The “Golden Age” for Jews Has Ended | Simon Sebag Montefiore

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Did you know that Joseph Stalin could sing with perfect pitch? Or that he was so scared of his wife that he would hide from her in the bathroom? Did you know that Peter the Great liked to surround himself with naked dwarfs? Did you know that Catherine the Great—long smeared as a nymphomaniac—was actually a lovelorn monogamist? Or that King Herod’s genitals once exploded with maggots?

Most historians bore you with dry accounts of battles and treaties, and it’s hard to remember any of it. But not Simon Sebag Montefiore, who writes 900 pages that you cannot put down.

Sebag Montefiore is one of the most important historians alive today. His many books, like Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, The Romanovs, and Catherine the Great & Potemkin are essential to understanding power, politics, revolution, dictatorships, and above all, human nature.

While most of Sebag Montefiore’s books are biographies of people, Jerusalem is a biography of a city—one that is “the house of the one God, the capital of two peoples, the temple of three religions, and she is the only city to exist twice—in heaven and on earth.” The book takes you through 3,000 years of Jerusalem’s history, from King David to Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu. It is a must-read. It has sold more than a million copies, and it has just been reissued in paperback.

With the ceasefire deal underway in Israel and with Donald Trump a few weeks into his second presidency, we could not think of a better person to talk to at this moment.