Jeffrey Herf, Undeclared Wars With Israel: East Germany and the West German Far Left 1967–1989 (Cambridge 2016) After 1945, Communist East Germany and the far Left in West Germany felt that they had no moral responsibility towards Israel. In their eyes it was just another outpost of imperialism that had placed the yoke of colonialism around the necks of Palestinian Arabs. Prof. Jeffrey Herf’s … Read more
The Last Days of Stalin Joshua Rubenstein Yale University Press, £25 When Stalin died on Purim, in 1953, beggars in Jerusalem rattled their tin cans and cried “Haman is dead!” In the USSR, there were public tears and private joy. Huge, inconsolable crowds appeared in the streets and many participants were crushed underfoot in the … Read more
Socialism of Fools: Capitalism and Modern Anti-Semitism (Columbia University Press 2016) pp.321 by Michele Battini The Italian academic, Michele Battini examines the gradual transformation of the traditional Christian anti-Semitic charge of usury into modern anti-Jewish anti-capitalism. Fuelled by the economic transformation in the nineteenth century and the self-regulated market, anti-Jewish anti-capitalism emerged … Read more
The Black Door:Spies, Secret Intelligence and British Prime Ministers By Richard J. Aldrich and Rory Cormac Collins, £30 British prime ministers have never been neutral towards the intelligence services. Intelligence historians Richard Aldrich and Rory Cormac have written an accessible book, indicating how different premiers reacted to intelligence reports – and often bypassed their own … 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
Britain’s Moment in Palestine: Retrospect and Perspectives 1917–1948, Michael J. Cohen (New York and London: Routledge, 2014), isbn 978-0-415-72985-7, pp. 518, £90. This is a revelatory book, which comprehensively details Britain’s contentious and anguished moment in Palestine as ruler and colonizer. In one sense this is a solid “old-fashioned” factual overview of British policy during the thirty … Read more
David Landau: Arik: The Life of Ariel Sharon (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013), 631 pp. Did Ariel Sharon have a clear-cut ideology? How can all the inconsistencies in his political outlook be reconciled? It can be argued that Sharon belonged to the flexible Ben-Gurion school of perception of current reality. In addition, Sharon was … Read more
W. Stephen Gilbert has written an adulatory account of the emergence of the new British Labor party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, and the subsequent hope for “a new politics” in the United Kingdom. Corbyn, the eternal party rebel on the far Left, was unexpectedly elected to lead the Labor Party in September because of a new voting system that permitted many non-Labor party members to vote … Read more
Review of Let My People Go by Pauline Peretz (Trans: Ethan Rundell) Transaction, £54.50 Joseph Stalin’s last years were the “Black Years of Soviet Jewry”. The trial and execution of the Yiddish writers, the Slansky trial of mainly Jewish Communists in Prague, and the infamous Doctors’ Plot in January 1953, all characterised this period. Stalin’s … Read more
Operation Thunderbolt: Flight 139 and the Raid on Entebbe Airport By Saul David (Hodder and Stoughton pp. 446, 20 pounds) In 1976 Palestinian Arabs from a splinter group of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and German far leftists from the Revolutionäre Zellen hijacked an Air France Airbus with nearly 250 … Read more