Bulgaria, I reflected as I walked back to the hotel, isn’t a country; it’s a near-death experience.

So I close this long reflection on what I hope is a not-too-quaveringly semi-Semitic note. When I am at home, I will only enter a synagogue for the bar or bat mitzvah of a friend’s...

And thus to my final and most melancholy point: a great number of Stalin’s enforcers and henchmen in Eastern Europe were Jews. And not just a great number, but a great proportion. The proportion was...

I have had my mother’s wing of my genetic ancestry analyzed by the National Geographic tracing service and there it all is: the arrow moving northward from the African savannah, skirting the Mediterranean by way...

That’s different. The French know that the English are superior to them and they’re appropriate about it. The Eastern Europeans on the other hand have no sense of place. All that communism has them thinking...

A little of this caviar finds its way to the fish restaurants around Istanbul’s Taksim Square, but the bulk is sent on to the United Arab Emirates to be enjoyed by wealthy Westerners and Arabs...

The people were divided into the persecuted and those who persecuted them. That wile beast, which lives in man and does not dare to show itself until the barriers of law and custom have been...