Alex Gordon

Jewish Biography: Henri Bergson

On a cold December day in occupied Paris in 1940, a large group lined up at the Nazi commandant’s office. Jews stood waiting to be registered, anxious for their lives. In the crowd was a thin, tall old man with a bulging, high forehead, a shallow chin and a small mustache. After waiting for hours in the cold, he caught a bad cold, caught pneumonia, and died on January 3, 1941. He died in the very town in which he had been born 80 years earlier. Registered by the Nazis, the old Jew was one of France’s most famous men, Professor Henri Bergson of the Collège de France, member of the French Academy of Sciences, winner of the 1927 Nobel Prize in Literature. In the Pantheon there is an inscription on one of the columns: “To Henri Bergson, a philosopher whose life and work have done honor to France and to human thought. [Alex Gordon]

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Alex Gordon, International, Jewish History

Moses Mendelssohn: The Berlin Dreamer

By Alex Gordon HAIFA, Israel — In 1783, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s play “Nathan the Wise” premiered at the Berlin Theater. The play was a literary and theatrical sensation and a shock to Germany, and perhaps to the entire Christian world. Hitherto Jews had been considered and portrayed as immoral and despicable people. Lessing’s character Nathan,

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Alex Gordon, International, Jewish History, Opinion

The Triumphant and Tragic Odyssey of the Inventor of Sea Cruises

By Alex Gordon HAIFA, Israel — On March 1, 1881, in Russia, members of the People’s Will assassinated Tsar Alexander II. The murder, to which the Jews had nothing to do, triggered the largest wave of Jewish pogroms in the 19th century due to a blood libel against Jews falsely accused of complicity in the

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Alex Gordon, International, Jewish History, Opinion

The Neuroses of Sigmund Freud

By Alex Gordon HAIFA, Israel — Ernst Jones, one of Sigmund Freud’s few non-Jewish students, wrote in an obituary that his teacher’s achievements would not have been possible without his national characteristics, among them “a special national insight” and “a skeptical attitude toward illusions and deception.” Psychoanalysis shaped a new way of thinking that made

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Alex Gordon, Books, Poetry & Short Stories, International, Opinion

The Red Terror of the Pacifist

By Alex Gordon HAIFA, Israel — The assassination in Sarajevo of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Habsburg throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was the most important political assassination of the twentieth century, for it was the trigger for World War I. However, this assassination, committed in 1914, was not the only resounding political assassination in the

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Alex Gordon, International, Jewish History, Opinion