Eighty years ago, on 1 September 1939, German troops crossed the Polish frontier and ignited a conflagration that claimed the lives of tens of millions of innocents. This descent into the jaws of destruction has been impregnated on our collective memory by the imagery of gleeful Nazis raising the border post in order to enter…
Seventy Five years ago, on 26 August 1944, General Charles de Gaulle walked triumphantly down the Champs-Elysées, engulfed by a sea of jubilant Parisians. The capital had been liberated from the Nazi oppressor, but France was yet to be free. The road from D-Day in June 1944 had been long and tortuous. The original plan…
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…
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…
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…
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…
The figure of Menasseh ben Israel holds a special place in the hearts of many British Jews. He is regarded as the central advocate in pleading the case to the leaders of the English republic in 1656 to readmit the Jews into the country. A leading Sephardi rabbi in Amsterdam, he spent two frustrating years…
TWO HUNDRED and thirty years ago a small wooden flotilla sailed into Sydney Cove. This First Fleet of 1788 consisted of two warships and three store vessels which contained sheep, cattle and horses plus enough provisions for two years. Its most important cargo was contained in six transportation ships — 789 convicts from Britain accompanied…
At the 11th hour on the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, the First World War came to an end. Among the vast number of casualties, it had cost the lives of 3,500 British Jews and 12,000 German Jews. It had uprooted millions, demolished great empires and destroyed the ordered worlds of so…
Review of In Search of Israel: The History of an Idea by Michael Brenner, published by Princeton University Press, pp. 372 The renowned sociologist, Zygmunt Bauman, a refugee from the anti-Semitic campaign in Communist Poland during the 1960s and subsequently a professor at the University of Leeds, popularised the term ‘allosemitism’. It depicted the ‘otherness’…