Nakam: The Holocaust Survivors who Sought Full-Scale Revenge By Dina Porat, translated by Mark L. Levinson, Published by Stanford University Press 2023, pp. 365 Nakam is the Hebrew for ‘revenge’ — and the fifty men and women who planned mass poisonings of Germans in the immediate aftermath of World War II were the Nokmim, the … Read more
Kreisky, Israel and Jewish Identity by Daniel Ashheim Published by University of New Orleans Press, 2022, pp.225 Bruno Kreisky was the longest serving Chancellor of Austria (1970-1983). He was also a Jew who had fled to Sweden when Hitler annexed the country to the Third Reich. More than 20 family members perished in the Shoah, … Read more
The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt Published by Bloomsbury 2022, pp. 557 Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962) was a leading liberal voice in post-war America. She had been a committed advocate of womens’ suffrage, an architect of the welfare state, a diplomat, a journalist and a social activist committed to the ideals of the newly established United Nations … Read more
When the result of the vote was announced, ‘a feeling that grips a man but once in his lifetime came upon us. High above us we seemed to hear the beating of the wings of history.’ So recalled David Horowitz, a member of the Jewish Agency delegation, on hearing the result of the historic vote … Read more
The Story of Russia by Orlando Figes Published by Bloomsbury (London 2022), pp. 348, price £25.00 Reviewed by Colin Shindler Why is Russia as it is — from holy Tsars to Soviet commissars to Putin’s nationalists? The historian Orlando Figes’s latest book provides fascinating insights into this contemporary conundrum. All countries are embedded in national … Read more
The death of Queen Elizabeth II has been described by many as the end of an era — a watershed in British history. The Queen’s remarkable reign of 70 years — a period only exceeded in recent times by the Sun King, Louis XIV of France — encompassed the end of empire and the decline … Read more
Following the reduction of many German cities to rubble and amid the ignominy of defeat and occupation in May 1945, some cogs in the Nazi wheel focused first and foremost on escape from retribution. By the autumn of that year, with the onset of the Cold War, fortune had remarkably smiled upon them. Several became … Read more
Many believe that Bulgaria, like Denmark, saved its Jews from the Nazi death camps. The book The Stolen Narrative of the Bulgarian Jews and the Holocaust (Rowman and Littlefield) by Jacky Comforty, together with Martha Aladjem Bloomfield, tells a different story. It is a narrative that recalls Bulgaria’s alliance with Hitler to regain territory in … Read more
LONDON THEATRE-GOERS have been flocking to see the revival of Cabaret and marvelled at the decadence and hedonism of the famed Kit Kat Klub in Weimar Germany. The production was, of course, characterised by the rise of Nazism and dark visions of an impending doom. Yet in the minds of many a mesmerised audience during recent weeks, … Read more
On the day of the German capitulation (in 1945), the entire youth of Bethlehem (in Galilee) marched through the colony, singing Nazi songs while the memorial service for Hitler, held in that colony on VE Day was essentially a rededication by the locals for the lost Führer. So wrote the enraged author of a Jewish … Read more