From Herzl to Rabin: The Changing Image of Zionism (Holmes and Meier) pp. 283 This book is in fact an updated version of Amnon Rubinstein’s From Herzl to Gush Emunim and Back: The Zionist Dream Revisited which was published in 1984. If the original was catalyzed by Rubinstein’s reaction to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, … Read more
Lord Jakobovits in Conversation by Michael Shashar. London, Vallentine Mitchell, 202 pages. £19.50Michael Shashar completed the last of his interviews with the former Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of Great Britain shortly before Immanuel Jakobovits died a year ago. In one sense this book of conversations paints an autobiographical landscape, but it is … Read more
Celebrating Life: Finding Happiness in Unexpected Places by Jonathan Sacks. London, Harper Collins. 192 pages. £ 8.99In encounters with the late Oxford don, Sir Isaiah Berlin, the British Chief Rabbi, Dr. Jonathan Sacks was regularly rebuffed with comments such as “When it comes to God, I’m tone deaf.” Berlin’s counter-attack was to question how Sacks, … Read more
The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After by Edward W Said 345pp, Granta, pounds 15Edward Said is an eloquent advocate of the Palestinian cause in the west, but he is also a hate figure for both the Israeli right and American neo-conservatives. Like Vladimir Jabotinsky, the founder of the Revisionist Zionist movement, Said … Read more
Kahane, Meir 1932-1990 American-born Israeli vigilante and political activist Cohen-Almagor, Raphael, The Boundaries of Liberty and Tolerance: The Struggle against Kahanism in Israel, Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994 Dolgin, Janet L., Jewish Identity and the JDL, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1977 Friedman, Robert I., The False Prophet: Rabbi .Meir Kahane, from … Read more
The PLO in the World Order Avraham Sela and Moshe Ma’oz (eds), The PLO and Israel: From Armed Conflict to Political Solution 1964-1994. London: Macmillan, 1997. Pp.x + 310, index. £30 (cloth). ISBN 0-333-72370-8. Roland Dannreuther, The Soviet Union and the PLO. London: Macmillan, 1998. Pp.ix + 222, index, biblio. £45 (cloth). ISBN 0-312-17223-0. … Read more
Murder in the Name of God: The Plot to Kill Yitzhak Rabin by Michael Karpin and Ina Friedman 292pp, (Granta)13.99. On November 4, 1995, at the end of a jubilant rally for peace, Yigal Amir, a religious student, pumped two bullets into Yitzhak Rabin and a third into his bodyguard.The shots ruptured his spleen, severed … Read more
Man Is Wolf to Man: Surviving Stalin’s Gulag (Simon and Schuster) by Janusz Bardach and Kathleen Gleeson The Israeli critic, Dov Sadan, symbolised the 20th-century experience as the nations of the world crowded together in a room. The Jews were squeezed in at a coiner of a table, but in the centre of the room. … Read more
The Gates of November: Chronicles of the Slepak family (Secker and Warburg) by Chaim Potok Ten years ago, the telephone rang in the Moscow apartment of Vladimir and Masha Slepak, veterans of the refusenik movement. They had finally been granted permission to emigrate to Israel. It was the end of 17 years of harassment, imprisonment, … Read more
Mordechai Bar-On, In Pursuit of Peace: A History of the Israeli Peace Movement, Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1996. Pp.470, biblio. ISBN 1-878379-53-4. Mordechai Bar-On has written an overview of the Israeli peace movement from the birth of the State in 1948 up to the Rabin-Arafat handshake on the White House lawn … Read more