Week of Oct. 15, 2007

With all these pressing responsibilities one thing Congress should not be doing is sorting out the historical record of the Ottoman Empire.

"This is a city [Chicago] that's afraid of its own history," says Perry Duis, a University of Illinois at Chicago history professor and author. In the 1960s, as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, he tried to research old city records for his dissertation, but got nowhere.

"The records were always controlled by some guy with a little cigar stub who maybe expected a bribe to do his job. You can talk to a lot of historians around the city and that is the way it was. City Hall treated these things as if they were the private property of politicians."

In 1918 Shmuel Talkovsky, then secretary of Haim Weizmann, wrote with Weizmann's approval:"Is there any nation whose fate is more similar to ours than the Armenians?" But in Israel today there are Jews who are less than Jewish and Zionists who are less than Zionist - including heads of state and heads of government. Denying another nation's Holocaust is no less ugly than denying ours. It is also dangerous. Today's denial is tomorrow's Holocaust.

If you really want to analyze the founding fathers through their love lives, Alexander Hamilton is the man to watch, the only blackmail-paying, apology-offering adulterer in the bunch. Washington, Adams, Jay, the long and loyally married, can sit this one out. A scamp from early on and a flirt well into his widowed 70s, Franklin was ultimately more talk than action. Which again raises that pesky question: What to do with Jefferson?