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
Four hundred years ago, in September 1620, the Mayflower sailed from Plymouth Hoe in search of a promised land and a new world. On board, the travellers promised to ‘enact, constitute, and frame, such just and equal Laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions, and officers, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general … Read more
One hundred years ago, Rosh Hashanah 5681/1920, British Jews were beginning to look forward to a better future after the years of lethal stalemate on the battlefields of the First World War. Almost a million British soldiers had died fighting for King and Country in a terrible conflagration. The poet, Siegfried Sassoon, described the choking … Read more
SULTANIC SAVIORS AND TOLERANT TURKS by Marc David Baer Writing Ottoman Jewish history, denying the Armenian genocide338pp. Indiana University Press. $95 (paperback, $45). Until quite recently, whenever Turkey was criticized for its approach to minorities – Greeks, Kurds and Armenians – they were known to deflect the argument by pointing to 500 years of tolerance … Read more
For British Jews of a certain age, Alfie Bass, David Kossoff, Warren Mitchell and Lionel Bart were household names in the world of popular music and theater. They were also children of London’s Jewish East End who aspired to make it in the wider world, felt very Jewish, but at the same time were perplexed by … Read more
Eighty years ago on 16 July 1940, Hitler issued Führer Directive No.16 which instructed his forces to prepare for an invasion of the United Kingdom. The Nazis had conquered France and on a clear day could see the white cliffs of Dover — they readied themselves to launch Operation Sealion. A few weeks before, David … Read more
In 1999, Ehud Barak defeated Benjamin Netanyahu with the slogan, “Too many lies for too long!”. While a similar disdain exists today, do you think that it was inevitable that Benny Gantz would go into government with Netanyahu even after the stalemate of three elections? Netanyahu is a highly intelligent and crafty politician. Over the … Read more
Karl Marx: Philosophy and Revolution by Shlomo Avineri Published by Yale University Press 2019, pp.221 Why should Karl Marx be included in Yale’s excellent Jewish Lives series when the subject of this fascinating book never referred to his Jewish origins? Shlomo Avineri, the eminent Israeli intellectual and academic, has attempted to unravel Marx’s connection to … Read more
Searching for Socialism, by academics Leo Panitch and Colin Leys, traces the odyssey of Labour’s “Old Left” from the 1970s until the defeat of the far left in last year’s elec-tion. It looks at the political voyage of left-wing Brexiteers from Tony Benn to Jeremy Corbyn; and also indicates that the mindset of the far … Read more