Review of Divided We Stand: A Journey with Judge Israel Finestein QC by Colin Lang (Vallentine Mitchell 2017) pp.262 ISRAEL “SHMUL” Finestein (1921-2009) was a successful lawyer and community leader from his student days in post-war Britain. He possessed “a dry wit, combined with a placid nature” but this belied a fierce desire for … Read more
Review of Yitzhak Rabin: Soldier, Leader, Statesman (Yale University Press 2017) pp. 304, £16.99 The Israeli novelist, Amos Oz, described Yitzhak Rabin as ‘not a charismatic man, but rather a logical, skilful captain’. Rabin was both a political dove and a military hawk, who never pretended to be a far-sighted intellectual, had no small … Read more
Review of Yuli Kosharovsky’s “We are Jews Again: Jewish Activism in the Soviet Union” (Syracuse University Press 2017) pp.440 David Khavkin, the Podolsky family, Anatoly Rubin, Joseph Schneider, Baruch Veissman – such names are largely unknown to Jews in Israel and in the Diaspora. Yet these people, and many others, kept the flame of Jewish … Read more
Review of Our Israeli Diary, 1978: Of That Time, Of That Place By Antonia Fraser Published by One World (London 2017) pp149 $16.99 In May 1978, the Nobel Prize winning playwright, Harold Pinter and Lady Antonia Fraser, a celebrated historian who later became his wife, visited Israel. Fraser has now published her diary of … Read more
Review of Neill Lochery’s The Resistible Rise of Benjamin Netanyahu Admiration and respect are not words usually attached to the persona of Benjamin Netanyahu by either friend or foe. Rather, it is his prowess as ‘the national goalkeeper’ and the guarantor of security that matters. In the eyes of many Israelis, the question of … Read more
What Ifs of Jewish History: From Abraham to Zionism edited by Gavriel D. Rosenfeld (Cambridge University Press 2016) pp. 412 Noel Coward wrote Peace in Our Time, a play which imagined defeat in the Battle of Britain and a Nazi occupation of the UK, in 1946. Writers from Philip Roth (The Plot Against America) … Read more
Review of Revolutionary Yiddishland By Alain Brossart and Sylvia Klingberg Verso, £16.99 Not all Jews who emigrated to Israel in the last century were Zionists. Some Trotskyists, Bundists and loyal Communists went to Israel as a refuge from the Nazi inferno and Stalin’s gulag. Scarred by such murderous regimes, these survivors of Red Yiddishland represented the … Read more
Review of Paul Bogdanor’s Kasztner’s Crime (Transaction 2016) pp. 323 Paul Bogdanor has penned a well-researched book on the contentious Kasztner affair – a controversy that commenced in wartime Hungary and has continued until the present day. In the summer of 1944, a minor Jewish figure, Rudolf Kasztner, negotiated with Adolf Eichmann in the … Read more
Review of Avi Shilon’s Ben-Gurion: His Later Years in the Political Wilderness (Rowman and Littlefield 2016) pp.245 This latest work from Avi Shilon describes in detail Ben-Gurion’s last decade – from stepping down as prime minister in June 1963 until his death in December 1973. They were not glorious years and were peppered by … Read more
Review of Where the Jews Aren’t by Masha Gessen (Schoken 2016) pp.171. When should the Jews leave and when should they stay put? This is the general question which the gay, Jewish, American-Russian writer Masha Gessen asks about her own life. She was beaten in primary school, ostracized at secondary school and barred from university in the USSR because of her Jewishness. Her … Read more