Rick Richman is a resident scholar at American Jewish University. In February 2023, Encounter will publish his next book, And None Shall Make Them Afraid: Eight Stories of the Modern State of Israel.
The author of And None Shall Make Them Afraid stops by to talk about his new book and how history has a role to play in forming devotion to the Jewish people.
Sure, it’s unrealistic to expect complete historical accuracy from the movies. But the inaccuracies all bespeak a more fundamental, and worrying, concern.
Hollywood is full of Jews. So why is it so insistent on universalizing the story of the Jewish state?
Jabotinsky was the rare political leader who devoted as much time to artistic pursuits as to his political activities. What can be learned from them?
Seventy-three years ago this week, Israel appointed a thirty-three-year-old former professor as its UN representative. The rest is history—and bears a lesson for today.
We should appreciate Theodor Herzl’s lightning-storm emergence, even if we’ll never really know what caused it.
A young secular Viennese writer had an experience 125 years ago that would lead him to change Jewish history forever. He could never explain it. Can anyone else?
The possibility of another contentious confirmation hearing recalls the first the Senate ever held, which just happened to be for the first Jewish justice to sit on the court.
Ben Hecht invented the gangster movie. He also prodded Roosevelt into saving thousands of Jews from the Nazis, and marshaled reluctant American Jews into becoming Zionists.
A new book gives reason to reflect on the little-known story of the Jewish teenager who assassinated a German diplomat in 1938, an act that served as the pretext for Kristallnacht.
That is the question a new history of Polish Jewry in the 1930s asks and—with one large exception—answers well.
Despite everything that has changed, today’s internal Jewish divisions eerily echo those from exactly a century ago.
As millions of Jews fell under the Nazi yoke, Zionism’s foremost leader came to America with one goal. He didn’t achieve it.
In 1937, an official British report first proposed the partition of Mandate Palestine. The story behind it helps to explain why the Arab-Jewish conflict remains unresolved.
America paid Iran $1.7 billion in cash—funds that by law were not to be released unless and until Iran paid what it owed to American victims of its terrorism.
Considering the achievement of the American Jewish legal giant, a new biography also asks what he would make of Citizens United and other contemporary issues.