Andrei Sakharov died on 15 December 1989. The abundance of tributes accorded to him tended to concentrate on his more recent role is an opponent of the gradualist policies of the Gorbachev regime. Yet perhaps more than anyone else, he was responsible for the historic changes that have taken place in the Soviet Union and, … Read more
On the 800th anniversary of the York Massacre: Yom Kippur as Jewish History On Yom Kippur, Jews come to shul for a plethora of reasons. Many come for reasons of faith. Others come for reasons of culture. Still others come for reasons of both faith and culture. Some come out of a sense of guilt. Some … Read more
A new Jewish listings monthly, New Moon, appears on Thursday. A sort of Jewish Time Out, it sets out to appeal to the younger generation of Anglo-Jews whose needs and interests have remained unanswered by the official face of the community. Whether this initiative will be translated into financial stability is another question. The Jewish … Read more
MARGARET THATCHER’S current difficulties seem to herald the end of an era: three foreign secretaries within as many months; the exit of an experienced team from the uppermost echelons of government to the back benches and less important posts; the trouncing of the Tories in the European elections — the first defeat since she entered … Read more
The Tory objective seems to be and is probably seen by most of them, including Mrs Thatcher, as the utopia of economic neo-liberalism: every man an entrepreneur, the triumph of the unrestricted market and the dismantling of state interference in the economy and the affairs of the private citizen. In short the anarchism of the … Read more
On December 30th 1988, the writer and translator, Yuli Daniel died in Moscow at the age of sixty-three. A few days later, Andrei Sinyavsky was allowed to return from self-exile in Paris to pay homage at his graveside at Vagavanskoye cemetery. For a whole generation, the names of Daniel and Sinyavsky were synonymous with the … Read more
AS ANGLO-JEWISH personalities fly out from London to attend the “Prime Minister’s Conference on Jewish Solidarity with Israel”, a group of prominent Jewish writers, academics. intellectuals and communal leaders has issued a statement which casts doubt on the value of their visit. Asking “which Jews today do not express solidarity with Israel?” they commented that ‘it seems increasingly likely that this is a … Read more
At the end of 1988, full page advertisements appeared in the national press in Britain which exhorted Jews to embrace Jesus Christ as the Messiah and effectively to convert to the Christian faith. The reaction of most Jews was initially one of astonishment that, in this day and age, large sums of money should be … Read more
At the end of last year, BBC 2’s “Timewatch” series screened a programme on the life and times of Nikolai Bukharin, a leading Bolshevik revolutionary and a central figure in the early Soviet state—in Lenin’s words “the favourite of us all”. 1988 marked both the fiftieth anniversary of his execution after a Stalinist show-trial and … Read more
Mandela was arrested in August 1962, formally for his work in Umkonto we Sizwe, the underground wing of the ANC whose activities were directed at sabotaging installations—often ineptly. Nearly a year later, the entire leadership of Umkonto we Sizwe were surprised by a police raid on the home of Arthur Goldreich in Rivonia near Johannesburg. … Read more