Reading the NY Times online the other day, I was drawn toward a tailored “Recommended for You” item listed to the side of the screen (apparently a benefit of my subscription) about a Palestinian political activist being held in administrative detention, who is on a hunger strike which may lead to his death. This “Lede” blog story makes reference to a historic parallel in Northern Ireland, with the fatal hunger strike of Bobby Sands and other IRA prisoners in 1981, and the fact that a current leader of the IRA’s political arm, Sinn Fein, has called for the Palestinian’s release.
I’m troubled by the practice of administrative detention, but the fact that this individual, Khader Adnan, is evidently a political activist for the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, an extreme terrorist organization with much civilian Jewish blood on its hands, gives me pause from the other direction. So I’m not arguing strongly for either side in this matter, but I do hope that his life is spared and that administrative detention rules are relaxed enough to allow attorneys for detainees to effectively represent their clients in court.
What moves me to write is that this first post links to a 2010 Lede blog post by the same NY Times blogger, Robert Mackey, “Thinking Outside the Two-State Box,” (Sept. 7, 2010), which mentions right-wing elements within Israel calling for a one-state solution involving a single political entity for Israel, East Jerusalem and the West Bank, but excluding the Gaza Strip. The Gaza Strip would be excluded in order to insure either a Jewish majority or a more equal ethnic balance between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs, and presumably to isolate Hamas. This provision alone would probably make it a non-starter from the Palestinian point of view, but the unrealistic excision of Gaza is curiously not considered by the blogger.
One aches for a solution to a long-standing conflict that continues to bedevil Arabs and Jews on both sides of the divide, and in which neither side seems capable of making adequate concessions or accommodations to the other. Although recent Israeli governments have made territorial concessions and offers, they have still been too broadly ensconced in the West Bank and East Jerusalem to satisfy minimal Palestinian needs and aspirations; and settlements expand in spurts but inexorably, on territory claimed by the Palestinians.
Osteen with wife Victoria
I’m not a follower of Joel Osteen, but after occasionally stumbling upon his program while channel surfing, I’ll admit to appreciating his charm. Why would I, who mostly fits the profile of a “secular humanist” who inhabits the Upper West Side of Manhattan–and also identifies strongly as Jewish and occasionally attends synagogue–feel some fondness for a Christian televangelist and mega-church preacher?
I’ve just caught most of his hour on Oprah Winfrey’s program on the OWN network, which taught me a great deal about what he believes. What I learned is that he’s a fundamentalist Christian, as befits the Southern Baptist faith he inherited from his pastor-father, but he’s nothing like the fire & brimstone preacher someone like me would imagine. Why? Because he presents himself and his faith in a relatively non-judgmental way, a stance illustrated by his response to Oprah on whether he believes that gays can get into heaven.
His answer is yes, because who would qualify for heaven if we had to be without sin? And further, why focus upon the “sin” of homosexuality beyond others? Obviously, he sees homosexuality as “sin,” but when asked on exactly this by Oprah in a follow-up, Osteen explains with some evident discomfort that he cannot deny from his reading of the relevant Biblical text that homosexuality is a sin. But the fact that he apparently doesn’t expend energy in condemning this phenomenon marks him off from others of this background. This is how the Huffington Post recaps Osteen on this matter:
I made a point of seeing Rabbi Lerner twice in his recent sojourn to New York. Last Sunday evening, he was part of a panel discussion of religious leaders and academics at Riverside Church, called “Occupy the Mind: Progressive Moral Agenda for the 21st Century.” It was organized by James Vrettos, a professor of sociology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York, who began the discussion with an impassioned recitation of progressive concerns.
Dr. Cornel West
Dr. Cornel West contributed his usual brilliant oratory: witty, entertaining and challenging. In a mutual exchange, he pointed out that fellow panelist Dr. Serene Jones, president of the nearby Union Theological Seminary, will be his “boss” when he moves from Princeton to Union Theological in July, where he began his academic career in the late 1970s. He mentioned that he’s returning to New York to enjoy the cultural richness and social vitality of the Big Apple and especially to be near Harlem, to again experience its energy and its music.
Michael Lerner connected well with the audience, getting us to stand and stretch, after sitting over an hour listening to speeches, and to sing with him a couple of Biblically-inspired songs for peace. His talk was about promoting a politics of love, hope and generosity versus right-wing themes of fear and “power over.” To this end, he touched upon the Global Marshall Plan initiative, and the Environmental & Social Responsibility Amendment. He pointed out that the latter would overturn “Citizens United” by ending the corporate funding of elections and would subject large corporations of over $100 million in gross income to having to prove their environmental and social responsibility every five years to be recertified with a public charter. I don’t know how “practical” these ideas are in every detail and in their implementation, but hopefully they will promote constructive public discourse on what we are about as a society and as citizens of the world. Moreover, Michael urges us not to be “practical.” This runs somewhat counter to my nature, but I have enough experience in this world to know that we can undermine ourselves as individuals and collectively when we too readily define things as impossible or impractical.
I also caught him the next evening at Romemu, a Jewish Renewal congregation in my neighborhood in Manhattan,
NY Times Magazine cover, Jan. 29, 2012
The New York Times Magazine’s Jan. 29 cover story, “Will Israel Attack Iran?” frighteningly argues that Israel is nearing a decision to make an all-out military effort against Iran’s nuclear program. What may prompt an imminent go-ahead is the calculation that Iran’s facilities will soon be hardened and dispersed beyond Israel’s capacity to cripple its program.
I’m very much against an Israeli attack on Iran and I agree with Prof. Shibley Telhami that moving toward regional nuclear disarmament may facilitate a solution. But I take Iran’s nuclear program seriously as a security threat to the region.
The crisis would likely end once Iran reverses course: quickly opening its facilities to international inspection and stopping its constant “death to Israel” rhetoric and other overt expressions of hostility toward Jews (Holocaust denial being one); Iranian officials usually do not even mention Israel by name, referring instead to the “Zionist regime” or some such. When coupled with its ongoing support for Hezbollah and Hamas, it’s no wonder that many Israelis and Jews believe they face an existential threat from Iran. (It would not be enough for Iran to invite renewed negotiations, such as Pres. Ahmadinejad claims to have just done in a rather belligerent way; negotiations can be used as a delaying tactic, and Iran has backed away from solutions proposed in previous discussions.)
Yet, aside from inviting a catastrophic war, an Israeli attack would not deter Iran’s nuclear ambitions (quite the opposite). Part of the problem is the already hardened and dispersed nature of Iran’s nuclear facilities; another is Israel’s limited military capability. Over five years ago, I blogged about the widespread myth that Israel is a military superpower (with the supposed implication that it’s invulnerable) beginning as follows:
The world is abuzz with the ongoing fallout of the Arab Spring, while the Occupy movement still reverberates in the US. But what endures from Israel’s less-noted summer months of street protest for social justice? I’m going to review what I’ve learned in recent months and project forward.
Protest leader, Daphni Leef
First of all, street protests continue, including a clash in recent days with police over the removal of protest tents; but these activists are in the hundreds rather than the tens and hundreds of thousands who rallied peaceably during the summer. Still, the structure I reported on for In These Times magazine, continues to operate, with the movement attempting “to carry itself beyond the streets”:
…. Alongside “general assembly” meetings in parks, neighborhood committees have been formed around the country, as well as advisory committees comprised of prominent personalities from Israel’s diverse ethnic and religious communities.
By any estimation, Israel’s summer of protest was an impressive display of progressive social activism, rallying nearly half a million protesters (out of Israel’s seven million population) into the streets at its high-water mark on September 3rd. More than one hundred tent encampments for social justice dotted the entire country. It united Arabs in Jaffa (at least rhetorically) with traditional working class Likud and Shas supporters in the Tel Aviv neighborhood of Hatikva. (See this YouTube video of the great liberal Orthodox activist, Leah Shakdiel, speaking on this unifying theme at the Yerucham protest.)
Hillel Schenker
Sadly, the lack of progress toward a two-state solution is creating a backlash among some Palestinians who are now turning against dialogue and cooperation with dovish Israelis. An article in Israel’s Ha’aretz newspaper, published on Dec. 30– “Don’t let them shut down discussion” by Hillel Schenker, co-editor of the Palestine-Israel Journal– tells the tale. Here are highlights:
…. [T]he Palestine-Israel Journal, the quarterly I co-edit, was obliged to postpone a public conference we were organizing at an East Jerusalem hotel … due to pressure on Palestinian speakers and threats against the hotel owner. …
A news item … earlier in the week stated that the Fatah leadership had decided to halt all unofficial Palestinian-Israeli meetings due to … Prime Minister’s Netanyahu’s insistence on continuing settlement expansion. Unnamed Palestinian officials were quoted claiming that Israel exploits such meetings in order to tell the world that a dialogue is taking place between the two peoples, and that it is only the Palestinian Authority that refuses to sit down at the negotiating table.
This seems like a parallel to the familiar criticism of such meetings by right-wing Israelis, who accuse Israeli participants of being concerned only about Palestinian rights, as opposed to Israeli security needs. Suffice it to recall recent campaigns by NGO Monitor, Im Tirzu and others against Israeli peace, human rights and civil liberties NGOs….
What was so threatening about a conference at which Israelis and Palestinians were going to discuss the potential impact of the Arab world’s uprising, whose speakers were to include Ron Pundak, co-chair of the Palestinian-Israeli Peace NGO Forum, and Khalil Shikaki, the renowned Palestinian public-opinion specialist?
The mother of the Yiddish song and language revival, Adrienne Cooper, has left us suddenly and entirely too soon. I knew her slightly, seeing her sometimes at social events, organizational meetings and performances. On occasion I’d see her on the street or even in a parking garage.
She was always cordial, even when an article of mine angered some colleagues, and she went out of her way to reassure me that I was still welcome. She even thanked me for the “free publicity.”
And then there was her voice, her scholarship and her activism, perhaps more cultural than political. She made a choice to devote her professional life to Yiddish and Yiddish song, rather than American history, in which she nearly completed a doctorate. Highlights of her career included about a decade each in important executive positions at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York, and in the Workmens Circle/Arbeiter Ring, a longstanding cultural and fraternal organization with a legacy of social democratic and labor union activism. I last saw her at a Passover “model seder” she presided over for the Workmens Circle, a traditional event that I used to attend with my retired parents in the South Florida chapter years ago. We had no inkling of her illness, a rare and vicious cancer that was difficult to diagnose–a diagnosis she didn’t receive until July.
Over years of writing and blogging, I’ve been refining this message that I take from a holiday that I love. Other bloggers here have also provided their insights, but I like mine for its relative brevity:
History is of necessity an interpretive process, and these interpretations often spawn self-serving myths. National myths are not usually complete fabrications, but they tend to romanticize and sanitize real events.
The traditional Hanukkah story is a source of pride for the Jewish people. We are taught that a small army of freedom fighters, the Maccabees, led by the heroic priestly family of Mattathias and his seven sons, successfully resisted the cruel pagan tyranny of the ancient Greco-Syrian Seleucid dynasty. This is not untrue, but it’s only part of the story. We are usually not taught the far more complex reality that the Maccabean war of liberation was also a civil war between rural “fundamentalist” religious adherents of the old order and the more educated and cosmopolitan Hellenized Jews of the city, who voluntarily and eagerly embraced the Greek culture of the Syrian empire. The Maccabees surely killed many of these “liberal” Jews in their struggle.
Alvin Rosenfeld, an Indiana University professor of English and Jewish Studies, engaged in dialogue at the NY Museum of Jewish Heritage, Dec. 14, with David Harris, director of the American Jewish Committee, on his new book, The End of the Holocaust (Indiana University Press, 2011). Prof. Rosenfeld had achieved a measure of notoriety with an essay published by the AJC in 2006, “Progressive Jewish Thought and the New Antisemitism.” The controversy that followed is admirably summarized in this Wikipedia article.
You also
might wish to read “Shotgun Blast,” an analysis of this essay in The American Prospect magazine by Gershom Gorenberg. He praised Rosenfeld’s idea, but criticized his “sloppiness”:
…. While attacking vituperative opponents of Israel who call themselves “progressive,” he identifies their views with all who call themselves progressives – rather like letting James Dobson define what “Christian” means. He fires the shotgun of his criticism at such a wide flock of writers that his reader can wonder where he is aiming. Does The Washington Post’s pro-Israel columnist Richard Cohen really belong to the same ideological species as those who accuse Israel of genocide? [Cohen apparently went overboard in one column, cited by Rosenfeld, when he characterized Israel's creation as a "mistake"; in another column published not long after Rosenfeld's essay came out, Cohen complains (in much the same way that Rosenfeld would) about the left's outsized focus upon Israel, while often giving far worse human rights offenders (like China, Sudan, Zimbabwe and Iran) a bye.--R.S.]
The blurriness is a shame, because Rosenfeld has a legitimate argument. … his intended target is those Jews who reject the very existence of a Jewish state, and who express their opposition in shrieks that rise to equating Israel with the Nazis.
Another excellent critique was written by Andrew Sillow-Carroll, editor-in-chief of the New Jersey Jewish News, in an editorial that I reproduced on the Meretz USA Blog. Since I share Rosenfeld’s concern for the more outlandish and unfair arguments against Israel that characterize too much of the left, and occasionally seep into mainstream liberal discourse, my response was rather mild.
Judging from this public appearance, Rosenfeld (as in the AJC essay) engages in overkill in his new book. He’s
Ex-Speaker Newt Gingrich (Reason.com)
With characteristic boldness, the G.O.P. front-runner du jour, Newt Gingrich, asserts that the Palestinians are “an invented people.” This was a telling moment at the pander fest that was the Republican Jewish Coalition’s candidates’ forum. Having carefully not invited Rep. Ron Paul, the RJC insured that it would be no less. From the little that I saw of it, only Jon Huntsman (albeit warm toward his audience) seems not to have gone overboard in this mode.
Although Gingrich’s comment, according to the JTA account, drew “rebukes” from some of his rivals, these were not anything like the points I’ll raise here. First off, all nations are “invented” in their formative stage. Whether due to geography, history, language, culture or religion, they obtain a level of self-consciousness as a distinct people and generally press their claim in some organized way. As the well-known Palestinian-American scholar Rashid Khalidi indicated in Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (Columbia University Press, 1997), “National identity is constructed; it is not an essential, transcendent given….”
Arab-Palestinian identity was largely a reaction to the Zionist movement reestablishing Jewish nationhood in Palestine, the ancient birthplace of the Jewish people, as recorded in the Bible and remembered reverentially in the Jewish religion for two millennia. Just as Palestinian nationalism was born of the Arab struggle against the Jews in the early to mid 20th century, the Jewish national rebirth occurred in Palestine, with Jewish identity made over from what was primarily (but not only) a religious heritage — because of the tragic experience of Jews as a frequently reviled and downtrodden minority in Christian Europe and the Muslim Middle East.
Dec13
by: Ralph Seliger on December 13th, 2011 | Comments Off
Bergson in 1940s & '70s (VarianFry.org)
Over this past weekend, the NY Jewish Week posted my article on a film and filmmaker dealing with the Holocaust-era controversy of the “Bergson Group” and whether American Jews were too passive. My article begins with a discussion of filmmaker Pierre Sauvage’s background as a child survivor in France and how pre-State Zionist divisions and the politics of that time (and ours) enter into the controversy, including a word from J Street founder Jeremy Ben-Ami. In a meeting with Sauvage, he told me that he is not right-wing and doesn’t understand why his sympathetic treatment of Bergson’s work would lead people to think this.
Yet this confusion surely arises because Peter Bergson (the nom de guerre of Hillel Kook), and his comrades from Palestine, were members of the right-wing Zionist underground, the Irgun. Together they worked tirelessly and ingeniously to rally a mass movement of American Jews to pressure the Roosevelt Administration to engage in meaningful rescue efforts for the trapped Jews of Europe. Jeremy Ben-Ami’s father, also an Irgunist, was one of Bergson’s core associates; his son writes of this in an afterword of the recent posthumously published memoir by another of Bergson’s close colleagues, Samuel Merlin (Millions of Jews to Rescue, published by the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies). Paradoxically, Ben-Ami points out that most Americans recruited into the Bergson Group– such as Ben Hecht, Stella Adler and Max Lerner– were liberals, whose efforts were augmented by varying degrees of support from such leftists as Upton Sinclair, Sinclair Lewis, Langston Hughes and Paul Robeson.
Nov29
by: Ralph Seliger on November 29th, 2011 | Comments Off
It would be a very bad idea for either Israel or the US to attack Iran; today’s NY Times op-ed article by Malfrid Braut-Hegghammer, a Norwegian security expert, reinforces this conclusion. But an article in Salon by Gary Kamiya, “The Boys Who Cry ‘Holocaust’,” conveys a wrong-headed notion that the crisis about Iran’s nuclear program is Israel’s fault. Yes, Netanyahu and the neocon hawks need to be countered, but not like this, in a way that removes all responsibility from Iran.
Jeffrey Goldberg (a liberal, not a neocon) is absolutely correct in this statement, quoted by Kamiya only to dismiss it:
“The leaders of Iran are eliminationist anti-Semites; men who, for reasons of theology, view the state of the Jews as a ‘cancer.’ They have repeatedly called for Israel’s destruction and worked to hasten that end, mainly by providing material support and training to two organizations, Hamas and Hezbollah, that specialize in the slaughter of innocent Jews. Iran’s leaders are men who deny the Holocaust while promising another.”
Nov18
by: Ralph Seliger on November 18th, 2011 | Comments Off
I may be an outlier as a blogger on this site for fully supporting the NATO military campaign to oust Qaddafi. I was gratified that French aircraft stopped his forces cold as they closed in on Benghazi less than two months into the revolution. They would undoubtedly have exacted a terrible toll in death and suffering if they had been allowed to prevail and exact their revenge on the rebel capital.
Grafitti depicting Qaddafi as a Jew (for some reason, his head doesn't reproduce here).
NATO’s ability to help the rebels overthrow this dictator, without sending in an army on the ground, was a triumph for collective action in a humanitarian cause. It also may have inaugurated a new “Obama Doctrine,” which emphasizes some important principles: that the United States lends its military might in a collective effort (in this case, even taking a back seat to France, Britain and other allies) in a limited way, with the support of an international consensus, as expressed in this instance by the United Nations Security Council; the U.S. and its allies need to be aware of their limitations and cannot intervene everywhere. These are all points that would distinguish an Obama Doctrine from the hubristic and reckless overreach of George W. Bush, and make what happened very different from our tragic misadventure in Iraq.
It is very clearly the responsibility of the Libyans, who shed their blood in a revolution of their own making, to shape their destiny. Evidently, Qaddafi helped foster antisemitism so deeply within his country that Libyans are now reviling him as a “Jew,” playing up the rumor that his mother was Jewish. While this manifestation of bigotry is bad enough in itself, a freelance reporter for The Jewish Daily Forward reflects upon his recent visit to the new Libya that this marks an inability of most Libyans to admit that Qaddafi’s decades of misrule and tyranny were a product of their society, not a foreign import. Here are some highlights of Andrew Engel’s article:
…. During the course of my six days hopscotching over the 1,000-mile-wide country, I had the opportunity to listen to scores of Libyans express themselves freely for the first time in 42 years…. What I found, unfortunately, along with freedom of expression, was a virulent and ubiquitous anti-Semitism that looks likely to outlast the ruler who promoted it.
Nov16
by: Ralph Seliger on November 16th, 2011 | Comments Off
Photos by Hillel Schenker
The following is an eyewitness report by Hillel Schenker, an Israeli journalist and veteran peace activist who combines both of these pursuits in his current role as co-editor of The Palestine-Israel Journal:
50,000 rally to remember Rabin
No matter what, I planned to go to the 16th annual memorial rally in memory of assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Just as I have for the past 15 years. Just as I did on that fateful Saturday night, November 4th, 1995, when I went to the mass rally For Peace and Against Violence that was organized to counteract the slander campaign being carried out against the Prime Minister. It was at the end of that rally that Rabin was shot three times by Jewish terrorist Yigal Amir.
Joseph Stalin
[This is my third and final installment (applause?) on two recent programs at the YIVO Jewish research center in New York. Click here for its beginning, and here for Part 2.]
Steven T. Usdin, a science writer and science policy editor, related the rather amusing story of Joel Barr and Alfred Sarant, about whom he’s written in Engineering Communism: How Two Americans Spied for Stalin and Founded the Soviet Silicon Valley (Yale University Press, 2005). Barr had become a Communist because of his family’s experience of being evicted during the Depression and his agreement with the CP’s newspaper, The Daily Worker, that the country was run by “bloody plutocrats.” Like Julius Rosenberg and others, he was inculcated in his Communist convictions as a student at the City College of New York; he and Sarant became part of the Rosenberg spy ring.
Joel Barr with Alfred Sarant
Both fled to the Iron Curtain after Rosenberg’s brother-in-law, David Greenglass, was arrested in 1950. They led adventurous and lucky lives, narrowly escaping arrest in the West and avoiding being purged in Prague and Moscow. Barr in particular was highly successful in romancing women. And at one point, the ‘Keystone Kops’ aspect of their story returned to American shores when they got their U.S. passports and Social Security numbers reinstated simply by asking.
During the 1960s, they created a micro-processing laboratory complex in the Soviet Union. Barr had “tens of thousands of scientists” reporting to him. Following Nikita Khrushchev’s fall from power in 1964, they were assigned to a lab in Leningrad, working on torpedo technology. Their innovations are still in use by navies of successor states of the former Soviet Union, and the navies of Iran and India.
Hitler vs. Stalin
[Click here for part 1.] The closing panel featured fascinating portraits of individual spies. It began with historian and journalist Allen Hornblum (a former executive director of Americans for Democratic Action), the author of The Invisible Harry Gold: The Man Who Gave the Soviets the Atom Bomb (Yale University Press). A chemist, Gold was an industrial and military spy from 1935 until 1950; most importantly, he was the courier to Soviet agents of atomic secrets stolen from the Manhattan Project by physicist Klaus Fuchs.
Joseph Stalin
But Gold also is regarded by all who came to know him (including FBI agents and fellow inmates in Federal prison) as a complete altruist, a loveable and humane person. What drove him were the best of intentions: a concern about the rising power of Nazi Germany and a perception of the USSR as a progressive bulwark against this threat. Hornblum sees similar motives in Klaus Fuchs.
Next came David Evanier, the author of a novel on the Rosenbergs who is now writing a biography of Morton Sobell, convicted along with the Rosenbergs in 1951 and having served 18 years in Federal prisons. Evanier contends that the Communist left was blind to Soviet crimes, while the right tended to be blind to the suffering of African Americans and the dangers of fascism.
Sobell came from a Communist family and apparently held onto his loyalty to the USSR far longer than reasonable, but now is deeply disillusioned. The writer extrapolates from this that American Communists were not callous apologists for totalitarians, but rather that they held onto a naive faith.
Nov1
by: Ralph Seliger on November 1st, 2011 | Comments Off
Joseph Stalin
Most people on the left have some grasp of the odious nature of Stalinism and the fact that Communists — however sincere they were in opposing racism, militarism and the excesses of capitalism — served false gods in Moscow. With archival evidence uncovered after the downfall of the Soviet bloc, little doubt remains on the Kremlin’s role in utilizing Communist Party members as spies in the United States. Most Party members had nothing to do with espionage, but a small secret cadre did. That being said, there is such a thing as “reactionary anti-Communism” — using an exaggerated fear of Communism to oppose progressive reform.
The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, the famed research center on Yiddish culture and Eastern European Jewry — originally established in Vilna, Poland (now Vilnius, Lithuania) but long centered in New York — hosted two programs in the past month that eagerly drew me in. One was a half-day conference on “American Jews and Soviet Espionage” (Sept. 20), and the other a lecture by Yale University historian Timothy Snyder on his book, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, about the Eastern European territories which Hitler and Stalin rendered into great killing grounds in the 1930s and ’40s (Oct. 2).
The first program was a kind of reunion for YIVO’s executive director Jonathan Brent, who in his former post at Yale University Press as editorial director of “The Annals of Communism” series, had worked with some of the presenters. Dr. Brent opened the conference with a poignant talk on how Soviet Jews were sucked into spying on each other for a regime that had it in for them anyway. But first, unique for its time, Lenin’s reign had outlawed anti-Semitism and fostered a flowering of secular Yiddish culture. Many leading Bolsheviks– including one head of the secret police– were Jews, and other Politburo figures were married to Jews.
But after Lenin died, it was unhealthy to be a close comrade of his successor, Joseph Stalin. “In this world, nobody is innocent,” Brent explained. The most prominent Jewish literary figures of their time were executed on trumped-up charges. (Brent is the author of Stalin’s Last Crime — HarperCollins, 2003 — about Stalin’s apparent plan for a massive purge and deportation of Soviet Jews, just before his death in 1953.)
