Colin Shindler

Cognitive Dissonance and the Survey Critics

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We Jews invented cognitive dissonance. The American Jewish psychologist, Leon Festinger, was the first to coin the phrase and to use it to describe people’s responses to information which conflicts with their own understandings of reality. There’s a perfect illustration of the phenomenon in the flurry of argument, rationalisation and denial that has surfaced in … Read more

The US Campaign for Soviet Jewry

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Review of Let My People Go by Pauline Peretz (Trans: Ethan Rundell) Transaction, £54.50 Joseph Stalin’s last years were the “Black Years of Soviet Jewry”. The trial and execution of the Yiddish writers, the Slansky trial of mainly Jewish Communists in Prague, and the infamous Doctors’ Plot in January 1953, all characterised this period. Stalin’s … Read more

The Origin of the Soviet Jewry campaign in the UK

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During 2015, several books were published about the various diaspora campaigns for Soviet Jewry, which culminated in the emigration of a million people from the former USSR to Israel during the 1990s. The French academic Pauline Peretz has documented the American campaign while the journalist Sam Lipski and Professor Suzanne Rutland have produced a fine … Read more

On David Cesarani

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Professor David Cesarani, who has died at the early age of 58, was an international expert on the Holocaust and on anti-Semitism who spoke on several occasions to the Centre for Jewish Studies at SOAS. During his career, he held posts at Leeds, Manchester, QMC, Southampton and finally at Royal Holloway. He was an advisor … Read more

Boycotting Israel is Wrong

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Boycotting Israel is Wrong by Philip Mendes and Nick Dyrenfurth This academic overview of the boycott against Israel argues that the BDS campaign is “bad For Israelis, bad for Palestinians, and is corrosive of progressive movements and civil society”. The authors believe the campaign plays on the lack of understanding about the complexity of the … Read more