Review of Adam Begley’s Houdini: The Elusive American (Yale 2020) pp.221 If someone is described as a ‘Houdini’ today, it usually means that person is adept at getting out of difficult situations. In a sense, that is what ‘Harry Houdini’ – born Ehrich Weiss to an impoverished rabbi and his wife in Budapest – sought … Read more
The sudden death of the respected former Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks elicited an outpouring of grief. Last month also saw the publication of a new biography of Rabbi Louis Jacobs, a revered and venerated Talmudic scholar in Britain. This ironic juxtaposition brought back memories of a controversy within British Jewry over 50 years ago which led … Read more
People in the gas chambers knew, when they were dying, that the world had risen up against their executioners. People in the (Soviet) camps, however, did not have even this consolation. These stark, shocking words were written by Julius Margolin over 70 years ago in Tel Aviv after a forced sojourn of five years in … Read more
So now we know. President Biden will face the American people and Mr Trump will face the American courts. For many Jews, a long nightmare has come to an end, but how will we understand the Trump interregnum in the years to come? Can we draw any lessons from Jewish history and the trauma of the … 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
An interview with Itamar Rabinovich, Israeli Ambassador to the US 1993-1996 during Rabin’s tenure as prime minister Your biography of Rabin opens with a quote from Amos Oz that Rabin was not endowed with Ben-Gurion’s prophetic passion, Levi Eshkol’s warm gracefulness, Golda’s sweeping simplicity or Begin’s populist energy. How then would you characterise Yitzhak Rabin? … Read more
Review of Review of Daniel Lee’s The S.S. Officer’s Armchair: Uncovering the Hidden Life of a Nazi, published by Hachette (New York 2020) PP.303 It all began at a dinner party in Florence. A guest related how a collection of documents, bearing the Nazi insignia, had fallen out of an old chair that her mother had … Read more
Four hundred years ago, in September 1620, the Mayflower sailed from Plymouth Hoe in search of a promised land and a new world. On board, the travellers promised to ‘enact, constitute, and frame, such just and equal Laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions, and officers, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general … 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
One hundred years ago, Rosh Hashanah 5681/1920, British Jews were beginning to look forward to a better future after the years of lethal stalemate on the battlefields of the First World War. Almost a million British soldiers had died fighting for King and Country in a terrible conflagration. The poet, Siegfried Sassoon, described the choking … Read more