Alex Gordon

The Return to Kiev

By Alex Gordon HAIFA, Israel — The Red Army liberated Kiev from German forces on November 6, 1943. My father was not conscripted because of a congenital heart condition. Because of his illness, he was always breathing heavily. His breathing became even heavier when he and my mother, returned to Kiev after two and a […]

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Alex Gordon, International, Opinion

The Complex Legacy of German Chemist Fritz Haber

By Alex Gordon HAIFA, Israel — In 1919, the 1918 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to German scientist Fritz Haber “for the synthesis of ammonia from its constituent elements.” Ekstrand, president of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, said that Haber’s discoveries were extremely important for agriculture and the prosperity of mankind. Scientists of

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Alex Gordon, International, Opinion

The Bitter Laughter and Tragic Fate of the First Writer of Anti-Soviet Jokes

By Alex Gordon HAIFA, Israel — The German historian and political scientist Otto-Ernst Schüddekopf wrote, “Walter Rathenau (the future German Foreign Minister, assassinated by the Nationalists in 1922 as one of the ‘ Elders of Zion’ – A.G.), who visited Radek in a Berlin prison in 1919 as an authority and read him his elegant

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Alex Gordon, International, Opinion

Burden of High Expectations, or Kleptopatria: That Was in Kiev

By Alex Gordon HAIFA, Israel — “Kleptomania” in Greek is a morbid craving for theft, “kleptocracy” is the power of thieves, “kleptopatria” is the theft of the homeland, the taking away of the country from people born and raised in it, whose ancestors have lived in it for generations, people brought up on its culture,

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Alex Gordon, International, Jewish History

Democracy from the Perspective of a Native of a Totalitarian State: From Kiev to Israel

By Alex Gordon, Ph.D HAIFA, Israel — The Jews came out of Egypt long ago, they came out of the Soviet Union, but they did not go out of fashion at all: at every stage of history someone was bound to seek to throw them into the sea. The Jews, however, had already been to

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Alex Gordon, International, Opinion

The World Revolution

By Alex Gordon, Ph.D HAIFA, Israel — When I was a university student, I had to take an exam on the history of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The students were afraid of not only the exam but also the lecturer administering the test — a student-hater, and a tough, unpleasant man who

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Alex Gordon, International