Review of Julius Margolin’s Journey to the Land of the Zeks and Back: A Memoir of the Gulag translated by Stefani Hoffman, published by Oxford University Press, pp.640 You have to touch death to know what life is”, Julius Margolin wrote in Tel Aviv in 1946, after seven years in Stalin’s Gulag. His was one … Read more
Last Saturday, tens of thousands of people came out across Russia in support of Alexei Navalny, the detained opponent of Vladimir Putin. Demonstrations took place from Vladivostok in the East to St. Petersburg in the West — and significantly outside the Russian Embassy in Tel Aviv. Over 3,000 demonstrators have been arrested. In the past, … Read more
Review of Eliyana R. Adler’s Survival on the Margins: Polish Jewish Refugees in the Wartime Soviet Union. Published by Harvard University Press This book tells the story of the tens of thousands of Polish Jews who were forcibly deported to special settlements and camps in the interior of the Soviet Union in 1940. They had … Read more
Fifty years ago, on Christmas Day 1970, a handful of British Jews gathered in the bitter cold outside the Soviet Embassy in Bayswater. The news had reached London the night before that two Soviet Jews, Mark Dymshits and Edward Kuznetsov, had been sentenced to death. The announcement on Christmas Eve of these draconian sentences had … Read more
Thirty years ago, on 5 November 1990, Rabbi Meir Kahane, founder of the Jewish Defence League (JDL) in the US and the Kach party in Israel, was gunned down by an Egyptian Islamist, El Sayyed Nosair, at the Marriot Hotel in Manhattan. He was 58 and a father of four. Kahane had repeatedly proclaimed his … Read more
IN MARCH 2019, US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, told the Christian Broadcasting Network he believed that God was acting through President Trump to protect the Jews of Israel. While Queen Esther had saved the Jewish people from certain Persian annihilation during Purim, today, Pompeo argued, President Trump was saving the Jews from the wrath of … Read more
There have been many explanations for the rapid spread of antisemitic utterances within the British left. For some, the explanation is that it is ideologically ingrained since the birth of socialism; for others, sheer ignorance about Jewish history exacerbated by social media; for still others, an indifference to the Jews per se, that Jews are … Read more
Sylvia Becker née Rosenhead Born 26 April 1925 Died 13 February 2019 Sylvia Becker was one of ‘those wonderful women in black’ – the 35s Women’s Campaign for Soviet Jewry – who quietly changed the course of Jewish history. Never one to push herself to the front, she spent the 1970s committed to this cause before … Read more
One of the celebrated Women in Black, the 35s Women’s Campaign for Soviet Jewry, Sylvia Becker, who has died aged 93, spent the 1970s committed to the cause before moving to Israel in 1980 and fading back into family life. Leeds-born Sylvia Rosenhead studied dispensing at Leeds University and was evacuated to Stoke Poges and … Read more
The fact that no state in western Europe could ensure the elementary rights of the Jewish people or defend them from the violence of the Fascist executioners, explains the aspiration of the Jews to set up a state of their own. It would be unjust if we were to reject the right of the Jewish … Read more