One of the celebrated Women in Black, the 35s Women’s Campaign for Soviet Jewry, Sylvia Becker, who has died aged 93, spent the 1970s committed to the cause before moving to Israel in 1980 and fading back into family life. Leeds-born Sylvia Rosenhead studied dispensing at Leeds University and was evacuated to Stoke Poges and…
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…
Four million Jews waiting for death Oh hang and burn but — quiet Jews! Don’t be bothersome; save your breath — The world is busy with other news So began the opening stanza of the Ballad of the Doomed Jews of Europe, published in the New York Times in September 1943. Its author was Ben…
Ben Hecht was one of the 20th century’s greatest scriptwriters for the silver screen. He wrote – or had a hand in writing – the scripts for iconic films including Scarface, Barbary Coast, Stagecoach and Gone with the Wind. As Adina Hoffman, the author of this wonderful biography of Hecht, notes, “The list is ridiculous…
Jeremy Corbyn’s reaction to Julian Assange’s forced exit from the Ecuadorean Embassy in London last week was to laud him as a twenty-first century folk hero for exposing “evidence of atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan” - and to call on the British government to oppose extradition to the U.S. That kneejerk support was hardly surprising. It follows…
The fringe pro-Corbyn group Jewish Voice for Labour has many antecedents in Jewish history — representing, as they do, the few and not the many, and eagerly embraced by a ruling elite. Some have been ideologically opposed to Zionism, such as the Bundists and the Charedim, others have been disillusioned socialist Zionists. Some have been accidental Jews…
We do not know what tidings you are bringing with you from your visit to our neighbour, Egypt, whether the dove that emerged from the Ark carries an olive branch in her mouth to signal that the waters have subsided so that people can put their feet on the ground once more. So spoke President…
THE GENESIS OF THE LIKUD Since the election of the Likud in 1977, the party has led government for 28 out of those 42 years. In addition it partnered Labour in the rotation government (1984-1988). Likud was only truly out of power when Ariel Sharon’s Centre-Right Kadima ruled between November 2005 until February 2009 and…
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,…
Pope Francis’s announcement that the Vatican will open the archives on the life and times of his predecessor, Pius XII (1939-1958) – some 16 million pages – has answered the call of historians over many decades. The attitude of Pius towards Jews, anti-Semitism and Nazi atrocities has remained a matter of controversy for Jewish and…