Yakov M. Rabkin

The Jewish holiday of Purim, related in the Book of Esther, celebrates deliverance from a genocide. How to celebrate it when death and starvation kill thousands in Gaza, and the holiday’s rhetoric, namely the memory of the archenemy Amalek, is…

Eighty years ago, on January 27, 1944, people in the street were hugging each other and weeping with joy. They were celebrating the end of a nearly 900 days brutal siege. Soviet forces lifted the siege of Leningrad after ferocious…

Palestinians in Gaza are being decimated. Over 20 000 have been killed, mostly women and children. Three times more have been wounded. Some experts qualify it as genocide, others as massacre. Two million people have been displaced, many more than…

Pogrom. This Russian term denotes a violent riot incited with the aim of massacring Jews and destroying their property. One of the deadliest pogroms (50 Jews were killed and nearly 600 wounded) took place in Kishinev a hundred and twenty…

By Yakov M. Rabkin A profound division exists between Zionist advocates of Israel on the one hand, and both secular and religious Jews, on the other, who reject Zionism and thus the very idea of a separate state for the…

On the night of the October 7, 2023 attack in Southern Israel, I was staying overnight at my nephew’s place in Saint Petersburg, in the apartment I had grown up in, prior to emigrating from the Soviet Union over fifty…

The Brandenburg Gate and the White House are laser-painted in Israeli blue-and-white colours. They used to harbour the Ukrainian blue-and-yellow colours. In both cases, Western governments pledge unlimited support and declare the recent attacks on Israel, as earlier on Ukraine,…

A few days ago, I raised questions that stem from the standing ovation for Yaroslav Hunka, a Ukrainian veteran of the SS in the Canadian parliament (https://www.pressenza.com/2023/09/a-nazi-on-the-parliament-hill-is-an-antidote-to-self-righteousness/) . These questions deserve answers. Here are some of them. How is it…

The triumphant visit of President Zelenskyy to Ottawa in late September was marred by an episode in the Parliament of Canada. Anthony Rota, the Speaker of the House of Commons, invited Yaroslav Hunka, an elderly Ukrainian from his riding to…

Nearly fifty years ago I emigrated from the Soviet Union. My only reason for leaving all that was known to me was a deep longing for freedom of expression. I resented restrictions on foreign publications and deplored the practice of…