Last week’s revelations in the national and Israeli press that Associated Press (AP) had ”co-operated” with Joseph Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry during the 1930s and 1940s was astounding. The German historian, Harriet Scharnberg, discovered that photographer SS-Oberscharführer Franz Roth of the Propaganda Ministry, whose work regularly appeared in the Völkischer Beobachter, the Nazi party daily, was … Read more
Ingrid Carlberg’s Raoul Wallenberg is a painful book to read. The story is known. The outcome is known. But history cannot be unwritten. This well-researched, detailed account relates the saga of Wallenberg, the Swedish businessman diplomat who saved tens of thousands of Jews in wartime Hungary in 1944. This long book conveys every morsel of information – from the important to the trivial … Read more
“Like their fellow citizens, Argentina’s more than half-a-million Jews have greeted the seizure of power by a military junta with a long sigh of relief. They hope that the long nightmare of the past three years or so under the Peronist administration has ended,” So wrote a JC special correspondent from Buenos Aires in … Read more
Hilary Benn’s remarkable speech during the Syria debate in parliament last week did not please everyone. It did however align voting to bomb Daesh installations with past traditions of the Labour party which are rarely mentioned today. Benn spoke about internationalism and evoked the struggle against Franco during the Spanish Civil War – a struggle … Read more
The firefighters of Irish heritage during the 9/11 attack on New York were lauded for their courage and resilience. The tragedy drew public attention to the Irish tradition of serving in the New York City Fire Department – to save the lives of others at the risk of their own. It was important to commemorate … Read more
The Times and “Englishness” In May 1784, John Walter, a bankrupted Lloyds underwriter wrote to is patron, Benjamin Franklin, the American Minister in pre-revolutionary Paris, to inform him that he intended to publish a newspaper. On 1 January 1785, Walter’s project appeared as The Daily Universal Register. Three years later, the title was changed … Read more
Fifty years ago the United Nations approved a Declaration of Human Rights. It pledged to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small’. The Declaration was motivated by the Holocaust and the destruction of … 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
The war in Bosnia has shown that aggression does pay. Under the terms of the Geneva Agreement, the Serbian nationalists together with their Croatian accomplices have been satisfied in their demand for land and power. Bosnia, as we knew it eighteen months ago, no longer exists. Yet Sarajevo seems to have survived that evil bombardment—as … Read more
Five hundred years ago, the Jews of Catholic Spain were expelled from their homeland by the practitioners of a religious fanaticism who believed that they had God on their side. The talents and contributions of minorities, whether Jewish or Muslim, were unwanted in a religiously pure Iberia. Those Jews who did not prostrate themselves before the priests of Ferdinand and Isabella left to seek new … Read more