“We made a mistake in navigation,” admitted a chastened Amihai Chikli, the Israeli Minister for Diaspora Affairs — and called for a halt to the so-called “judicial reforms”. In the wake of airport closures, walkouts at universities, port stoppages, embassies and consulates shuttered until further notice, bank closures, a looming shut-down of the hi-tech industry … Read more
Nakam: The Holocaust Survivors who Sought Full-Scale Revenge By Dina Porat, translated by Mark L. Levinson, Published by Stanford University Press 2023, pp. 365 Nakam is the Hebrew for ‘revenge’ — and the fifty men and women who planned mass poisonings of Germans in the immediate aftermath of World War II were the Nokmim, the … Read more
One hundred years ago, on 30 December 1922, four republics, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Transcaucasia, agreed to form a union of states — the Soviet Union. This was to be ‘a decisive step on the path of unification into a World Socialist Soviet Republic’. The same year also saw the first trials of Zionists in … Read more
Bibi: My Story Benjamin Netanyahu Published by Threshold Editions, 2022, pp.726 When he was asked by a student in 2018, what is the most important subject to study for a political career, Benjamin Netanyahu replied that there were three answers: ‘History, history and more history’. In writing his own history during the Bennett-Lapid interregnum, dictated … Read more
‘I am a Russian writer. Like all Russians, I am now defending my homeland. But the Nazis have reminded me of something else; my mother’s name was Hannah. I am a Jew. I say this proudly.’ So spoke the noted writer, Ilya Ehrenburg, at a Jewish rally in Moscow in August 1941 as the Nazi … Read more
‘No more silence; no more compromise, no more acquiescence; no more vacillation, no more appeasement’. So spoke a young deputy at a Board of Deputies meeting in September 1982, defiantly challenging its leadership. It was directed at the Board’s Israel policy in the aftermath of the massacre of Palestinians by Christian Phalangists in the Lebanese … Read more
Review of The Jews of England and the Revolutionary Era 1789-1815 by Jeremy Smilg Published by Vallentine Mitchell 2021, pp. 254 In 1791 Edmund Burke, ‘the father of British conservatism’, commented that: We have in London very respectable persons of the Jewish nation whom we will keep: but we have of the same tribe, others … Read more
The Battle of London 1939-45: Endurance, Heroism and Frailty under Fire by Jerry White Published by the Bodley Head 2021, pp.425 price £30.00 In 1939, a fifth of the population of England and Wales lived in London. It made it a sitting target for Nazi bombers during World War II. And, after the zeppelin raids … Read more
Review of Internment in Britain in 1940by Ines Newman, published by Vallentine Mitchell, 224 pages; $74.95 Following the fall of France in the summer of 1940, there was a deep trepidation that Britain would be the next to be overrun by the Nazi war machine. British Jews feared that they were about to suffer the … Read more
Eighty years ago, at precisely 3.15 a.m. on the night of 22 June 1941, General Heinz Guderion moved his Panzers across the bridge, spanning the River Bug. This was the beginning of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union — an invasion which took the lives of over 20 million Soviet citizens including over two … Read more