Headed on vacation? Stop scrolling social media and read real books by real authors. You may not be any happier at the end, but you… Read More

It was the best of times. It was the worst of times… Oh, who are we kidding? The period beginning 10/7/2023 and continuing right through… Read More

Jews live in a world of code – words that say one thing and mean something entirely different to the initiated. Religion, nationality, ethnicity, Zionism,… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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,… Read More

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… Read More

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…. Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

“Indispensable” should not be confused with correct – or capable.  An “indispensable nation” should never be confused with a country that always does the right… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

The movement is:  Universal: Dealing with presumed ends of collectives – class, race, history. Teleological, or depersonalized: Not deriving from the aspirations of concrete persons… Read More

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…. Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

Jews live in a world of code – words that say one thing and mean something entirely different to the initiated. Religion, nationality, ethnicity, Zionism,… Read More

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... Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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…. Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

“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… Read More

If you think World War II ended in 1945, Harry & Arthur: Truman, Vandenberg and the Partnership that Created the Free World is a book… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

“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… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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:… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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:… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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,… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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,… Read More

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… Read More

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,… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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…. Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More