Politics

Barry Strauss | 9.19.2025 8:01 AM

On a late summer night Jerusalem casts a magic spell. The first day of autumn is less than a week away but the daytime temperature is close to 90 degrees Fahrenheit, and the sun is relentless. Then the cool breeze of evening comes and it's like the soft touch of a cat's whiskers.

Jerusalem is a city that needs to be seen on three levels. The street is a cacophony of cars of course but also the thrust and parry of conversation in the cafes on Bethlehem Road. Viewed from above, from the YMCA tower, say, an elegant art deco structure designed by the same architect who built New York's Empire State Building, the city looks like a forest of stone. The walls of the Old City, the domes and spires of church, mosque, and synagogue, the graves of the Mount of Olives, the ubiquitous construction cranes ("Israel's national bird," as the joke goes) and the slabs of limestone that line the buildings they help to erect, the separation wall between Israel and the Palestinian territories.

But as a historian, I am drawn to what lies underneath Jerusalem. It is not difficult to find mementoes of........

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