David P. Goldman

Although it lingered another sixty years, the Sack of Rome by Alaric the Visigoth in 410 marked the downfall of the empire. Gustav Niebuhr, writing in the Washington Post, finds hope in the fact that the Christian religion survived the destruction of its first state sponsor. That, says Niebuhr, . . . . Continue Reading »

DNA samples from several dozen relatives of Adolf Hitler indicate that the monster of the 20th century very likely had some Jewish ancestry, reports the Jerusalem Post.  The newspaper explains, “His father, Alois, was thought by some to have been the illegitimate offspring of a maid . . . . Continue Reading »

In a May 2009 essay entitled “Demographics and Depression,” I warned First Things readers that the great economic headwind of our time was demographic:Our children are our wealth. Too few of them are seated around America’s common table, and it is their absence that makes us poor. . . . . Continue Reading »

Where is Mel Brooks when we need him? The creator of “Spaceballs” is the right person to deal with this item from the Jewish webzine The Tablet:This month, 12 students were initiated into a class of women studying to become kohanot, or Hebrew priestesses, at a retreat center in . . . . Continue Reading »

Daniel Luban argued last week in the Tablet webzine that the old anti-Semitism has transmogrified into Islamophobia:...many of the tropes of classic anti-Semitism have been revived and given new force on the American right. Once again jingoistic politicians and commentators posit a religious . . . . Continue Reading »

Robert Reilly’s new book The Closing of the Muslim Mind rehashes the Muslim turn away from Greek philosophy with al-Ghazali, and argues that doctrinal irrationality is the source of all the problems in the Muslim world. There is of course something to this argument, and al-Ghazali’s . . . . Continue Reading »

I posted this piece earlier today at the Asia Times “Inner Workings” blog. Normally I don’t double post, but this is a cool piece of analysis. Pardon me for repeating myself. In the crudest version of the dividend discount model, the stock price P is a function of earnings and . . . . Continue Reading »

Today’s Google News leads with a new poll showing that 18% of Americans think that Barack Hussein Obama is a Muslim. Only 34% of Americans think he is a Christian, down from 48% a year ago. And 43% gave the correct answer: they don’t know what he is.The great physicist Wolfgang Pauli . . . . Continue Reading »

The recent publication of transcripts of Martin Heidegger’s 1934 Freiburg seminars on Being, the People and the State simply adds to the confusion over the philosopher’s relationship to Nazism. Michael Wyschogrod reviewed Emanuel Faye’s widely-read book on Heidegger in the March . . . . Continue Reading »

Poor Queen Jezebel, the misunderstood Phoenician feminist who fought for pluralism and Middle East peace against the narrow  nationalists of her time. Or so writes Janet Howe Gaines of the University of New Mexico  in the Biblical Archaeology Review, linked to this morning by Jewish Ideas . . . . Continue Reading »