Review of Let My People Go by Pauline Peretz (Trans: Ethan Rundell) Transaction, £54.50 Joseph Stalin’s last years were the “Black Years of Soviet Jewry”. The trial and execution of the Yiddish writers, the Slansky trial of mainly Jewish Communists in Prague, and the infamous Doctors’ Plot in January 1953, all characterised this period. Stalin’s … Read more
During 2015, several books were published about the various diaspora campaigns for Soviet Jewry, which culminated in the emigration of a million people from the former USSR to Israel during the 1990s. The French academic Pauline Peretz has documented the American campaign while the journalist Sam Lipski and Professor Suzanne Rutland have produced a fine … Read more
UK Jewish Film Festival 8 November 2015
Israel Report FINAL 12 November 2015
The assassination of Yitzhak Rabin 20 years ago was a watershed in the collapse of the peace process between Israelis and Palestinians. It also marked the lowest point in the far right’s march to power. The far-right came into existence when, opposing Menachem Begin’s support for the 1979 treaty between Israel and Egypt, it broke … Read more
Professor David Cesarani, who has died at the early age of 58, was an international expert on the Holocaust and on anti-Semitism who spoke on several occasions to the Centre for Jewish Studies at SOAS. During his career, he held posts at Leeds, Manchester, QMC, Southampton and finally at Royal Holloway. He was an advisor … Read more
Operation Thunderbolt: Flight 139 and the Raid on Entebbe Airport By Saul David (Hodder and Stoughton pp. 446, 20 pounds) In 1976 Palestinian Arabs from a splinter group of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and German far leftists from the Revolutionäre Zellen hijacked an Air France Airbus with nearly 250 … 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
In Jews Against Themselves, Edward Alexander, a retired English professor from Seattle, deals with the concept of “Jewish apostasy” – members of the tribe who “abandon” the State of Israel. Throughout this collection of essays, the author vents anger against Jews of ‘the progressive persuasion” who fall “to mobilize their intellectual resources on behalf of … Read more
In one pamphlet, the Sephardim of Bevis Marks express their relief in a special prayer that Queen Victoria had survived an assassination attempt at Constitution Hill in June 1840. Another is a declaration of fealty to the crown by the Portsmouth Jewish community when King George III visited the town in June 1773. Elsewhere, there … Read more