Review of Lutz Fiedler’s Matzpen: A History of Israeli Dissidence (Edinburgh University Press 2020) pp.408 Lutz Fiedler’s highly informative book about the far Left group, Matzpen, is a welcome addition to the recording of both Jewish and Israeli history. This book started life as a doctoral thesis under the supervision of Professor Dani Diner, a stalwart of … Read more
Review of Emil Draitser’s In the Jaws of a Crocodile: A Soviet Memoir, published by the University of Wisconsin Press 2021, pp.276 What’s a Purim miracle? A Jewish boy getting into Moscow University! Charlie Chaplin once commented that ‘to truly laugh, you must be able to take your pain and play with it’. For Jews, … Read more
Review of Suzanne Rutland’s Lone Voice: The Wars of Isi Leibler, published by Gefen Books 2012, pp. 663 This book is about the life and times of Isi Leibler, a leader of Australian Jewry and a bare knuckle fighter for Jewish rights. Lone Voice: The Wars of Isi Leibler (Gefen Books) is also an account of … Read more
Review of Julius Margolin’s Journey to the Land of the Zeks and Back: A Memoir of the Gulag translated by Stefani Hoffman, published by Oxford University Press, pp.640 You have to touch death to know what life is”, Julius Margolin wrote in Tel Aviv in 1946, after seven years in Stalin’s Gulag. His was one … Read more
This timely tome (The Gulf Region and Israel: Old Struggles, New Alliances) by Sigurd Neuberger appeared just as US President Trump’s Deal of the Century was sidelined and diplomatic ties established with several Gulf States. The formal recognition of relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates was considered more important than extending sovereignty over … Read more
Review of Eliyana R. Adler’s Survival on the Margins: Polish Jewish Refugees in the Wartime Soviet Union. Published by Harvard University Press This book tells the story of the tens of thousands of Polish Jews who were forcibly deported to special settlements and camps in the interior of the Soviet Union in 1940. They had … Read more
Review of Allenby: Making the Modern Middle East, by C. Brad Faught, (I. B. Tauris 2020) pp.231 Edward Henry Hynman Allenby was born in 1861 in Brackenhurst, Nottinghamshire in comfortable circumstances — a Victorian squire, seemingly destined to govern the British Empire on behalf of the Queen-Empress. Yet he failed his civil service exams and … Read more
Review of Richard J. Evans’s The Hitler Conspiracies: The Third Reich and the Paranoid Imagination Published by Allen Lane, London 2020, pp. 276, price £20 This a compelling book about ‘fantasies and fictions, fabrications and falsifications’ — an excursion through five episodes of the Nazi period by the celebrated Cambridge historian, Sir Richard Evans. It … Read more
Learning on the Left: Political Profiles of Brandeis University Stephen J. Whitfield Published by Brandeis University Press 2020, pp. 582, price $40.00 This book celebrates the many well-known alumni of Brandeis University, situated just outside Boston. The political thinker Michael Walzer, the New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, the black Communist activist Angela Davis, the … Read more
ISRAELI FOREIGN POLICY(Indiana University Press 2020 pp.356) $48.54 Uri Bialer There is a profound difference between the objective outcome of a thought-through policy and the superficial sound bites of transient politicians. Uri Bialer’s excellent and well-researched Israeli Foreign Policy: A People Shall Not Dwell Alone (Indiana University Press 2020) provides any reader with an intelligent appraisal of … Read more