Many Labour Jews voted for Sadiq Khan as Mayor of London with a heavy heart. Khan’s past association with unsavoury Islamists who were not shy about peppering their views with anti-Semitic tropes undoubtedly jarred. Yet during the election campaign Khan went out of his way to court the Jewish community and instantly denounced the view … Read more
Last week’s revelations in the national and Israeli press that Associated Press (AP) had ”co-operated” with Joseph Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry during the 1930s and 1940s was astounding. The German historian, Harriet Scharnberg, discovered that photographer SS-Oberscharführer Franz Roth of the Propaganda Ministry, whose work regularly appeared in the Völkischer Beobachter, the Nazi party daily, was … Read more
Ingrid Carlberg’s Raoul Wallenberg is a painful book to read. The story is known. The outcome is known. But history cannot be unwritten. This well-researched, detailed account relates the saga of Wallenberg, the Swedish businessman diplomat who saved tens of thousands of Jews in wartime Hungary in 1944. This long book conveys every morsel of information – from the important to the trivial … Read more
One hundred years ago a small group of Irish men and women staged a military uprising from Dublin’s General Post Office in a futile attempt to throw off the British yoke and achieve Irish independence. The leadership of the uprising were foolishly executed after courts-martial. They became martyrs in a religious country which believed in … Read more
“Like their fellow citizens, Argentina’s more than half-a-million Jews have greeted the seizure of power by a military junta with a long sigh of relief. They hope that the long nightmare of the past three years or so under the Peronist administration has ended,” So wrote a JC special correspondent from Buenos Aires in … Read more
http://www.jewishbookweek.com/past-events/2604/video
Jewish Book Week 28 February 2016
Vladimir Jabotinsky’s Story of My Life Edited by Brian Horowitz and Leonid Katsis Published by Wayne State University Press (Detroit 2016) pp.162 Eighty years since Vladimir Jabotinsky originally published his Hebrew autobiography, an English-language version has made his life story available to a wider audience. The original manuscript was found in the Jabotinsky Institute archives in Tel Aviv by the Russian … Read more
The Irish Ambassador to Israel would laugh at Gideon Levy’s assertion in his opinion piece ‘Don’t Celebrate the Israeli Occupation’s Impending Demise Just Yet’ that “It took the Irish 750 years to get rid of the British occupation, which was much less brutal and ferocious than the Israeli one” – even taking into account the fact that … Read more
Britain’s Moment in Palestine: Retrospect and Perspectives 1917–1948, Michael J. Cohen (New York and London: Routledge, 2014), isbn 978-0-415-72985-7, pp. 518, £90. This is a revelatory book, which comprehensively details Britain’s contentious and anguished moment in Palestine as ruler and colonizer. In one sense this is a solid “old-fashioned” factual overview of British policy during the thirty … Read more
David Landau: Arik: The Life of Ariel Sharon (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013), 631 pp. Did Ariel Sharon have a clear-cut ideology? How can all the inconsistencies in his political outlook be reconciled? It can be argued that Sharon belonged to the flexible Ben-Gurion school of perception of current reality. In addition, Sharon was … Read more