Among the heroes lost in 2020 was Robert Fisk, the hard-nosed Anglo-Irish journalist of the shoe-leather school whose daring reportage from war-torn locales — from Northern Ireland to North Africa, the Balkans to the Middle East — earned him an international reputation as a bold, polemical truth-teller. He was 74.

Writing for the London Times in the early 1970s, he reported on the Troubles before becoming that paper’s Middle-East correspondent, covering armed conflicts in Lebanon, Iran, and Afghanistan. Following a split with the Times, he joined the Independent in 1989, for which he wrote until his passing. Fluent in Arabic, he gained notoriety for having interviewed Osama bin Laden no fewer than three times in the 1990s — though well before the latter was known foremost as al-Qaeda’s infamous leader, and instead as a “mountain warrior of mujahedin legend.”

Fisk blasted peers who, instead of reporting the nitty-gritty from the danger zone, stooped to what he dismissed as “hotel journalism.” Some of his colleagues, in turn, accused him of overstepping his purview by penning damning critiques of Western (especially American) meddling in the Middle East, as well as of Israel’s oppression of Palestinians. Fisk remained unflinching in his assessments, however, writing last year that “by recognising Israel’s annexation of Golan, Trump merely recognised that Israel has annexed America.”

It was his father, a veteran of the First World War, who instilled in Fisk an understanding of the “great, terrible waste” that is war, as well as an abiding skepticism of those who wage it. In The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East (2005) — one of Fisk’s six books — he wrote of how, “at the end of my father’s war, the victors divided up the lands of their former enemies,” creating “the borders of Northern Ireland, Yugoslavia and most of the Middle East.” It would prove a sordid historical link between father and son. “I have spent my entire career — in Belfast and Sarajevo, in Beirut and Baghdad — watching the people within those borders burn.” The world needs heroes like Fisk. With his death, who will take up the mantle?

Jonathan Sacks, the former chief rabbi of the United Kingdom who emerged as an important voice on the role of religion in the modern world, died on November 24, 2020 in London. He was 72.

Rabbi Sacks, who wrote extensively and made frequent media appearances, withdrew from public life in mid-October after he announced that he was being treated for cancer.

While his religious home was Orthodox Judaism, Rabbi Sacks was one of the most inclusive voices within Judaism. He managed to “hold in delicate balance the universal demands of the modern, multicultural world with the particularism associated with Judaism,” wrote the editors of one study of his work.

Other people’s faiths ought to enlarge us rather than threaten us, he believed. “No one creed has a monopoly on spiritual truth; no one civilization encompasses all the spiritual, ethical and artistic expressions of mankind,” he wrote in The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations (2002). “God is greater than religion. He is only partially comprehended by any faith.”

This sort of talk got him in hot water with fundamentalist elements of the Jewish community. Many orthodox Jews actually considered him a heretic.

This too he took in stride. “The most intense arguments,” he said, “are in the family.”