Remembering the Great Jewish Historian of Ancient Greece and His Wisdom about the Present

Born in the Lithuanian shtetl of Kurshan in 1932, Donald Kagan came to the U.S. with his mother when he was only two years old, following the death of his father. He grew up in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn and attended Brooklyn College, where he developed an interest in ancient history. As an adult he became one of the foremost experts on ancient Greece and the Peloponnesian War, spending most of his career teaching at Yale University, where he also served as dean. He died last Friday at the age of eighty-nine.