China and the United States: The Engineer and the Lawyer
Michael Mandelbaum examines some core differences between American and Chinese societies.
The Art of Deflection
With former Mossad chief Yossi Cohen bidding to be Israel’s next prime minister, the JST’s Bob Silverman reviews Cohen’s just published memoirs.
A New Interpretation of Hitler’s War in the East
Jochen Hellbeck, World Enemy No. 1: Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and the Fate of the Jews, Penguin Press, 2025 Legend has it that when the first chancellor of West Germany, Konrad Adenauer, crossed the Elbe River by train, he lowered the shades and remarked, “Here we go, Asia again.” As a Rhinelander, Adenauer, who had […]
A Clarion Call for Liberal Education
Blue Skies: My Life in Many Worlds, by S. Frederick Starr, Dorrance Publishers, 2025. In his memoirs, Edward Gibbon observed that “every person has two educations, one which he receives from others, and one, more important, which he gives to himself.” By that standard, S. Frederick Starr has done very well indeed. Starr, who was […]
The Vietnam War in Retrospect
LBJ and McNamara: The Vietnam Partnership Destined to Failby Peter L.W. Osnos, Rivertowns Books, 2024 McNamara at War: A New Historyby Philip Taubman and William Taubman, W.W. Norton & Company, 2025 Fifty years after it ended, the American war in Vietnam remains controversial. That is because it turned out very differently than had been anticipated […]
Russia and the West: The Economic Dimension
Perfect Storm: Russia’s Failed Economic Opening, the Hurricane of War and Sanctions, and the Uncertain Future, by Thane Gustafson, Oxford University Press, 2025 In the final decade of the last century, the end of communism in Europe and the collapse of the Soviet Union left three developments in their wake. Together the three promised to […]
A Hero For Our Time
Books Reviewed: Moshe Dayan, the Making of a Strategist by Eitan Shamir, Cambridge University Press, 2025Moshe Dayan, Israel’s Controversial Hero by Mordechai Bar-On, Yale University Press, 2012A New Map – Different Relations by Moshe Dayan, Maariv Library, 1969 [in Hebrew] Moshe Dayan died 44 years ago and is remembered today mainly for his military exploits. But […]
Tribute to an American Golden Age
Eminent Jews: Bernstein, Brooks, Friedan, Mailer by David Denby, Henry Holt and Co., 2025.
The Wolf’s Lair in German Memory
Before the Downfall, Hitler’s Years in the Wolf’s Lair by Felix Bohr, Suhrkamp, 2025 [in German]
The Best American Diplomatic Memoir of the Cold War
Foreign Service, Five Decades on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy by James F. Dobbins, RAND Corporation, 2017
