Review of The Thirty Year Genocide, by Benny Morris and Dror Ze’evi This remarkable book by two eminent Israeli historians recalls the massacre of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire by the Turks during the First World War and places it in the wider context of how the Turks treated their ethnic minorities. The authors remark…
Review of Paul Hanebrink’s A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism, published by Harvard University Press, pp.354 In August 2017, white nationalists marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting ‘Jews will not replace us!’ They espoused a depressing, if familiar world view: that it is Jews who control the banks and the media, imposing their morality…
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…
Protest and Power: The Battle For The Labour Party By David Kogan Bloomsbury, £20 THIS IS an excellent overview and dispassionate analysis of the past 40 years of Labour party history. The author, David Kogan, rightly places the debate about antisemitism in the wider context of the ascent of the far left in the party,…
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,…
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…
Review of James Loeffler’s Rooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century; Yale University Press 384 pages; $32.50 The exponents of human rights can often be an irritant to those who hold office even in democratic lands. Those who speak “truth to power” in countries ruled by authoritarian figures often risk imprisonment or worse….
Review of Simon Schama’s Belonging: A History of the Jews 1492-1900 Published by the Bodley Head, 800pp, £25 Simon Schama is a teller ofhistorical tales par excellence. As a professor of art history, the long and multilayered history of the Jews lends itself to his expertise. He captures vignettes of forgotten events and paints a…
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’…
Review of Anshel Pfeffer’s Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu Published by Hurst, pp. 424 Netanyahu” means “given by God” in Hebrew. Anshel Pfeffer, one of Israel’s most insightful journalists and the author of this excellent biography, clearly doesn’t believe this to be the most appropriate of surnames for Israel’s current prime…