Reviewing two recently published translations of works by the great Russian dissident novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008), Gary Saul Morson addresses the accusation, leveled by some of Solzhenitsyn’s former admirers, that late in life he became an anti-Semite and a nationalist in what now would be called a Putinist mode. Morson rejects these “absurd and contradictory charges,” and considers the Nobel Prize-winning author’s own responses:

In the 1930s, a Republic Jewish judge, observing his coreligionists’ commitment to the Democratic party, quipped, in Yiddish, that Jews have three velt (worlds): di velt (this world), yene velt (the next world), and Roosevelt. Since then, Jewish devotion has attenuated somewhat, although Jews still overwhelming lean Democratic. Most American Jews, however, are unfamiliar with the terms “this world” or “the next world” in any language. Carefully examining a wealth of statistical data, Samuel J. Abrams and Jack Wertheimer argue that the sort of robust Jewish liberalism that characterized U.S. Jewry a few decades ago is in steep decline. Jews, they explain, are undergoing their own version of what political scientists call the “great sort,” whereby politics, religion, and place of residence increasingly align: