Communism was deemed by its adherents to be eternal. Few could contemplate its decay and a final crumbling into the dust of ages. Its meaning was its existence. Most who lived under Communism accepted their lot, avoided trouble and got on with living their lives as best they could. Few possessed the courage and foresight … Read more
In a few weeks, the triennial election for the Presidency of the Board of Deputies of British Jews will be upon us. For many, it will be an occasion of numbing irrelevance despite the quality of the candidates. The current state of the Board is deeply depressing for all committed and concerned British Jews. And … Read more
The Tory objective seems to be and is probably seen by most of them, including Mrs Thatcher, as the utopia of economic neo-liberalism: every man an entrepreneur, the triumph of the unrestricted market and the dismantling of state interference in the economy and the affairs of the private citizen. In short the anarchism of the … Read more
Mandela was arrested in August 1962, formally for his work in Umkonto we Sizwe, the underground wing of the ANC whose activities were directed at sabotaging installations—often ineptly. Nearly a year later, the entire leadership of Umkonto we Sizwe were surprised by a police raid on the home of Arthur Goldreich in Rivonia near Johannesburg. … Read more
It is not by chance that the Jewish Historical Museum of Amsterdam has chosen this year, the tercentenary of the Glorious Revolution, to hold an exhibition on the Lopes Suasso family; for, without them, stadholder William of Orange would not have crossed the Channel from the Low Countries to become King William III of Britain. … Read more
Is a Jewish education for children the basis of a Jewish commitment for adults? Many would passionately argue that the complexities of Jewish life and experience can be communicated and registered only by teaching them to the young. This, indeed, was the raison d’être of the Jewish day school movement in Britain. At its core … Read more
The recent exhibition commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Anschluss drew large crowds in London and Leeds. It reminded many a visitor that 1938 was a year filled with fateful events—Czechoslovakia, Kristallnacht, the Evian Conference. It was a year of foreboding and premonition—the last full year of peace before the Shoah. It was also the … Read more
In writing on the first meeting of the World Council (Veltrat) for Yiddish and Jewish Culture in Jerusalem in August 1976, Jacob Sonntag asked: “What about the outcome of the Conference? Will it have a lasting effect or will it remain an isolated episode in the history of Yiddish? It is difficult to say.” It … Read more
Human Rights was a prominent and much trumpeted feature of the recent Reagan-Gorbachev summit. Many groups openly voiced their grievances in protests and demonstrations, the deposed Boris Yeltsin called for the removal of the conservative Ligachev and Yuli Kosharovsky, the veteran refusenik leader, spoke to millions of American viewers in a live broadcast from the … Read more
ALL British Jews alive today know that their survival during the Nazi period was determined essentially by geography and little else. Fortunately, the Nazi empire did not expand fast enough or last long enough to realize the finality of the Final Solution. Thus, for those Jews, for whom fate decreed that their forebears would settle … Read more