Essays

Michael Ignatieff moved to Budapest in 2016 to run Central European University (CEU). Instead the Canadian-born author, academic and former politician is fighting for its survival.…
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Just over four months into his administration—at my time of writing—the American president’s assault on the media is worse than we feared. We wondered whether, with the persuasive…
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The Origins of Totalitarianism is on the US bestseller lists, while tweet-size fragments of her thoughts cascade through social media; Hannah Arendt is trending. As with George…
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If you think of nationalism as a disease, a pathology of ideology, it is indicated by common transnational symptoms. Regardless of the country and its history, nationalism always…
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“If you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere.”—Theresa May At roughly 2 a.m. on 24 June 2016, I experienced a deep sense of grief —it felt as if…
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The Jews of Egypt, in the years after Suez, were fond of a punning French joke: “Qui est votre historien préferé? Philon d’Alexandrie.” (Who is your favourite historian? Philo of…
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In June of 1945, Elie Wiesel was one of Buchenwald’s 400 or so surviving orphans recuperating at the Children’s Rescue Society’s château at Écouis. He was 16 years old and he was…
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“As Jewish practice, learning and knowledge diminish over time, my concern is that Holocaust memory is emerging as the dominant feature of Jewishness in America.” So said…
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What was the role of Jews in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956? That can be answered in three words: waiting, seeing, leaving. That, at any rate, is how it was with us and with some…
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When I tell people that I was born in Egypt, they usually remark, “That’s interesting, but didn’t all the Jews leave with Moses?” I reply that I left in 1956 after the second…
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