NEXT WEEK, JOE BIDEN will be inaugurated as the 46th president of the United States. While the hopes of many of the world’s Jews are with him, he faces an uphill struggle to repair his country after the chaos of the last four years. At an age when the politically aware quietly leave it to the … Read more
Fifty years ago, on Christmas Day 1970, a handful of British Jews gathered in the bitter cold outside the Soviet Embassy in Bayswater. The news had reached London the night before that two Soviet Jews, Mark Dymshits and Edward Kuznetsov, had been sentenced to death. The announcement on Christmas Eve of these draconian sentences had … Read more
Thirty years ago, on 5 November 1990, Rabbi Meir Kahane, founder of the Jewish Defence League (JDL) in the US and the Kach party in Israel, was gunned down by an Egyptian Islamist, El Sayyed Nosair, at the Marriot Hotel in Manhattan. He was 58 and a father of four. Kahane had repeatedly proclaimed his … Read more
Every elected Israeli prime minister since 1996 has been the subject of a criminal investigation. Sometimes charges were dropped through lack of evidence or defendants were acquitted in court. Yet Ehud Olmert was found guilty as charged and sentenced to prison for the ‘cash in envelopes’ affair while Ariel Sharon’s son, Omri, was indicted for … Read more
ISRAELI FOREIGN POLICY(Indiana University Press 2020 pp.356) $48.54 Uri Bialer There is a profound difference between the objective outcome of a thought-through policy and the superficial sound bites of transient politicians. Uri Bialer’s excellent and well-researched Israeli Foreign Policy: A People Shall Not Dwell Alone (Indiana University Press 2020) provides any reader with an intelligent appraisal of … Read more
IN MARCH 2019, US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, told the Christian Broadcasting Network he believed that God was acting through President Trump to protect the Jews of Israel. While Queen Esther had saved the Jewish people from certain Persian annihilation during Purim, today, Pompeo argued, President Trump was saving the Jews from the wrath of … Read more
Last Monday the UAE Ambassador and its Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Lana Nusseibeh, was rapturously greeted by the American Jewish Committee in New York. It was a celebration of the decision of Israel and the United Arab Emirates to proceed towards a normalisation of diplomatic relations. While it was clearly different from the … Read more
SULTANIC SAVIORS AND TOLERANT TURKS by Marc David Baer Writing Ottoman Jewish history, denying the Armenian genocide338pp. Indiana University Press. $95 (paperback, $45). Until quite recently, whenever Turkey was criticized for its approach to minorities – Greeks, Kurds and Armenians – they were known to deflect the argument by pointing to 500 years of tolerance … Read more
EIGHTY YEARS AGO, on August 6, 1940, 25,000 Jews stood in silence on the streets of New York to bear witness to the funeral cortège of Vladimir Jabotinsky as it passed by. The death of the Revisionist Zionist leader at the age of 59 shocked the Jewish world and he was mourned by friend and foe … Read more