Coronations are a time for celebration and contemplation since they connect all citizens with their own family history, stretching back through time. Yet Jews have a complex relationship with monarchy. As the rabbi tells Tevye and Leibesh in Fiddler on the Roof: ‘God bless the Tsar – and keep him far away from us!’ The … Read more
Spying on the Reich: The Cold War against Hitler Published by Oxford University Press, 2023, pp.358 In 1936, the Nazis beheaded six spies including four who had worked for the British. This was a transient reflection of the secret cold war that Britain was waging against the clandestine German rearmament programme. The Secret Intelligence Service … Read more
Israel’s Moment: International Support for and Opposition to Establishing the Jewish State, 1945–1949. By Jeffrey Herf. (Cambridge University Press 2022). 500 pp. NAZIS AND COMMUNISTS AFTER 1945 The author of this highly informative book, Jeffrey Herf, is a distinguished researcher of prewar Nazi Germany and, through his numerous publications, the ties between nationalists and Islamists … Read more
The Holocaust: An Unfinished History By Dan Stone, published by Pelican 2023, pp. 402 On 26 November 1942, 532 Jews were rounded up in Oslo by Norwegian plainclothes policemen. They were taken in taxis to the local harbour, placed on the S.S. Donau which took them to Germany, from where they were taken by ‘freight … Read more
A visit to the Israel Cartoon Museum in Holon several years ago first gave me the idea of telling Israel’s history through cartoons. It was undoubtedly the hardest of all my books to write. Which episode in a year to highlight; which cartoon to select, which events to record? Clearly there could have been an … Read more
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
Bibi: My Story Benjamin Netanyahu Published by Threshold Editions, 2022, pp.726 When he was asked by a student in 2018, what is the most important subject to study for a political career, Benjamin Netanyahu replied that there were three answers: ‘History, history and more history’. In writing his own history during the Bennett-Lapid interregnum, dictated … 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