Colin ShindlerIN the midst of Shimon Peres’s triumphant visit to London, Israel announced that she had agreed to participate in Mr Reagan’s Strategic Defence Initiative—Star Wars. In March 1985, Israel was invited to detail—in Mr Caspar Weinberger’s words—”the areas of your country’s research excellence that you deem most promising for this programme”. Since it has taken … Read more
Hitler’s Apocalypse: Jews and the Nazi Legacy ROBERT WISTRICH Weidenfeld £18.95 IN AN AGE when epithets such as Fascist and Nazi are as liberally sprinkled as political confetti, it is a sobering experience to be confronted with the Hitlerite madness. The first part of Robert Wistrich’s book is also a cultural antidote to the fantasy, … Read more
We oppose censorship, but we are impelled to participate in the debate about Jim Allen’s play, “Perdition,” especially after a number of Holocaust experts have declared that it is riddled with errors and distortions. Advisers have written countless pages separating fact from fiction in the search for objective truth. Such objections have been ignored by … Read more
The Dulwich Picture Gallery in London will be playing host to an exhibition of the work of the little-known artist Sam Rabin. Born in Manchester in 1908 of Russian-Jewish immigrant parents (his father had been a cap-maker in Vitebsk), Rabin won a scholarship to Manchester School of Art and later studied at the Slade. Returning … Read more
The election of Meir Kahane to the Knesset sent shock waves through Israel and the Diaspora. At the time, public relations pundits in Britain dismissed it as more or less a freak result. It was not regarded as part of a prevalent trend toward irrational policies in Israel. A year later, several opinion polls suggest … Read more
The people of Israel are remarkably innovative and Moshe Efrati’s dance company is a good example. It is called Kol Demama—the Voice of Silence. Such a name may conjure up many misleading images—for many of Efrati’s dancers are totally deaf. How do the deaf and the hearing communicate with each other? How do the worlds … Read more
EARLY ONE hundred years ago, the progenitor of cultural Zionism, Ahad Ha’am visited the Land of Israel for the first time. 0n his return, he wrote an acerbic article in Hamelitz, the St Petersburg Hebrew daily. Although his central theme was his castigation of the Hovevei Zion settlers for unethical financial practice, he also registered … Read more
MOST READERS will already know that Tony Lerman has relinquished the editorship of the Jewish Quarterly—especially since his decision to do so was followed by a long exchange of letters in the correspondence columns of the Jewish Chronicle. Whilst this is neither the time nor the place to delve into the minutiae of the controversy, … Read more
Sharon: an Israeli Caesar by Uzi Benziman, published by Robson Books, 276 pp, £12.95 Anyone with, what might be termed “a liberal conscience” always tries to locate the good, those small islands of common humanity, in the views and actions of an opponent. However, by the time I had passed page 200, with the war … Read more
EARLIER this year, Harvard University hosted the first conference on the American-Jewish Press. It was attended by over one hundred journalists, editors and publishers from the East coast, the deep South and the mid-West. Since 1823, when the first Jewish newspaper, The Jew, was published, there has been a tremendous proliferation of English language Jewish … Read more