Category: Uncategorized
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אבן העזר ואבן’ם לזכרון The Stone of Help and Stones of Remembrance: Bringing to Mind Yahwah’s Help and Goodness
Putting the Hebrew words first in the title is meant to illustrate how these two well-known phrases appear in the Hebrew text of the Old Testament. As many of you who read this post will know, Hebrew writing goes from right to left, which means that אבן העזר is the Hebrew phrase translated as ‘stone…
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Greece And Israel: Discovering Commonalities Through Facing A Common Adversary
The Russian-language newspaper, Каскад/Cascade, published in Baltimore, Maryland, on February 16, 2023, featured an article on its internet site entitled, Greece – Where There Is Everything. Everything, according to the author, includes the Jewish presence in Greece, and specifically, in Thessaloniki/Salonica. Within its eclectic content that ranges from the dilatorious effects of the pandemic and…
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Putin Uses Victory Day Speech To Laud “Participants” in the Ukraine SMO, 9 May 2023
Russian President, Vladimir Putin, on May 9, 2023, spoke at the military parade in Moscow on Red Square to commemorate the 78th anniversary of the Red Army’s victory over Nazi Germany on that day in 1945. Using the May 9 celebration as a springboard, Putin in his 10-minute speech brought to the fore the “Special…
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Greece Wants a West-Leaning and Democratic Türkiye, mid-May 2023
AKP Leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on the left; CHP Leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu on the right The Turkish newspaper, Cumhuriyet, known for its independent reporting and anti-Islamist stance, on 14 May 2023, as Presidential and Parliamentary elections voting was coming to a close, claimed that Türkiye’s incumbent President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan had lost the election to…
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The Arrest of WSJ Reporter Evan Gershkovich in Russia and Reaction to It. Chronology
Voice of America’s Russian language service correspondent Masha Morton has filed a detailed report documenting the chronology of the arrest of The Wall Street Journal reporter in Russia, Evan Gershkovich. Morton’s April 3 account will probably be the most factually-based version of the incident that Russian-only speakers will receive, given the anti-free speech climate in…
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The Nechayev Affair: The Murder of the Student Ivanov in November 1869
This post is supplemental to my post, Dostoevsky and the [Russian Orthodox] Church, in order to add context and a partial raison d’etre for Dostoevsky’s writing the novel Demons. It is a translation of an article published by A.I. Rakitin in 2014 at ©”Загадочные преступления прошлого” (Mysterious Crimes of the Past). The translation by LOC…
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Dostoevsky and the [Russian Orthodox] Church
This is a translation, from the Russian, of a 3-part article by Vladimir Malyagin, an author and dramatist who serves on the publishing council of the Russian Orthodox Church. The reader is invited to engage in a critical review of the author’s commentary, remembering that it is the viewpoint of an apologist of Russian Orthodoxy,…
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Book Review: Russia in Search of Itself by James Billington
An American scholar with a deep interest in Russian culture, particularly as it relates to the country’s Christian heritage as expressed through Russian Orthodoxy, James Billington was perhaps the foremost chronicler of Russia and its history for over 40 years. Billington first appeared on my radar in the mid-1970s while I was studying Russian Language…
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The “Greatest Generation” and its Legacy: A Perspective
Just the other day, January 20, 2023, to be exact, I turned 75, i.e., the day that marked ¾ of a century of existence on Planet Earth. If you’ve done your math, you’ve figured out that I was born approximately four weeks into the new year of 1948, just 2 ½ years after the end…
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Russian President Putin Delivers New Year’s Eve War-Time Footing Message to Country, December 31, 2022
Couched in a message that at times teetered on the edge of extreme sentamentality and at other times wreaked of Soviet-era communist jargon and its rationalizing propagandistic worldview, Putin was profuse in expressing his gratitude to all those who have been ‘participants’ in fighting [to reclaim] Russia’s historic lands, while protecting the lives of their…
The Dragon is Slain 