COLIN SHINDLER
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Diaspora

Home Diaspora

On the Iranian Revolution

27 December 2018Articles, Contemporary Israeli Politics, Diaspora, Israel and the Diaspora, Israel and the left, Universal questions, Zionist HistoryColin Shindler

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…

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On Menasseh ben Israel

30 November 2018Book Reviews, British Jews, Diaspora, Jewish historyColin Shindler

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…

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The First Jewish Australians

30 November 2018Articles, Diaspora, Jewish historyColin Shindler

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…

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How British Jews greeted the end of World War I

7 September 2018Articles, British Jews, Diaspora, Jewish history, Universal questionsColin Shindler

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…

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In Search of Israel

12 June 2018Book Reviews, Diaspora, Jewish history, Zionist HistoryColin Shindler

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’…

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On the Kasztner Affair

19 November 2016Book Reviews, Contemporary Israeli Politics, Diaspora, HolocaustColin Shindler

  Review of Paul Bogdanor’s Kasztner’s Crime (Transaction 2016) pp. 323 Paul Bogdanor has penned a well-researched book on the contentious Kasztner affair – a controversy that commenced in wartime Hungary and has continued until the present day. In the summer of 1944, a minor Jewish figure, Rudolf Kasztner, negotiated with Adolf Eichmann in the…

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The Battle of Cable Street

30 September 2016Articles, Diaspora, Universal questionsColin Shindler

Oswald Mosley instituted antisemitism as the official policy of the British Union of Fascists only in 1934, some two years after its formation. The annual report of the Board of Deputies for 1932 stated that Mosley had informed the Board that antisemitism formed “no part of the BUF’s policy”. Yet at a BUF meeting a…

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New Evidence about Raoul Wallenberg

12 August 2016Articles, Diaspora, Holocaust, Soviet Jewry, Universal questionsColin Shindler

”I have no doubts that Wallenberg was liquidated in 1947.” So noted the newly emerged diary of Ivan Serov, head of the KGB between 1954 and 1958 during the post-Stalinist thaw, regarding the fate of the Swedish diplomat who saved thousands of Jews in wartime Budapest. It seemed to confirm that Raoul Wallenberg had not…

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They Shall Not Pass

15 July 2016Articles, Diaspora, Israel and the leftColin Shindler

‘For some people, life was split in two on June 22 1941, for some on September 3 1939 and for others on July 18 1936.’ So wrote the Soviet Jewish writer, Ilya Ehrenburg about the start of war against Nazi Germany. Ninety-nine year old Ubby Cowen in his nursing home in Golders Green remembers that…

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The Saga of Sholom Schwartzbard

20 May 2016Articles, DiasporaColin Shindler

In May 1926, a Jewish watchmaker approached a middle-aged man sporting a cane and attending his favourite restaurant in the Rue Racine in Paris. The watchmaker asked the man his name and, after hearing the response, pumped five bullets into him, adding two more as he lay dying on the pavement. The dead man was…

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