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
Eighty years ago in April 1940, British Jews sat down to celebrate the festival of freedom at their Passover Seder with a sense of foreboding and trepidation. A few days before, Nazi Germany had invaded Norway and Denmark. While the Nazis initially viewed Denmark as a model protectorate, there was fear for the fate of … 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
Review of Chris Millington’s A History of Fascism in France: From the First World War to the National Front published by Bloomsbury 2020, pp. 235 In 1995, President Jacques Chirac stated that France was responsible for the Vel’ d’Hiv round-up of Jews in 1942. In 2018, Marine Le Pen, president of the Front National, attributed … Read more
Review of We Fight Fascists: The 43 Group and Their Forgotten Battle for Post-War Britain by Daniel Sonabend Published by Verso 2019, 369pp IN APRIL 1946, a government committee decided it would be an error to ban fascist groups as they now posed no threat. Manny Shinwell, a committee member and Jewish Labour MP disagreed; … Read more
Two weeks ago, Mario Sandoval, a professor at the Sorbonne’s Institute of Latin American Studies, was finally extradited to Argentina after a seven-year legal fight. In a former life, he had been a police officer during the military junta then assigned to unit 3.3.2 at Escuela de Mecanica de la Armada, the naval college known … Read more
The Road from Kristallnacht: Unlearning the Past Seventy-Five years ago tomorrow, on 12 November 1944, Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle laid a wreath at the tomb of the Unknown Soldier at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. It commemorated the multitudes who had fallen during World War I. Churchill, De Gaulle and many others … Read more
There have been many explanations for the rapid spread of antisemitic utterances within the British left. For some, the explanation is that it is ideologically ingrained since the birth of socialism; for others, sheer ignorance about Jewish history exacerbated by social media; for still others, an indifference to the Jews per se, that Jews are … Read more
Eighty years ago, on 1 September 1939, German troops crossed the Polish frontier and ignited a conflagration that claimed the lives of tens of millions of innocents. This descent into the jaws of destruction has been impregnated on our collective memory by the imagery of gleeful Nazis raising the border post in order to enter … Read more
Seventy Five years ago, on 26 August 1944, General Charles de Gaulle walked triumphantly down the Champs-Elysées, engulfed by a sea of jubilant Parisians. The capital had been liberated from the Nazi oppressor, but France was yet to be free. The road from D-Day in June 1944 had been long and tortuous. The original plan … Read more