Walter Laqueur

Walter Ze'ev Laqueur (26 May 1921 – 30 September 2018) was a German-born American historian, journalist and political commentator.

He was an influential scholar on the subjects of terrorism and political violence.

Walter Laqueur was born in Breslau, Lower Silesia, Germany (today Wrocław, Poland), into a Jewish family.

In November 1938 he left Germany, immigrating to the British Mandate of Palestine.

His parents, who were unable to leave, were murdered in the Holocaust.

After less than a year at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he left to work as an agricultural laborer and guard.

In 1942 he became a member of kibbutz HaZore'a.

Laqueur was married to Naomi Koch, with whom he had two daughters.

His second wife was Christa Susi Genzen.

From 1944, when he moved to Jerusalem, until his departure in 1955 he worked as a journalist for the Hashomer Hatzair newspaper, Mishmar (later, Al HaMishmar), and for The Palestine Post (later, The Jerusalem Post).

In addition, he was the Middle East correspondent for journals in the United States and a commentator on world politics for Israel radio.

After moving to London, Laqueur founded and edited Soviet Survey, a journal focusing on Soviet and East European culture.

Survey was one of the numerous publications of the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom to counter Soviet Communist cultural propaganda in the West.

Laqueur was Director of the Institute of Contemporary History and the Wiener Library in London from 1965 to 1994.

Together with George Mosse, he founded and edited Journal of Contemporary History.

He was Professor of the History of Ideas at Brandeis University from 1968 to 1972, and at Georgetown University from 1976 to 1988.

He was also a visiting professor of history and government at Harvard, the University of Chicago, Tel Aviv University and Johns Hopkins University.

Laqueur wrote extensively about the Middle East, the Arab-Israeli conflict, the German Youth Movement, Zionism, the cultural history of the Weimar Republic, Communism and the Soviet Union, the Holocaust, the Cold War, fascism, post-World War II Europe and the decline of Europe, antisemitism both ancient and new.

He pioneered the study of guerrilla warfare and terrorism.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, he predicted that Russia would not become a democracy but an authoritarian system based on nationalist populism.

His books and articles, which were published in many American and Europeans newspapers and periodicals, have been translated into several languages.

Laqueur's book The Last Days of Europe is often cited as a segment of "Eurabia literature", although in After the Fall he dismisses the "alarmist" notion of Eurabia as popularized by Oriana Fallaci.

Articles

Books

Hearings/Testimony

From 1969 he was a member, and later Chairman (until 2000), of the International Research Council of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington.

He was the founding editor of The Washington Papers.

Laqueur died at his home in Washington, D.C., on September 30, 2018.