Adam Kirsch

1 month ago | newyorker.com | Adam Kirsch

“Sons and Daughters” is quite probably the last great Yiddish novel. Chaim Grade, who was born in what is now Lithuania, in 1910, and spent the second half of his life in the Bronx, wrote it from the mid-nineteen-sixties through the mid-nineteen-seventies. It appeared in serial form in two New York-based Yiddish newspapers, first Tog-Morgn Zhurnal (Day-Morning Journal) and then Forverts (Forward).

1 month ago | sapirjournal.org | Adam Kirsch

Is it antisemitic to be anti-Zionist? The question has been unavoidable since the Hamas attack of October 7. For most American Jews, protesters who chant “from the river to the sea” are ipso facto antisemitic: What could be more hostile to Jews than calling for the destruction of the world’s only Jewish state?

1 month ago | meforum.org | Adam Kirsch

The phenomenon of pro-Hamas activism by self-described “progressives” in the United States following the October 7 massacre demands an explanation. Kirsch partially provides this in his slim volume on the ideology of settler colonialism. This set of convictions portrays America’s founding as “an unmitigated disaster” that, in the words of one prominent scholar, “should never have happened.” Israel is seen as a singular source of evil.

2 months ago | city-journal.org | Adam Kirsch

The War Memoirs of Charles de Gaulle, by Charles de Gaulle (Simon & Schuster, 976 pp., $23)When Charles de Gaulle published the first volume of his war memoirs, in 1954, it looked like an acknowledgment that he no longer belonged to the present, but to history. His achievements during the Second World War were indeed historic. In June 1940, as France collapsed and its leaders agreed to a humiliating armistice, de Gaulle escaped to London.

2 months ago | modernagejournal.com | Adam Kirsch

Memorialized on Marx’s tombstone in London’s Highgate Cemetery is one of the most famous lines he ever wrote: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” It was a mission statement. Marx did not want merely to understand and critique bourgeois society; he wished that his work might play some part in its revolutionary overthrow. Elsewhere, he wrote that history repeats itself as farce.