Review of The Jews of England and the Revolutionary Era 1789-1815 by Jeremy Smilg Published by Vallentine Mitchell 2021, pp. 254 In 1791 Edmund Burke, ‘the father of British conservatism’, commented that: We have in London very respectable persons of the Jewish nation whom we will keep: but we have of the same tribe, others … Read more
The Battle of London 1939-45: Endurance, Heroism and Frailty under Fire by Jerry White Published by the Bodley Head 2021, pp.425 price £30.00 In 1939, a fifth of the population of England and Wales lived in London. It made it a sitting target for Nazi bombers during World War II. And, after the zeppelin raids … Read more
LAST WEEK, THE killer of 85-year-old Mireille Knoll was sentenced by a French court to 22 years without parole. The courtroom was told that the assault in March 2018 on this aged Jewish woman started out as a petty robbery but was transformed into a frenzied attack — and that this was fuelled by “a … Read more
Ring of Spies: How MI5 and the FBI brought down the Nazis in America by Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones Published by the History Press 2020, pp. 288, price £20.00 Frederick the Great once commented that his French military opponent, Marshal de Soubrise was always followed by a hundred cooks. ‘I, on the other hand, am always followed … Read more
Palestinian Islamic Jihad: Islamist Writings on Resistance and Religion By Erik Skare, published by I. B. Tauris, 2021, pp.266 Forty years ago, a group of students formed Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) in Gaza. It was inspired by the success of Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolution in Iran and the assassination of Anwar Sadat in Cairo by an … Read more
Review of Internment in Britain in 1940by Ines Newman, published by Vallentine Mitchell, 224 pages; $74.95 Following the fall of France in the summer of 1940, there was a deep trepidation that Britain would be the next to be overrun by the Nazi war machine. British Jews feared that they were about to suffer the … Read more
Eighty years ago, at precisely 3.15 a.m. on the night of 22 June 1941, General Heinz Guderion moved his Panzers across the bridge, spanning the River Bug. This was the beginning of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union — an invasion which took the lives of over 20 million Soviet citizens including over two … Read more
David Baddiel is well-known in Britain as a comedian and a writer. He is also unusual – in that he does not shy away from his Jewishness in his stage routine, but actually glories in his identity. The grandson of disenfranchised, well-to-do, Jewish business-people who escaped Nazi Germany in 1939, his Twitter biography is just … Read more
When the existence of a European Association of Israel Studies (EAIS) was first publicized a decade ago, many believed that it was merely a front for advocacy and that the discipline was an invented one. The last ten years have borne testimony instead to a profound intellectual endeavour that indicates Israel Studies is an area … Read more
Sixty years ago, on 11 April 1961, a pale, bespectacled, balding man stepped into a glass booth in a courtroom at Beit Ha’am in Jerusalem. Standing stooped before three judges, he was asked: ‘Are you Adolf Eichmann?’ The diminutive figure answered without emotion: ‘Jawohl!’ — and so began the trial of a central figure who … Read more