Colin ShindlerLast week saw the passing of two former Soviet Jewish refuseniks, Vladimir Slepak and Vladimir Prestin, who were not permitted to leave the USSR for almost 20 years. It was only when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985 that the gates were finally opened for a small group of long-term Moscow activists. Slepak and … Read more
Red Notice: A True Stroy of High Finance, Murder and One man’s Fight for Justice By Bill Browder Bantam Press (London 2015) 374 pages During the 1990s, international capitalism discovered the dysfunctional society of post-Communist Russia. Privatization offered Western investors the opportunity of unheard of profits in hitherto unknown territory. In Russia itself die-hard … Read more
Nazi Germany and the Arab World What if Monty had lost in the Middle East? By Colin Shindler, April 8, 2015 Meeting of malevolent minds: Mufti and Hitler in 1941 By Francis R. Nicosia Cambridge University Press, £60 What would have happened if Montgomery had lost at El Alamein and Hitler had defeated the Soviet … Read more
Jews and the Left::The Rise and Fall of a Political Alliance by Philip Mendes PALGRAVE MACMILLAN, 2014 As an accidental Jew, Will Self first ‘resigned as a Jew’ during the Second Lebanon war in 2006. In Self’s recent Guardian review of Shlomo Sand’s How I stopped being a Jew, he again resigned his … Read more
Disturbing rise of the far right Jewish settlers collect stones to build a structure as they attempt to establish an unauthorised outpost at the hill of Eitam Israeli election campaigns are nowadays characterised by the breast-beating of an array of right-wing parties, each vying with their rivals in proclaiming their undiluted patriotism. They have become … Read more
Some British Jews believe that London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies is a den of anti-Semitic iniquity. Some British Trotskyites believe that it is the center of the Zionist conspiracy. Both caricatures exist at one and the same time. Both are false. SOAS, however, is unusual in London colleges in that its firstclass … Read more
The Qatari-owned website Al Araby proudly proclaimed that “SOAS becomes the first UK university to boycott Israel”. This was patently untrue. It was not “SOAS” the institution that voted – not the governing body, not the administration, not even formally the lecturers’ union, but an invented “SOAS community”. Anyone could vote who wanted to – … Read more
The Best of Times or the The Best of Times or the Worst of Times? American Attitudes Towards Israel and Attitudes Towards Israel and Implications for the Peace Implications for the Peace Process Alistair Burt MP, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State, Foreign & Commonwealth Office (2010-13) Dr Jonathan Rynhold, Director, Argov Center for the Study of Israel … Read more
Leading the way: David Ben-Gurion was both revolutionary Jacobin and ‘the helmsman of the state’ By Anita Shapira Yale University Press, £18.99 ‘The man possesses the genius of looking at life face to face, of thinking not in concepts but in the fundamental facts of reality”. So wrote Ben-Gurion about Lenin, whom he further described … Read more
Shlomo Avineri Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2013. pp.274 In his autobiography, Chaim Weizmann commented that Theodor Herzl was ‘not of the people’ despite being an inspiring leader and brilliant organiser. The author of this interesting book, the eminent Israeli academic and public intellectual, Shlomo Avineri, has not written a conventional biography of Herzl. Instead he has … Read more