The National Health Service is rightly revered by all in this time of the coronavirus. It is admired worldwide and based on the principle that medical care should be provided ‘free at the point of delivery’. It was established in July 1946, by Aneurin Bevan, the Minister of Health in Clement Attlee’s post-war government. But … Read more
Review of Emil Draitser’s In the Jaws of a Crocodile: A Soviet Memoir, published by the University of Wisconsin Press 2021, pp.276 What’s a Purim miracle? A Jewish boy getting into Moscow University! Charlie Chaplin once commented that ‘to truly laugh, you must be able to take your pain and play with it’. For Jews, … Read more
Review of Suzanne Rutland’s Lone Voice: The Wars of Isi Leibler, published by Gefen Books 2012, pp. 663 This book is about the life and times of Isi Leibler, a leader of Australian Jewry and a bare knuckle fighter for Jewish rights. Lone Voice: The Wars of Isi Leibler (Gefen Books) is also an account of … Read more
WHEN THE BRITISH FOREIGN SECRETARY, Dominic Raab, was asked last month about the plight of the Uighurs, a Muslim ethnic minority in China, Raab invoked the odyssey of his father, a Czech Jew who came to the UK in 1938. Similarly, Anthony Blinken, the US Secretary of State, argued during his recent confirmation hearings in the Senate … Read more
Review of Julius Margolin’s Journey to the Land of the Zeks and Back: A Memoir of the Gulag translated by Stefani Hoffman, published by Oxford University Press, pp.640 You have to touch death to know what life is”, Julius Margolin wrote in Tel Aviv in 1946, after seven years in Stalin’s Gulag. His was one … Read more
Last Saturday, tens of thousands of people came out across Russia in support of Alexei Navalny, the detained opponent of Vladimir Putin. Demonstrations took place from Vladivostok in the East to St. Petersburg in the West — and significantly outside the Russian Embassy in Tel Aviv. Over 3,000 demonstrators have been arrested. In the past, … Read more
Review of Eliyana R. Adler’s Survival on the Margins: Polish Jewish Refugees in the Wartime Soviet Union. Published by Harvard University Press This book tells the story of the tens of thousands of Polish Jews who were forcibly deported to special settlements and camps in the interior of the Soviet Union in 1940. They had … Read more
Fifty years ago, on Christmas Day 1970, a handful of British Jews gathered in the bitter cold outside the Soviet Embassy in Bayswater. The news had reached London the night before that two Soviet Jews, Mark Dymshits and Edward Kuznetsov, had been sentenced to death. The announcement on Christmas Eve of these draconian sentences had … Read more
Review of Review of Daniel Lee’s The S.S. Officer’s Armchair: Uncovering the Hidden Life of a Nazi, published by Hachette (New York 2020) PP.303 It all began at a dinner party in Florence. A guest related how a collection of documents, bearing the Nazi insignia, had fallen out of an old chair that her mother had … Read more
Review of Richard J. Evans’s The Hitler Conspiracies: The Third Reich and the Paranoid Imagination Published by Allen Lane, London 2020, pp. 276, price £20 This a compelling book about ‘fantasies and fictions, fabrications and falsifications’ — an excursion through five episodes of the Nazi period by the celebrated Cambridge historian, Sir Richard Evans. It … Read more