On both sides of the Atlantic, politics has come to be dominated by vitriolic name-calling and pervasive dishonesty.
— Max Boot
The Immigration Act of 1924 closed our doors to virtually all non-European immigrants - a great wrong that was not rectified for decades.
I used to be one of those people who read thrillers on vacation, but for some reason most thrillers no longer thrill me. Maybe because these days reality is far more unbelievable than any fiction?
When Democrats aren't being fiscally reckless, they are economically irresponsible. Democrats bemoan corporate greed and have not a positive word to say about the entrepreneurs that have made our economy the envy of the world.
Analogies, in particular, can illuminate, but they can also obscure and confuse. They need to be handled carefully, like rhetorical high explosives.
All acts of terrorism - all killings of the innocent - are an abomination, and one that is made all the worse when the victims are chosen for their skin color, ethnicity, sexuality or religious beliefs.
Anyone anywhere - as long as you live in a country that does not censor the Internet - can now read this newspaper. But like diners passing up a healthy salad for an artery-clogging cheeseburger, many information consumers are instead digesting junk news.
Unfortunately, history suggests that dictatorial regimes can withstand years, even decades, of economic sanctions.
To win in 2020, a Democratic nominee will need to win back voters in key Midwestern states who supported Trump in 2016.
At Mom's funeral, mourner after mourner spoke about what a wonderful teacher she was. She was certainly devoted to her students.
The scandal isn't that refugees want to come to the United States. It's that Trump is abusing these aspiring Americans and closing our doors to them.
What would I do now, at age 48, if I were deported to a country that I have not seen in more than 40 years and whose language I no longer speak? How would I work? How would I survive?
There has been an unspoken assumption among establishment Republicans that all they have to do is wait out Hurricane Trump and then return to 'normal' conservatism.
Even being too good at teaching is risky at research universities; the joke is that a 'teacher of the year' award is the kiss of death for non-tenured professors.
History has been my primary intellectual passion ever since, as a boy in Southern California, I began reading books on World War II and the life of Winston Churchill.
Even getting a college degree does not guarantee a minimal knowledge of U.S. history.
What's true for New York is true for most of the country: We are a long way removed from the double-digit interest rates and unemployment rates, and the soaring crime rates, of the early 1980s.
But while I am proud to be an American, I am ashamed of what the Trump administration is doing in our name. It is literally rewriting the meaning of America.
I yearn for intellectual sustenance on vacation but want, of course, to avoid tedium or boredom. I want to read something that will entertain me but also help me appreciate what I am seeing.
There are two kinds of people: Those who like active vacations and those who like sedentary vacations. I'm one of the weird hybrids who likes both. That makes me, I suppose, the Jekyll and Hyde of holidayers.
Democrats deserve credit for engaging with big issues such as climate change and income inequality and coming up with bold, imaginative solutions.
Neoconservatism' once had a real meaning - back in the 1970s. But the label has now become meaningless. With many of those who are described as neocons, including me, fleeing the Trumpified right, the term's sell-by date has passed.
Soliciting anything of value from a foreign national to help a U.S. campaign is not just illegal; it is the Founding Fathers' nightmare.
In the 16th and 17th centuries, as many as 60,000 people were executed in Europe as suspected witches. But it would be nice to think that centuries of advances in science and education have made people less prey to phantasms and falsehoods.
Silence is complicity. All Republicans who stand mute in the face of Trump's latest racism are telling you who they really are.
Joe Biden stands out from other Democratic candidates not just by taking on President Trump directly but also by seeking to separate Trump from the rest of the Republican Party.
Mom developed an interest in 'heritage-language education after noticing an increasing number of students in her UCLA classes whose parents were Russian.
I find myself increasingly forced to think of my ethnic identity instead of the national identity I adopted as a boy in 1976. That is discomfiting for me, and a tragedy for America.
I am white. I am Jewish. I am an immigrant. I am a Russian American. But until recently I haven't focused so much on those parts of my identity. I've always thought of myself simply as a normal, unhyphenated American.
Logic, fact, morality, legality, ideology: All of it is irrelevant in understanding the Party of Trump. Republicans have made crystal clear that nothing matters to them other than partisanship.
You simply can't understand the present if you don't understand the past. There is no more alarming case study of the consequences of historical ignorance than President Trump.
History education in schools is so poor that students often enter college ignorant of the past - and leave just as unenlightened.
Only 36 percent of Americans could pass a multiple-choice civics test of the kind that is administered to immigrants seeking to become citizens.
Freedom will not prevail because of historical forces; it will only win, if it does, because of historical actors. In other words, us. Those like me who came of age around 1989 used to take democracy for granted.
I am certain that my family - my grandmother, mother and myself - had a credit score of zero when we arrived in 1976. There were no credit cards in the Soviet Union, and we didn't have any money.
People who sit for hours in a beach chair or an airplane seat without any reading material simply baffle me: What is going on between their ears, I wonder?
Trump doesn't need his own agenda if he can terrify independent voters in swing states about what would happen if the Democratic agenda is implemented.
Growing up in the 1980s, I remember when the GOP was the party of ideas. Now it's brain dead.
I am by no means suggesting that everyone who uses the neocon label is doing so as an anti-Semitic smear, but the word has been used often enough in that ugly context that it should make any person of goodwill think twice before employing it.
Irrationality may be more prevalent in the party of climate denial, but it isn't limited to Republicans.
The case for democracy is that voters in the aggregate will make better decisions than a lone monarch or dictator would.
Yet another reason to be angry at President Trump: He is forcing me - and every other American who is not a racist - to defend the most left-wing members of Congress.
My mother and I were alike in one crucial respect: We may have been Russian by birth, but we were English in spirit. She was intensely reserved and private, and seldom showed what she was feeling.
Olga E. Kagan was the strongest woman I knew - and probably the reason I've spent my life with other strong women.
Increasingly I feel like a Jew, an immigrant, a Russian - anything but a normal, mainstream American.
We have a long, ugly history of white supremacy in this country, ranging from Jim Crow laws to keep African Americans down to the 1924 Immigration Act to keep non-Europeans out.
Americans are in vital need of the instruction that historians can provide.
At the University of California at Berkeley, my interests broadened from military history to diplomatic history and other disciplines.
There is little doubt that our society is changing rapidly, but one thing will never change as long as we remain a democracy: the need for voters to know the essentials of our history and government.
The spread of communications technologies - social media, TV news channels - aggravates societal divisions and discord. All that online snarling is making us jittery.
