SULTANIC SAVIORS AND TOLERANT TURKS by Marc David Baer Writing Ottoman Jewish history, denying the Armenian genocide338pp. Indiana University Press. $95 (paperback, $45). Until quite recently, whenever Turkey was criticized for its approach to minorities – Greeks, Kurds and Armenians – they were known to deflect the argument by pointing to 500 years of tolerance … Read more
For British Jews of a certain age, Alfie Bass, David Kossoff, Warren Mitchell and Lionel Bart were household names in the world of popular music and theater. They were also children of London’s Jewish East End who aspired to make it in the wider world, felt very Jewish, but at the same time were perplexed by … Read more
Review of The Room where it Happened: A White House Memoir by John Bolton Published by Simon and Schuster, pp. 577 price £25.00 John Bolton is the hawks’ hawk, a maximalist who takes no prisoners — someone who even worried Trump by his views. A neo-con veteran of the Reagan, Bush père and Dubya administrations, … Read more
Vladimir Jabotinsky’s Russian Years 1900-1925 by Brian J. Horowitz, published by Indiana University Press 2020, pp.271 The surprising interest in Vladimir Jabotinsky, the so-called ‘Father of the Israeli Right’ during the last twenty years is due less to his well-known Zionism, but more to the mystery of his inner beliefs and outward contradictions. For some … Read more
Review of From Antisemitism to Anti-Zionism: The Past and Present of a Lethal Ideology ed. Eunice G. Pollack Published by Academic Studies Press 2017, pp.426 This book is a collection of essays which looks at the transition of anti-Zionism into antisemitism in our time. There are some excellent essays in this collection such as David Hirsh’s … Read more
Karl Marx: Philosophy and Revolution by Shlomo Avineri Published by Yale University Press 2019, pp.221 Why should Karl Marx be included in Yale’s excellent Jewish Lives series when the subject of this fascinating book never referred to his Jewish origins? Shlomo Avineri, the eminent Israeli intellectual and academic, has attempted to unravel Marx’s connection to … Read more
Searching for Socialism, by academics Leo Panitch and Colin Leys, traces the odyssey of Labour’s “Old Left” from the 1970s until the defeat of the far left in last year’s elec-tion. It looks at the political voyage of left-wing Brexiteers from Tony Benn to Jeremy Corbyn; and also indicates that the mindset of the far … Read more
Britain’s Pacification of Palestine: The British Army, the Colonial State, and the Arab Revolt 1936–1939, Matthew Hughes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), ISBN 978-1-107-10320-7, pp. 478, £34.99. This work by the military historian Matthew Hughes describes in great detail the multifaceted approach taken by the British army “to grind out the rebellion” (blurb), the suppression … Read more
IRVING BERLIN: NEW YORK GENIUSBy James KaplanPublished by Yale University Press, pp.324 Born at the end of the 19th century in Siberia, Israel Beilin or Izzy Baline, but best known as Irving Berlin, lived to be 101 – and during his long life composed some of the most enduring contributions to the American songbook. A … Read more
Review of Laurel Leff’s Well Worth Saving: American Universities’ Life and Death Decisions on Refugees from Nazi Germany Published by Yale University Press 2019, pp.357 To be hired by an American university, a refugee scholar (from Nazism) had to be world-class and well connected, not too old and not too young, not too right and … Read more