‘Final Verdict: A Holocaust Trial in the Twenty-First Century’, by Tobias Buck Published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson, In October 2019, a 93-year-old man was wheeled into a Hamburg courtroom, hiding his face from the public gaze behind a red folder, a pair of dark sunglasses and a wide-brimmed hat. Bruno Dey was accused of being involved … Read more
Safe Haven: The United Kingdom’s Investigations into Nazi Collaborators and the Failure of Justice by Jon Silverman and Robert Sherwood, published by Oxford University Press 2023, pp.309 Thirty years ago, the late David Cesarani published Justice Delayed which revealed that many Nazi collaborators were living peacefully in Britain. This followed on the heels of the War Crimes … Read more
There have been commemorations this year to mark several anniversaries: the assassination of President Kennedy (1963), the Yom Kippur War (1973), the Oslo Accords (1993). And less obvious ones that many in Jewish communities would prefer to forget such as the electrocution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg in Sing-Sing prison in 1953. Into this latter … Read more
The mourners gathered round the body at Alice Shalvi’s funeral in Jerusalem last Tuesday and sang with great emotion and passion, Eshet Chayil – “a woman of worth”. Chanted each Friday night to welcome in Shabbat, it summed up a woman who was deeply loved and revered. Her family, friends, community, students and colleagues in their hundreds accompanied … Read more
One area of the tortuous Israel-Palestine conflict that has been under-researched has been the ties between Nazi propaganda and Islamism. The German academic, Mattihas Küntzel, has attempted to fill in the gaps in this short, but absorbing book. Nazi propaganda regarded the spoken word as more effective than the written word and began to broadcast … Read more
In the aftermath of the French Revolution and the rise of European nationalism in the 19th century, Jews began to understand themselves in terms of more than a religion – a people with a history, a culture, a literature, and a plethora of languages. With the rise of antisemitism, many considered a territorial solution to the … Read more
The ‘Out of the Forest Theatre Company’ will shortly feature a play at the Edinburgh Fringe about King Boris of Bulgaria and how he saved 50,000 Jews from the Nazis. While no doubt well-intentioned, this projects a history that has been rewritten to perpetrate a myth. A recent book, The Stolen Narrative of the Bulgarian Jews … Read more
Review of Goodbye Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land By Jacob Mikanowski, published by Oneworld, London 2023, pp.380 ‘The twentieth century will be the century of the Jews and revolutions’ — so wrote the Hungarian painter, Béla Zombory-Moldaván on hearing about the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian … Read more
In a few days, a meeting to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the deportation of Jews from Bulgarian-occupied Greece will take place at the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris. For many, this will be one minor tragedy amidst a multitude during the Holocaust. For some, the deportations may register momentarily about a country of … Read more
Spying on the Reich: The Cold War against Hitler Published by Oxford University Press, 2023, pp.358 In 1936, the Nazis beheaded six spies including four who had worked for the British. This was a transient reflection of the secret cold war that Britain was waging against the clandestine German rearmament programme. The Secret Intelligence Service … Read more