I met Yitzhak Arad in the cafeteria of his upscale retirement home outside Tel Aviv. To his enemies, this short man, softened by age and bundled in long sleeves against the facility’s overzealous air conditioning, is a kind of Jewish Kurt Waldheim: a brutal war criminal who deftly covered his tracks and went on to run one of the world’s leading human rights institutions. Waldheim, a former Nazi officer, famously became secretary-general of the United Nations before the truth came out. Arad allegedly committed atrocities against Lithuanian anti-Communists on behalf of Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD, before moving to Israel and becoming the director of Yad Vashem, the nation’s holocaust museum.

Read more