Doctoral thesis
http://eprints.mdx.ac.uk/13485/1/568729.pdf
Colin Shindler
In Pursuit of Peace
Mordechai Bar-On, In Pursuit of Peace: A History of the Israeli Peace Movement, Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1996. Pp.470, biblio. ISBN 1-878379-53-4. Mordechai Bar-On has written an overview of the Israeli peace movement from the birth of the State in 1948 up to the Rabin-Arafat handshake on the White House lawn … Read more
Those Wonderful Women in Black
Those Wonderful Women in Black: The Story of the Womens Campaign for Soviet Jewry (Minerva Press) by Daphne Gerlis Sometime in 1971, Yitzhak “Ijo” Rager, the diplomat at the Israeli Embassy unofficially responsible for Soviet Jewry activities in Britain, asked me to stand in for him and speak to a group of Jewish women who … Read more
The Politics of Hope?
When Jonathan Sacks was installed as Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations at the beginning of the decade, he was determined not to provoke the publicity and public criticism of his predecessor. Lord Jakobovits was always prepared to speak his mind on Likud’s Israel and to puncture the wall of silence erected by the … Read more
Schneier Levenberg 1907-1997
Dr Levenberg (few people addressed this very private man by his first name) was born in Kursk in the reign of Nicholas II. He barely escaped the murderous embrace of Reds and Whites in the Civil War a decade later: his parents fled to Riga, where he spent his formative years studying law and … Read more
Western Jewry and the Zionist Project
Western Jewry and the Zionist Project, 19141933 / by Michael Berkowitz. – Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. – ISBN 0-521-47087-0 £35 305pp Borrowing a phrase from Eric Hobsbawm, Berkowitz prefers to view Zionism as an ‘invented tradition’ which was remarkable for its adaption to the situation of assimilated Jewries and its ingenious ability to build … Read more
God, the Jews and Tony Blair
Barring an electoral upset of unimaginable proportions, Tony Blair will be the next Prime Minister of this country. But is it — to put it at its most crudely — good for the Jews? Many Jews have answered this question already both by flocking to his banner and no doubt by contributing to Labour’s campaign … Read more
The Really Jewish ‘Jewish State’
Zionism has always posed a problem for the ultra-orthodox. Unlike the religious Zionists of the Mizrachi, they always preferred the actual arrival of the messiah rather than his indeterminable coming to inaugurate a new era in the Holy Land for the Jewish people. Medinat Yisrael, the State of Israel, was nothing less than a blot … Read more
The Hiding Room
The Hiding Room by Jonathan Wilson (Secker and Warburg 1995) The Rabin assassination showed that seemingly normal Jews are ready to kill their brethren for a cause. After all, Yigal Amir was no American import attempting to turn the West Bank into the Wild West. Amir’ s group was guided by the life and times … Read more
Jews Behaving Badly
Despite the depressing campaign of the suicide bombers, many Jews are recalling the birth of the return to Zion by commemorating the hundredth anniversary of Theodor Herzl’s The Jewish State. Its publication proved to be the catalyst which launched the Zionist Congresses and changed a small number of disparate groups into an international movement which … Read more