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
Boycotting Israel is Wrong by Philip Mendes and Nick Dyrenfurth This academic overview of the boycott against Israel argues that the BDS campaign is “bad For Israelis, bad for Palestinians, and is corrosive of progressive movements and civil society”. The authors believe the campaign plays on the lack of understanding about the complexity of the … Read more
The far-left candidate in the British Labour Party leadership contest, Jeremy Corbyn, is performing very well. He stands out from the other candidates in projecting a clear vision of the future in an age of austerity and plucks at the socialist heartstrings of many a party member – a yearning for traditional Labour values and … Read more
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