A summer of football and flags has enabled tens of millions to proclaim their patriotism in a relatively harmless fashion. Big business, royalty and organised religion all jumped on this acceptable bandwagon. Jews, up and down the land, followed the team, for the Crusaders’ Cross no longer inspires fear. Nine hundred years after the slaughter … Read more
Christopher Hitchen’s articles in the Evening Standard, Barbara Amiel’s reply in The Daily Telegraph and Malcolm Palmer’s reply in the last issue of LJN all show a highly selective reading of the history of the Revisionist Zionist movement and its main protagonists, Jabotinsky and Begin. Amiel was right to condemn Hitchen’s depiction of the politics … Read more
In Hampstead Garden Suburb and its environs, it was only with great fortune that you could actually find a copy of the Jewish Chronicle on that terrible Friday. It was a measure of the affection in which he was held. Chaim was different. He was no gossip columnist, but a Jewish writer permeated by tradition … Read more
At the end of January, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu travelled to Washington for a tough meeting with President Clinton. At the top of the agenda for discussion were the redeployment of Israeli troops in the Territories and the percentage of West Bank territory to be evacuated. Netanyahu came to the talks with Clinton from a … Read more
Last year the Hale-Bopp comet traversed our skies. It was paying its first visit to the inner solar system for two and a half thousand years. The last time that Jews looked up and gazed in wonderment was during that terrible period of exile and return. Carrying with them the harrowing memory of the destruction … Read more
You were amongst the pre-war founders of Bnei Akiva-Bachad in London, but when did you leave for Israel? After my father discovered that her father had perished in Auschwitz, the family went from London to Palestine in May 1947. I was still engaged in Zionist work in London at that time as Director of … Read more
How to break through the barrier of ‘nonsense’ ‘publishing Benjamin Disraeli once had one of his fictional characters point out that books are the curse of the human race. In “Lothair,” it was Mr Phoebus who said: “Nine-tenths of existing books are nonsense, and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense. The … Read more
The Gates of November: Chronicles of the Slepak family (Secker and Warburg) by Chaim Potok Ten years ago, the telephone rang in the Moscow apartment of Vladimir and Masha Slepak, veterans of the refusenik movement. They had finally been granted permission to emigrate to Israel. It was the end of 17 years of harassment, imprisonment, … Read more
This issue of Judaism Today focuses on the theme of ‘heresy’. History testifies that it has transcended its formulation as a purely religious concept and has become a political tool in the hands of the powerful to discredit dissenting opponents and to discriminate against stubborn minorities. For Jews, the very term conjures up the Christian … Read more
Mordechai Bar-On, In Pursuit of Peace: A History of the Israeli Peace Movement, Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1996. Pp.470, biblio. ISBN 1-878379-53-4. Mordechai Bar-On has written an overview of the Israeli peace movement from the birth of the State in 1948 up to the Rabin-Arafat handshake on the White House lawn … Read more