2,101 words
Daniel Okrent
The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America
New York: Scribner, 2019
The Mayflower arrived at Plymouth 400 years ago this week. This monumental anniversary has largely gone unremembered. In the past, the Plymouth anniversary was a great event that drew our nation’s foremost orators to speak of the glories of America and its settlers. (more…)

Theodor Herzl
5,003 words
Part 2 of 4
What Was Traditional Jewish Society Like Before Emancipation?
By the early 1800s, when Napoleon brought about emancipation in Europe, the majority of the world’s Jews, Hasids, crowded the villages known as shtetls. Fiddler on the Roof would wax nostalgic about the shtetl, (more…)
6,964 words
My last article documented the funding of the March 1917 Revolution in Russia.[1] The primary financier of the Russian revolutionary movement 1905–1917 was Jacob Schiff, of Kuhn Loeb and Co., New York. (more…)

Jacob Schiff
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“There is no proletarian, not even a communist, movement that has not operated in the interests of money, in the directions indicated by money, and for the time permitted by money — and that without the idealists amongst its leaders having the slightest suspicion of the fact.” Oswald Spengler.[1]
The “Russian Revolution” (sic) is heralded in both the popular imagination and by academe as a triumph of the people against Czarist tyranny, (more…)