than a military strategy that attacks the core the group’s top leaders. Even if the military were to eliminate Usama bin Laden and Ayman az-Zawahiri tomorrow, the world’s most dangerous terrorist organization would continue to wreak havoc. Al-Qaeda can do this because it can rely on a large peripheral network […]

The Domestic Front “Norman Podhoretz’s new book, World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism, is a hate-filled, anti-American book of the first order,” wrote former CIA analyst Michael Scheuer on the website antiwar.com. According to Scheuer, who has become a poster child for criticism of the neoconservative movement, “Podhoretz hates every American who does […]

PROVING A NEGATIVE Honoring Those Who Prevented Another 9/11 If you like Michael Moore movies, don’t buy Ronald Kessler’s newest book. It does not heap scorn upon President George W. Bush. It does not inspire panic over “spy programs” that trample Americans’ civil liberties. Nor does it sneer at American patriotism. Kessler’s book celebrates the […]

In his new book, Dennis Ross, former US special envoy to the Middle East under president Bill Clinton and point man for the Oslo peace process in the 1990s, asserts that statecraft “has been missing” in America’s foreign policy in recent years. Ross defines statecraft as the strategic use of “every asset or military, diplomatic, […]

A New Weapon in the Arsenal In The War of Ideas: Jihadism Against Democracy, Professor Walid Phares’ historical perspective on the growth of the modern jihadist ideology and its offensive against the West, America may have found a new weapon in the war for hearts and minds against radical Islam. This book has the potential […]

Here we go again: yet another American “scholar” who apologizes for an Islamist terrorist group that exists first and foremost to murder, maim and destroy. With Hezbollah: A Short History, Augustus Richard Norton, a Boston University professor of international relations and anthropology, has joined the ranks of dozens of US academics who inexplicably teach the […]

Middle East Corleones Which Middle Eastern country is like a Mafia family with a seat at the United Nations? It might seem like there could be multiple answers but there’s really only one: Syria. Now we have “The Truth about Syria,” by Barry Rubin, to explain how the ruling Assad family is not only a […]

Jeruslaem of (Dore) Gold Jerusalem has long been a lightning rod for conflict among the three monotheistic faiths. For thousands of years, its wheat-colored dust has been drenched with the blood of loyal defenders of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Wearing the hats of historian, archeologist, theologian and political analyst – and wearing them well – […]

Freezing Terror What was the first strike against terrorism following the attacks of 9/11? If your answer relates to the U.S. military response to al Qaeda in Afghanistan, think again. According to former Undersecretary of the Treasury John Taylor, the “first shot in the global War on Terror” happened just two weeks after 9/11 when […]

The Unlikely Imperialists The transformation over the past decade of the intellectual framework in which U.S. power and influence are understood by some of our leading thinkers has been nothing short of astonishing. Shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall, for example, Yale’s Professor Paul Kennedy was warning against American “imperial overstretch” in his […]