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
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