Review of Simon Schama’s Belonging: A History of the Jews 1492-1900 Published by the Bodley Head, 800pp, £25 Simon Schama is a teller ofhistorical tales par excellence. As a professor of art history, the long and multilayered history of the Jews lends itself to his expertise. He captures vignettes of forgotten events and paints a … Read more
Review of In Search of Israel: The History of an Idea by Michael Brenner, published by Princeton University Press, pp. 372 The renowned sociologist, Zygmunt Bauman, a refugee from the anti-Semitic campaign in Communist Poland during the 1960s and subsequently a professor at the University of Leeds, popularised the term ‘allosemitism’. It depicted the ‘otherness’ … Read more
Review of Anshel Pfeffer’s Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu Published by Hurst, pp. 424 Netanyahu” means “given by God” in Hebrew. Anshel Pfeffer, one of Israel’s most insightful journalists and the author of this excellent biography, clearly doesn’t believe this to be the most appropriate of surnames for Israel’s current prime … Read more
In this well-researched and insightful book, British biographer Caroline Moorehead traces the transition of Italy’s pre-1914 liberalism to Mussolini’s Fascist utopia through the beliefs and actions of the Rosselli family and its matriarch, Amelia Pincherle. A Bold and Dangerous Family: One Family’s Fight against Italian Fascism, tells the story of a family who was proud … Read more
An East End Legacy: Essays in Memory of William J. Fishman Edited by Colin Holmes and Anne J. Kershen Published by Routledge 2018, pp.246 This volume of essays by accredited scholars in honour of the late Bill Fishman is a fitting memorial to a much loved historian of London’s East End. His telling of … Read more
Review of Mark Mazower’s What You Did Not Tell: A Russian Past and the Journey Home (Other Press 2017) pp. 400 Mark Mazower’s latest book, What You Did Not Tell: A Russian Past and the Journey Home, is a descriptive voyage of his family’s journey. Mazower’s discoveries are made all the more interesting because … Read more
Review of Jews and Leftist Politics: Judaism, Israel, Anti-Semitism and Gender ed. Jack Jacobs (Cambridge 2017) pp.374 This important book is based on an international conference on Jews and the Left held in New York in 2012. As the subtitle denotes, the chapters explore questions of religion, Zionism, anti-Semitism, Marxism and Soviet Communism and contain some remarkable … Read more
Enemies and Neighbors: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel 1917-2017 Ian Black, published by Allen Lane 2017) pp. 640 Ian Black, a longtime Guardian journalist, sees Yasser Arafat’s appearance at the UN in 1974 as the “apogee of his 40-year leadership.” It’s a curious notation in his latest book, Enemies and Neighbors: Arabs … Read more
Review of Daniel Heller’s Jabotinsky’s Children The acknowledged founder of the Zionist Right was the assimilated Odessa-born intellectual Vladimir Jabotinsky, whose abilities were admired by both acolytes and opponents. A hundred years ago he founded the Jewish Legion, which fought in the British campaign in 1918 to take Palestine from the Turks and promoted a … Read more
Review of Sean Matgamna’s book The Left in Disarray Most of the time, the key terms of the anti-capitalist Left have no clear meaning, they express and convey emotion, not reason. They are the tools of demagogy more than of reasoned discourse … our language of politics is decayed, disablingly. So opens Sean Matgamna’s timely … Read more