One hundred years ago, on 28 June 1919, the victorious powers in the First World War signed the Treaty of Versailles with Germany. It was followed by treaties with Austria, Bulgaria, Hungary and Turkey — the defeated powers in a conflict in which millions lost their lives. The Paris Peace Conference in 1919 was supposed … Read more
Review of Susie Linfield’s The Lions’ Den: Zionism and the Left from Hannah Arendt to Noam Chomsky Published by Yale University Press, 2019, pp.389 Many who write about the international Left tend to focus on antisemitism rather than anti-Zionism. US academic and journalist Susan Linfield remedies this imbalance in The Lions’ Den: Zionism and the … Read more
The Charedi refusal to serve in the IDF — the stumbling block in Netanyahu’s inability to form a governing coalition — is rooted in an ideological opposition to Zionism and a reticence to come to terms with modernity. It was the combination of the French Revolution and the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, that fragmented a hitherto … Read more
Protest and Power: The Battle For The Labour Party By David Kogan Bloomsbury, £20 THIS IS an excellent overview and dispassionate analysis of the past 40 years of Labour party history. The author, David Kogan, rightly places the debate about antisemitism in the wider context of the ascent of the far left in the party, … Read more
Sylvia Becker née Rosenhead Born 26 April 1925 Died 13 February 2019 Sylvia Becker was one of ‘those wonderful women in black’ – the 35s Women’s Campaign for Soviet Jewry – who quietly changed the course of Jewish history. Never one to push herself to the front, she spent the 1970s committed to this cause before … Read more
One of the celebrated Women in Black, the 35s Women’s Campaign for Soviet Jewry, Sylvia Becker, who has died aged 93, spent the 1970s committed to the cause before moving to Israel in 1980 and fading back into family life. Leeds-born Sylvia Rosenhead studied dispensing at Leeds University and was evacuated to Stoke Poges and … Read more
Colin Shindler: In your book, Never a Native, you recalled that your parents went to see The Merchant of Venice in Essen in 1932 and were so appalled by the antisemitic comments in the audience that they left halfway through. What do you remember about the rise of Nazism in Germany at that time? Alice Shalvi: I very … Read more
Four million Jews waiting for death Oh hang and burn but — quiet Jews! Don’t be bothersome; save your breath — The world is busy with other news So began the opening stanza of the Ballad of the Doomed Jews of Europe, published in the New York Times in September 1943. Its author was Ben … Read more
Ben Hecht was one of the 20th century’s greatest scriptwriters for the silver screen. He wrote – or had a hand in writing – the scripts for iconic films including Scarface, Barbary Coast, Stagecoach and Gone with the Wind. As Adina Hoffman, the author of this wonderful biography of Hecht, notes, “The list is ridiculous … Read more
Jeremy Corbyn’s reaction to Julian Assange’s forced exit from the Ecuadorean Embassy in London last week was to laud him as a twenty-first century folk hero for exposing “evidence of atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan” – and to call on the British government to oppose extradition to the U.S. That kneejerk support was hardly surprising. It follows … Read more