Review of Susie Linfield’s The Lions’ Den: Zionism and the Left from Hannah Arendt to Noam Chomsky Published by Yale University Press, 2019, pp.389 Many who write about the international Left tend to focus on antisemitism rather than anti-Zionism. US academic and journalist Susan Linfield remedies this imbalance in The Lions’ Den: Zionism and the…
The Charedi refusal to serve in the IDF — the stumbling block in Netanyahu’s inability to form a governing coalition — is rooted in an ideological opposition to Zionism and a reticence to come to terms with modernity. It was the combination of the French Revolution and the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, that fragmented a hitherto…
Colin Shindler: In your book, Never a Native, you recalled that your parents went to see The Merchant of Venice in Essen in 1932 and were so appalled by the antisemitic comments in the audience that they left halfway through. What do you remember about the rise of Nazism in Germany at that time? Alice Shalvi: I very…
MAURICE PERLZWEIG was one of the great n a m e s o f J e w i s h diplomacy during the inter-war and postwar periods. When he died in New York in 1985, a lonely, forgotten figure, police had to break into his apartment where they discovered a large number of books, newspapers,…
Thousands of eager participants are returning from the UK Limmud Festival, whose message of openness in Jewish life has proved a challenge to conformists within the Jewish world and spawned more than 80 Limmud communities across the world – from Beijing to Jerusalem and from New Zealand to New York, run by the brightest and best of…
Forty years ago, the Iranian revolution was reaching its zenith. 1978 had been marked by demonstrations and a massacre of protesters in Tehran’s Jaleh Square in September. By mid-January 1979, the Shah had gone into exile and the Queen’s visit to Iran in the royal yacht, Britannia, had been abruptly cancelled. On 1 February, the Ayatollah…
There has been much criticism over the Board of Deputies’ invitation to the Shadow Education Secretary, Angela Rayner, to represent the Labour party at a Chanukah service in the House of Lords. Such opprobrium omits any recognition that political differences exist between Jeremy Corbyn and many on his front bench. Ms Rayner, who has voiced…
IT WILL TAKE A NEW generation, and a change of leadership, on both sides of the Israel-Palestine conflict for there to be a real possibility of progress towards peace, one of the world’s leading scholars on Israel believes. Professor Colin Shindler, a visiting British academic who will deliver the first of three lectures at the University…
Forty years ago during the early summer of 1978, 348 reserve and non-commissioned officers signed an open letter to prime minister Menahem Begin. It stated that �?a government that prefers the establishment of the State of Israel in the borders of a Greater Israel above the establishment of peace through good neighbourly relations instils in…
To what degree should U.K. Jews fear a Corbyn-led Labour government? The most recent wave of anti-Semitism accusations against Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has once more brought into sharp relief the claim that British Jews will leave for safer countries. This comes after a survey published last year, covered widely by the right-wing British press,…