In Har­vest of a Decade dis­tin­guished senior schol­ar Wal­ter Laque­ur col­lects a decade’s worth of essays pub­lished since 2001 in a wide range of ​“seri­ous” and aca­d­e­m­ic jour­nals in the U.S. and Europe. The essays are divid­ed into five sec­tions: Zion­ism, Israel, and the Jews; Rus­sia; Europe; Ter­ror­ism, and bio­graph­i­cal sketch­es. In his essays on Israel he comes across as a main­stream Labor Zion­ist who has not yet gauged the changes in Israel and the Jew­ish world since the Likud rose to pow­er in 1977. A wide range of move­ments and devel­op­ments come in for Laqueur’s crit­i­cism, includ­ing the New His­to­ri­ans, Ortho­dox Jews, the Likud, and Prime Min­is­ter Ben­jamin Netanyahu. Laque­ur reserves a spe­cial fury for the set­tlers in the West Bank and Gaza and their brand of Zion­ism. In this, the weak­est sec­tion of the book, he seems to have run out of things to say about Zion­ism, the State of Israel, and con­tem­po­rary Jew­ry.

In con­trast to Laqueur’s essays on Israel, those on Rus­sia and the Sovi­et Union are refresh­ing and impor­tant. Laque­ur cogent­ly explains how the Cold War led to the ulti­mate decline and fall of the Sovi­et empire, reviews Russia’s grow­ing ​“Mus­lim Prob­lem,” and pre­dicts where Russ­ian pol­i­tics might be head­ed in the near future.