Colin ShindlerON CHRISTMAS Day 1970, a few Jewish students and some British members of Menachem Begin’s Herut party, stood shivering in the snow outside the Soviet Embassy in London’s Bayswater Road. We had gathered at short notice to protest against death sentences meted out in Leningrad to two Soviet Jews, Mark Dymshits and Edward Kuznetsov, the … Read more
One hundred and twenty years in August since Herzl opened the first Zionist congress in Basel. Seventy years in November since UN Resolution 181 was passed which proclaimed the partition of historic Palestine – one state for the Zionist Jews, the other for the Palestinian Arabs. Fifty years in June since Israel’s victory in the … Read more
By withdrawing its protection at the UN on the question of Israeli settlement expansion, the fading Obama administration has caused turmoil within many Jewish organisations. Despite a recent American $38 billion military aid package to Israel, many viewed the move as a wholesale betrayal and a deliverance into the hands of Israels enemies. Was the … Read more
Review of Revolutionary Yiddishland By Alain Brossart and Sylvia Klingberg Verso, £16.99 Not all Jews who emigrated to Israel in the last century were Zionists. Some Trotskyists, Bundists and loyal Communists went to Israel as a refuge from the Nazi inferno and Stalin’s gulag. Scarred by such murderous regimes, these survivors of Red Yiddishland represented the … Read more
Last Shabbat, the prayer for the state of Israel was recited in the main Havana synagogue. It was also the day when the announcement was made of the passing of Fidel Castro, who had broken off diplomatic relations with Israel in 1973. This symbolised Fidel’s individualistic approach towards Jews and Israel while remaining a … Read more
Review of Paul Bogdanor’s Kasztner’s Crime (Transaction 2016) pp. 323 Paul Bogdanor has penned a well-researched book on the contentious Kasztner affair – a controversy that commenced in wartime Hungary and has continued until the present day. In the summer of 1944, a minor Jewish figure, Rudolf Kasztner, negotiated with Adolf Eichmann in the … Read more
“The Egyptian has his thumb on our windpipe”. So muttered Prime Minister Anthony Eden in July 1956 on hearing that President Gamal Abdel Nasser had nationalised the Suez Canal. It led to a clandestine agreement with then Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion for a joint military intervention – and Israel’s subsequent move into Sinai … Read more
MORE THAN anything, it was the abandoned shoes of the Holocaust that spoke most vividly to artist Jenny Stolzenberg about the suffering of concentration camp victims. Walking boots, high heeled shoes and baby bootees were turned into an art installation that reflected the full horror and pathos of those murdered by the Nazis. But Stolzenberg, … Read more
Oswald Mosley instituted antisemitism as the official policy of the British Union of Fascists only in 1934, some two years after its formation. The annual report of the Board of Deputies for 1932 stated that Mosley had informed the Board that antisemitism formed “no part of the BUF’s policy”. Yet at a BUF meeting a … Read more
THE transformation of Szymon Perski from Vishnyeva in Belarus into Shimon Peres, a founding father of the state of Israel, is a reflection of how the Jews have moved from the margins of history to its mainstream after two millennia of dispersion and persecution. An urbane cultured man who spoke several languages and wrote poetry, … Read more