DURING THE PAST WEEK, the British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has been engulfed in wave after wave of allegations and accusations about his conduct in the highest office of public service in the UK. He has seemingly slipped deeper and deeper into the slime of sleaze. On a wide range of issues, a familiar story has … Read more
Review of Lutz Fiedler’s Matzpen: A History of Israeli Dissidence (Edinburgh University Press 2020) pp.408 Lutz Fiedler’s highly informative book about the far Left group, Matzpen, is a welcome addition to the recording of both Jewish and Israeli history. This book started life as a doctoral thesis under the supervision of Professor Dani Diner, a stalwart of … 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
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 Yuli Kosharovsky’s “We are Jews Again: Jewish Activism in the Soviet Union” (Syracuse University Press 2017) pp.440 David Khavkin, the Podolsky family, Anatoly Rubin, Joseph Schneider, Baruch Veissman – such names are largely unknown to Jews in Israel and in the Diaspora. Yet these people, and many others, kept the flame of Jewish … Read more
During 2015, several books were published about the various diaspora campaigns for Soviet Jewry, which culminated in the emigration of a million people from the former USSR to Israel during the 1990s. The French academic Pauline Peretz has documented the American campaign while the journalist Sam Lipski and Professor Suzanne Rutland have produced a fine … Read more
During the summer of 1970 while working as the political secretary of the World Union of Jewish Students, I received a telephone call from an irate caller who told me that the spelling of the organisation’s name in Russian on its headed notepaper was incorrect. I tried to explain that this was none of my … Read more
On December 30th 1988, the writer and translator, Yuli Daniel died in Moscow at the age of sixty-three. A few days later, Andrei Sinyavsky was allowed to return from self-exile in Paris to pay homage at his graveside at Vagavanskoye cemetery. For a whole generation, the names of Daniel and Sinyavsky were synonymous with the … Read more