Tel Aviv was founded on the second day of Passover, 1909. A crowd famously gathered on the dunes on April 11 and dreamed of the rise of an ir metropolinit — a modern Hebrew metropolis. The new white city, inhabited by “the new Jew”, was established to be as far removed from the religiosity and … Read more
Brian Klug is highly selective in his choice of Jewish communal figures to bolster his argument. Many left wing Jewish academics and writers, such as Norman Geras and Howard Jacobson, opposed the initiative of Independent Jewish Voices. They were never approached to sign the IJV letter probably because they did not distance themselves sufficiently from … Read more
With the fog of publicity lifting, it is still difficult to know what Independent Jewish Voices actually stands for. Its advocacy in support of the universality of human rights, condemnation of racism and a negotiated peace between Israelis and Palestinians is not exactly revolutionary. It is certainly not new. The political innocence of its open … Read more
Zionism has, in recent years, become an increasingly pejorative term. It was, for example, unremarkable for Alexei Sayle to write in the Independent: “If the Zionists wanted a homeland, why didn’t they take a piece of Germany? The answer is, of course, that Arabs, then and now, were not considered fully human by the … Read more
The Reflection of Israel within British Jewry A Special Role British Jewry has played a unique role in the often ambivalent relationship between Britain and Israel. Sometimes it has been characterised as an emboldened advocate for Zionism during the Atlee government during the late1940s. On other occasions, it has been seen as an … Read more
I am sitting at home, writing about David Ben-Gurion’s historic debate with Agudat Israel about a constitution for the new state of Israel, when the telephone rings. A colleague from Israel asks if I’m OK. “OK? Everyone’s fine.” A silence. “You had better watch the BBC,” he says. “There have been explosions in London.” A … Read more
Imagine waking up one morning to discover that Dracula is Jewish. Imagine, too, that he has been elected unopposed to become leader of the British Conservative Party. Confused? Unless you have been reading the British press during the last fortnight, you would be. The unexpected emergence of the Transylvanian Tendency in British political life has … Read more
Early in August, the octogenarian Rabbi Dr. Louis Jacobs, perhaps the preeminent talmudic scholar in Britain and founder of the Masorti movement [loosely affiliated with the US Conservative movement], attended the aufruf of his granddaughter’s future husband in the coastal resort of Bournemouth. The synagogue, however, looked to the United Synagogue group, from which Jacobs … Read more
It is Jonathan Sacks’s destiny to inhabit several disparate worlds. Sacks is the scholarly British chief rabbi who heads the United Hebrew Congregations of the UK and the British Commonwealth Controversy seems to stalk him. His latest imbroglio relates to the republication of The Dignity of Difference, Sacks’s most recent book – ostensibly an Orthodox … Read more
Divided Against Zion by Rory Miller. London, Frank Cass. 275 pages. £20.00 Anyone here in London who reads the liberal/Left press these days despairs about their fundamental ignorance – not only about Israeli history and Zionism – but also about Palestinian-Arab politics. That’s why it is refreshing to read Dr. Rory Miller’s book about the … Read more