The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt Published by Bloomsbury 2022, pp. 557 Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962) was a leading liberal voice in post-war America. She had been a committed advocate of womens’ suffrage, an architect of the welfare state, a diplomat, a journalist and a social activist committed to the ideals of the newly established United Nations … 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
Józef Piłsudski, the founder of modern Poland after World War I, is hardly known today — and many Jews have previously regarded him pejoratively as just another one-dimensional strongman figure in an anti-Semitic inter-war Eastern Europe. This excellent biography by the American academic, Joshua Zimmerman, presents a far more nuanced account. Piłsudski grew up in … Read more
In all likelihood, Liz Truss will become leader of the Conservative Party and the UK’s next prime minister on September 5. During the last few weeks, an increasingly fatigued British public has watched Truss and her rival for the leadership, Rishi Sunak, attempting to out-Thatcher the other in an unedifying road show around the British … Read more
Last week, Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid called a meeting of ministerial colleagues and interested parties to discuss the threat from the Kremlin to close down the Jewish Agency for Israel in Russia – a body which facilitates the emigration of Jews from that country. Many were unsure whether the Kremlin’s move was merely intimidatory … Read more
Many believe that Bulgaria, like Denmark, saved its Jews from the Nazi death camps. The book The Stolen Narrative of the Bulgarian Jews and the Holocaust (Rowman and Littlefield) by Jacky Comforty, together with Martha Aladjem Bloomfield, tells a different story. It is a narrative that recalls Bulgaria’s alliance with Hitler to regain territory in … Read more
In Hitler’s Munich: Jews, the Revolution and the Rise of Nazism by Michael Brenner, translated by Jeremiah Riemer, published by Princeton University Press 2022, pp.392 In the immediate aftermath of the sudden defeat in the First World War in 1918, Munich — before the appearance of Hitler on the political stage — emerged as ‘the … Read more
One hundred years ago in 1922, the Nazis were just another fringe nationalist group, wallowing in the humiliation of sudden defeat in World War I. Under the terms of the Versailles agreement, Germany lost territory to Poland, Belgium and France, its colonies, its foreign investments — and owed reparations of 132 billion goldmarks. Defeat spawned … 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
David Baddiel is well-known in Britain as a comedian and a writer. He is also unusual – in that he does not shy away from his Jewishness in his stage routine, but actually glories in his identity. The grandson of disenfranchised, well-to-do, Jewish business-people who escaped Nazi Germany in 1939, his Twitter biography is just … Read more