Jews and the Left::The Rise and Fall of a Political Alliance by Philip Mendes PALGRAVE MACMILLAN, 2014 As an accidental Jew, Will Self first ‘resigned as a Jew’ during the Second Lebanon war in 2006. In Self’s recent Guardian review of Shlomo Sand’s How I stopped being a Jew, he again resigned his … Read more
Some British Jews believe that London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies is a den of anti-Semitic iniquity. Some British Trotskyites believe that it is the center of the Zionist conspiracy. Both caricatures exist at one and the same time. Both are false. SOAS, however, is unusual in London colleges in that its firstclass … Read more
The Qatari-owned website Al Araby proudly proclaimed that “SOAS becomes the first UK university to boycott Israel”. This was patently untrue. It was not “SOAS” the institution that voted – not the governing body, not the administration, not even formally the lecturers’ union, but an invented “SOAS community”. Anyone could vote who wanted to – … Read more
Résumé The reaction by the Left in Britain and France to the Arab Spring was one of both joy and opportunity in 2011, but had descended into a muffled and confused embarrassment by 2014. Yet this tentative alliance with Islamism mirrors past ideological mishaps such as a belief in Stalinism or the initial acceptance that … Read more
Uncivil War: The Israel Conflict in the Jewish Community by Keith Kahn-Harris (David Paul London 2013) The angst and anguish of British Jews in comprehending and coping with Israel’s political and military actions are documented and dissected in Keith Kahn-Harris’s book. It attempts to disentangle the different types of reaction to a specific event. Indeed the author … Read more
Geoffrey Levy’s Daily Mail article seemed like a family affair — only Jews were the main protagonists — Ralph Miliband, Eric Hobsbawm, Harold Laski. Each grappled with their Jewishness and how to repair the world in dark times. Hobsbawm remained an unrepentant Stalinist, who, despite his Jewish origin, supported the Nazi-Soviet pact at a time … Read more
The Invention of the Jewish People, by Shlomo Sand. London: Verso, 2009. 332 pp. This book has been promoted as “an international bestseller” that demolishes all previous connotations of the Jews as a people. Shlomo Sand approvingly quotes the French historian, Marcel Detienne, “How can we denationalise national histories?”— and this seems to be the … Read more
The European Left and Its Trouble With Jews Photo The Grande Synagogue de la Victoire in Paris in October. CreditEd Alcock for The New York Times LAST week, Twitter shut down a popular account for posting anti-Semitic messages in France. This came soon after the firing of blanks at a synagogue near Paris, the discovery … Read more
In 1940, Eric Hobsbawm, a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, characterised the war against Hitler as one of rival imperialisms between the Allies and Nazism and not as an anti-fascist struggle. Although millions of Jews were trapped by Hitler’s invasion of Poland, Hobsbawm was silent. He regarded the sacrifice of the Jews … Read more
During Jewish Book Week in February 1958, the great Marxist historian, Isaac Deutscher, gave a talk entitled “The Non-Jewish Jew”. It was later published and became required reading for the student revolutionaries of the 1960s. Deutscher tried to explain why some Jews embraced the revolutionary imperative and relegated their Jewishness to a secondary level. As … Read more