On the 25th day of the lunar month of Kislev (Dec. 24, 2106), Jews around the world will celebrate the eight-day holiday of Hanukah. Hanukah commemorates the rededication of the Jerusalem Temple in the second century BCE by Jewish freedom fighters (the Maccabees) who resisted the Macedonian regime in Damascus. The regime had violently attempted to enforce its polytheistic Hellenistic religion on the inhabitants of Judea — a people who held the then extraordinary belief…

From 1920 to 1990, the Soviet Union was governed by totalitarian communists whose regime was inspired and legitimized by the writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and the numerous state-supported commentators who followed them. These writers believed that “scientific Marxism” (as they variously defined it) explained all aspects of human history and culture, including the origin and development of religion, kinship, ethnicity, nations and empires, as well as the dynamics of the economy, politics, the…