Edward Alexander

OPUS is a political thriller about the joint search by American and Soviet Cultural Officers for a Beethoven Cello Concerto in Hungary, leading to the involvement of three Intelligence agencies, World War II intrigue, and culminating at KGB HQ.Author Biography: Edward Alexander majored in musicology and journalism at Columbia University and during World War II served in Psychological Warfare in Europe. From 1946 to 1949 he did public relations for Sir Laurence Olivier's "Henry V" and "Hamlet" and then organized "Voice of America" broadcasts to the Soviet Caucasus, and was appointed Armenian Service Chief. In 1959 he joined the Foreign Service with assignments in West and East European Embassies, including Hungary, and as Deputy Director for the Soviet Union and East Europe traveled extensively throughout the area overseeing press and cultural activities. In 1985 the State Department called him back out of retirement to become a member of the U.S. Delegation to three Human Rights Conferences abroad and to be the U.S. spokesman. He is the author of "The Serpent and the Bees" about the KGB and "A Crime of Vengeance" about the Armenian genocide.

The Holocaust and the War of Ideas begins with an analysis of ancient and modern anti-Semitism as the primary cause of the destruction of European Jewry. Alexander proceeds to interpret representative works from the three main bodies of Holocaust literature—Yiddish, American, Hebrew—in relation to the war of ideas that surrounds the historical catastrophe that is their subject.The chapter on Yiddish writers explores religious ideas and the claim that Yiddish, having become the language of martyrdom, has replaced Hebrew as the Jews' sacred tongue. The discussion of American writers centers on the attempts to Americanize Anne Frank, and criticizes the "personalization" of the Holocaust by literary latecomers to the subject who knew little of the Jewish past other than the Holocaust. Alexander treats sympathetically writers like Kovner and Appelfeld who integrated the European tragedy into the Israeli imagination, but charges that some Israeli dramatists have perpetrated travesties of the Holocaust that resemble anti-Semitic polemics.The second half of the book enters the seething cauldron of controversy in which the Holocaust is now engulfed. The chapter on Italian Jewry evaluates accusations of Vatican indifference and Primo Levi's allegations about German national character; the chapter "Crime and Punishment" reevaluates the writings of Arendt, Wiesenthal, and Weiss on the nature of Nazi war crimes, arguing that attempts to exculpate killers on the grounds that they were compelled to obey orders lack historical foundation.Alexander concludes the book with a survey of recent controversies: denial of the Holocaust; appropriation and relativization of it; the scandals of Bitburg and the Auschwitz Convent. He imputes the pervasive deformations of the Holocaust to the fact that the war of ideas over the Holocaust has become part of the larger war forced upon the Jews by the foes of Zionism as an ideology and Israel as a nation.

In West Berlin in 1963, while on his first diplomatic assignment, the author was contacted by a Soviet Armenian KGB agent. For fifteen months Alexander and the KGB agent met on both sides of the Berlin Wall. Attempting to play on Alexander's sympathy to his Armenian heritage, the KGB made a series of unsuccessful attempts to lure the author to Soviet Armenia and recruit him to work for the Soviet Union. After Berlin, the KGB's interest in Alexander continued. Over the years he was contacted by many Armenian agentsówhen he traveled on official business to the Soviet Union and spent five days in Soviet Armenia; in Washington, where the KGB agent from Berlin surprisingly appeared and sought to absolve himself of blame for the earlier approach; during later trips to Moscow; again in Washington by KGB agents assigned to the Soviet Embassy and at TASS; and in Greece. Fifteen years after the first contact, Alexander had a dramatic confrontation with the original KGB officer. The story is told against a backdrop of Soviet-American tensions and events ranging from the Kennedy visit to Berlin and his assassination five months later to the murder of the CIA station chief in Athens by Greek terrorists. In describing this ethnic pursuit of the author, this book provides a behind-the-scenes look at U.S.-Soviet relations, foreign service life, and the problems faced by KGB agents and their families, as well as an in-depth portrait of post-Stalin Armenia, where creative spirits are seeking to perpetuate an ancient culture despite the pressures of totalitarian control.

Composed of essays and commentaries delivered in 1985 at a conference entitled 'Israel at the Dawn of the Conservative Age,' this volume is the first self-consciously conservative collection of essays and commentaries by Israelis and Jews on the subjects of Jewish liberalism, Israel, and social science methods. The volume introduces Israel's first conservative think tank and attempts to explore the political implications of the failure of liberalism in context of a conservative and Israeli standpoint. Sections include: (I) Liberalism and Leadership: Exile and Nationalism in Modern Jewish History; (II) 'Conservative' Parties in Twentieth-Century Democracies: The Example of Likud; (III) Liberalism and the Intellectuals: Media and the Arts; (IV) Islam and the Jews; (V) The Critique of Social Science and the Problem of International Relations; (VI) Banquet Addresses; (Appendix) The Helms Initiative: A Report from the Initiators. Co-published with the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies.

This volume deals with the modern fate of the traditional conception of Jews as a covenanted people chosen to receive the Law, whose ultimate purpose is contributing to the universal salvation of mankind. The author shows how, under the influence of liberalism, rationalism, relativism, and other Enlightenment ideologies, this idea was distorted, denied, inverted, yet never entirely obliterated. In his discussions of modern Jewish thinkers and writers and the ideological and political struggles of Zionism and the state of Israel against enemies from without and from within, Alexander shows that the ancient idea of covenant is still alive today, if only in the assumption that Jewish life can lead somewhere so long as Jews remember that it began somewhere. Ranging from literary criticism and the history of ideas to journalism and politics, the book is unified by a point of view unabashedly espousing the Jewish idea and challenging its enemies.