“Like their fellow citizens, Argentina’s more than half-a-million Jews have greeted the seizure of power by a military junta with a long sigh of relief. They hope that the long nightmare of the past three years or so under the Peronist administration has ended,” So wrote a JC special correspondent from Buenos Aires in … Read more
W. Stephen Gilbert has written an adulatory account of the emergence of the new British Labor party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, and the subsequent hope for “a new politics” in the United Kingdom. Corbyn, the eternal party rebel on the far Left, was unexpectedly elected to lead the Labor Party in September because of a new voting system that permitted many non-Labor party members to vote … Read more
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
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
UK Jewish Film Festival 8 November 2015
Israel Report FINAL 12 November 2015
In Jews Against Themselves, Edward Alexander, a retired English professor from Seattle, deals with the concept of “Jewish apostasy” – members of the tribe who “abandon” the State of Israel. Throughout this collection of essays, the author vents anger against Jews of ‘the progressive persuasion” who fall “to mobilize their intellectual resources on behalf of … Read more
At this critical hour for mankind, let every Jew and Jewess utter a solemn vow that, come what may and whatever the trials in store, they will stand body and soul by Britain, giving all that they have, never despairing, determined that so far as they can achieve it, the crowning disaster of a desolate … Read more
Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s attempts to be re-elected by confronting the White House, two weeks before Israel’s election, antagonised many American Jews, over two thirds of whom had voted for President Barack Obama; it highlighted fundamental differences in approach between the Jewish state and the most powerful Diaspora community. The same was true in … 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