‘I am a Russian writer. Like all Russians, I am now defending my homeland. But the Nazis have reminded me of something else; my mother’s name was Hannah. I am a Jew. I say this proudly.’ So spoke the noted writer, Ilya Ehrenburg, at a Jewish rally in Moscow in August 1941 as the Nazi … Read more
‘No more silence; no more compromise, no more acquiescence; no more vacillation, no more appeasement’. So spoke a young deputy at a Board of Deputies meeting in September 1982, defiantly challenging its leadership. It was directed at the Board’s Israel policy in the aftermath of the massacre of Palestinians by Christian Phalangists in the Lebanese … Read more
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
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
NETANYAHU IS DOWN, but is he out? At the time of writing, this question remains unanswered. In the interim, he has reverted to his old habit of incitement as he did just before the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. His supporters in the Likud together with the Kahanists and the quiet admirers of Yigal Amir have door-stopped … 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