Fifty years ago, in mid-July 1973, the outgoing head of the IDF’s Southern Command, Ariel Sharon, held a retirement party in the garden of his Beersheba home. His farewell speech evolved into a tirade against David Elazar, the IDF Chief of Staff — there was no love lost between the two. Elazar had swept away … Read more
It is now 500 days since Vladimir Putin launched his war against the civilian population of Ukraine, days that have been peppered with anti-Jewish comments and imagery. In a search for a scapegoat for last week’s mutiny by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner mercenaries, Putin looked back into Russian history and repeated the … Read more
Review of Goodbye Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land By Jacob Mikanowski, published by Oneworld, London 2023, pp.380 ‘The twentieth century will be the century of the Jews and revolutions’ — so wrote the Hungarian painter, Béla Zombory-Moldaván on hearing about the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian … Read more
In a few days, a meeting to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the deportation of Jews from Bulgarian-occupied Greece will take place at the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris. For many, this will be one minor tragedy amidst a multitude during the Holocaust. For some, the deportations may register momentarily about a country of … Read more
Last week, Yigal Amir, the assassin of Yitzhak Rabin, celebrated his 53rd birthday in Ramon prison. He has spent more of his life behind bars than in freedom. He has served more time in prison than Nelson Mandela in apartheid South Africa and, unlike most Israelis sentenced to life imprisonment, it is highly unlikely his … Read more
The demonstrations every Saturday night against “the judicial overhaul” continue in Israel unabated and remain deeply defiant. Even the hiatus of a rocket barrage from Gaza by Islamic Jihad did not mean an abandonment of protest. Unlike in Türkiye and Hungary, many Israelis are not prepared to roll over and whisper their thoughts in private. … Read more
Sidney Reilly – the latest subject in the Yale University Press biography series, Jewish Lives – was born Shlomo Rosenblum in Odesa or Kherson or Bendzin or Pruzhany in either 1872 or 1874. He also seems to have convinced British Intelligence that he was an Irishman, born in Clonmel. The subject of countless books and a … Read more
Coronations are a time for celebration and contemplation since they connect all citizens with their own family history, stretching back through time. Yet Jews have a complex relationship with monarchy. As the rabbi tells Tevye and Leibesh in Fiddler on the Roof: ‘God bless the Tsar – and keep him far away from us!’ The … Read more
Amos Oz: The Legacy of a Writer in Israel and Beyond edited by Ranen-Omer-Sherman, published by the State University of New York press 2023, pp.414 Amos Oz once said that he had two pens on his desk — one to write stories, the other ‘to tell the government to go to hell’. Today his voice … Read more
In 1970, Soviet dissident Andrei Amalrik, published his famous essay, “Will the Soviet Union Survive until 1984?” Amalrik was killed in a car crash in Spain in 1980, so didn’t live to see the collapse of the USSR in 1991. His essay, however, has become more prescient in a wider international sense — and with … Read more