Putin’s Jews

Mina Yuditskaya Berliner, a retired teacher of German, could be forgiven for feeling surprised when one of her former students invited her for tea after almost half a century. Berliner, now 94, hadn’t seen him since she made aliyah to Israel from the USSR in 1973. But in 2005, the former student came to Israel to visit—an official visit, no less, the first ever made by a Soviet or Russian leader.

Book Review // The Crime and the Silence: Confronting the Massacre of Jews in Wartime Jedwabne

As a university student in Warsaw in the first half of the 1970s, I used to spend much of my summer vacation hitchhiking around the country. This is how one fine July day I found myself in Jedwabne, a nondescript but beautifully located small town in Poland’s Northeast. Wandering through the meadows and forests, I lost my sense of direction and eventually had to ask a local for the road out of town.