JONATHAN Sacks’s elevation to the Chief Rabbinate marks a watershed between the generations: the pre-Holocaust generation and those born after the war. Unlike those scarred by the years of fascism and anti-Semitism, their sons and daughters do not seem to have that psychological need for survivalist policies and symbols; they are generally more open … Read more
Itzik Feffer is not only a talented Yiddish poet; he is also a gifted journalist and a splendid speaker. It is difficult to draw any fast line of demarcation between Itzik Feffer the poet and Itzik Feffer the public worker. His poems are calls to action. They are simply worded, like folk poems, full of … Read more
One year ago, the two Germanies became one. The hated Berlin Wall was literally pulled down by the will of the people. The Stalinist gerontocracy which had ruled East Germany for more than four decades collapsed like a pack of cards. Their eyes and ears, the members of the Stasi secret police, were run to … Read more
“A GOOD opportunity”, “a new mood since the Gulf war”, “a tragedy to let this opportunity slip” — such was the official phraseology of the Board of Deputies of British Jews on the prospect of an international . peace conference on the Middle East. The comments could be construed as merely a public-relations exercise … Read more
IMAGINE A MILLION Catholics moving to Northern Ireland in the space of a few years—or the influx of a million Protestants. The social changes and the inter-communal problems arising would easily fill a book. In the Middle East, such a migration is no fantasy: 75,000 Soviet Jews emigrated to Israel in the first five months … Read more
It is, of course, wrong to speak ill of the dead—but there are exceptions. For many Jews, the life and times of Rabbi Meir Kahane were not a cause for celebration. Indeed, the bitterness which he aroused in many seemed to feed his need to achieve a self-perpetuating urge to self-destruction. Shortly after Kahane’s murder … Read more
When the scale of the defeat of the Iraqi forces in the Gulf War became apparent, there was a sense of quiet satisfaction in some Jewish quarters that the case for Israel was now fully recognized by the West. The Palestinians in the Territories had frittered away all their hard-won support by their emotional outpourings … Read more
Proud, but invisible A SENSE OF BELONGING: DILEMMAS OF BRITISH JEWISH IDENTITY Howard Cooper and Paul Morrison Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £16 Colin Shindler British Jews have that sense of oneness, often admired and sometimes resented, which appears as an impregnable fortress of indefinable purpose. The authors of this book of a new Channel 4 series … Read more
Jacob Frank will always be remembered as one of the most frightening phenomena in Jewish history: a religious leader who, whether for purely self-interested motives or otherwise, was in all his actions a truly corrupt and degenerate individual. So wrote one of the greatest Jewish scholars of our time, Gershom Scholem—and it can be stated … Read more
The security of the State of Israel is the central psychological factor which governs the approach of the ordinary citizen to the Palestinian problem. But how is national security interpreted? Does control over the West Bank and its inhabitants increase Israel’s national security or does it ultimately endanger the existence of the Jewish state? If … Read more