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Netanyahu became prime minister in the aftermath of one of Israel's biggest tragedies, the assassination of Yizhak Rabin, and will likely end his career as prime minister responsible for the biggest scandal in the nation's history; October 7th 2023. This book takes the reader on a riveting journey through the period, examining the most important events as well as the impact Netanyahu has had on Israel as the longest serving prime minister. A political genius who became his own worst enemy, doing anything to cling on to power to the detriment of his nation's well-being. Under Netanyahu's leadership, Israel's economy flourished in certain periods, and the Jewish state normalised ties with Arab nations. But he also paved the way for the most extreme politicians ever seen in the Knesset, and has divided the country more than any other leader. He also played an instrumental role in strengthening Israel's religious character, allowing the ultra-orthodox to live in a parallel society with fewer societal obligations than the rest of the country. Confino relies on interviews with the most important people from the years 1996- 2024 and offers the reader a rare look behind the scenes.

Here Isabelle Seddon reveals the astonishing contributions made by British born Jewish women in the arts during the twentieth century. Some of the women you will meet here were well-known in their fields such as singer Amy Winehouse, and others whose names are less familiar, but whose contributions to their fields are no less notable such as Rebecca Solomon, a painter of social injustices. The intersection of gender, Jewishness, social status and education links the experiences of all of the women featured in this volume, across their varied cultural outputs and contributions from acting to musicianship, writing to art, sport to cookery. The persecution of the Jews across the ages, including the Holocaust, is one of the factors that ties many of these highly accomplished women together. This, alongside the legacies of immigrant and refugee backgrounds, motivated and inspired them to shape British culture in remarkable and fascinating ways.

The book explores how history and politics were expressed in the war writings of Emanuel Ringelblum and Reuven Ben-Shem, inmates at the Warsaw Ghetto. Each produced different accounts in purpose and style, Ringelblum's diary was a historical record whereas Ben-Shem wanted to inform the world what had happened to his family. Despite political differences, Jewish history defined both men's personal identity, and they derived moral and political inspiration from it. The range of topics and how they were recorded reflects traditional approaches to appropriacy, focussing predominantly on the public sphere, leaving us to speculate the private. The book examines relationships between physical spaces in the Ghetto, and how they were conceived: how writing reflected the disruption of Jewish spaces by blurring boundaries between the private and public spheres resulting in abjection. The more Jews were crowded into the dwindling space, the more the private became public. Nizan's innovation is creating a model using historical records, philosophy and literature to understand the interactions between people, spaces and conditions in the Ghetto, and the effect on its inhabitants and outsiders.

Greek Jewry has a unique history in Europe. Greek Judaism is possibly the oldest faith on the continent. The Hellenized Romaniotes, the Sephardim from the western Mediterranean and the Ashkenazim from central Europe created a mosaic of communities across the country, each one with its own fascinating history and tradition. Thessaloniki, the ' Jerusalem of the Balkans', Ioannina, the capital of the Romaniotes, Larissa, Volos, Patra, Crete, Corfu, Rhodes, Athens, and many others. These Jewish communities, together but also individually, are an integral part of the Greece's rich history. This pioneering book presents a unique detailed historical overview of the history of Greek Jews from antiquity to the present day, including the period of the Shoah when nearly 90% of the community was annihilated. Beyond this historical landscape, the book also highlights the contributions of Greek Jews to the economic, cultural, intellectual and political life of the country, and reveals the golden times and the darkest days in the coexistence between Jews and Christians in Greece.

Rachel Bayvel covers some 1100 years of the more dramatic history of the Shapiros from the 11th century to 20th century. The Shapiro family gave the Jewish world such luminaries as Rabbi Natan Spiro from Krakow, the author of Megalleh Amukkot, and Rabbi Meir Shapiro, the founder of Daf Yomi - the page-a-day Talmud study programme. The Slavuta Printing Press which published the famous Slavuta Shas (Talmud), as well as the first edition of Tanya, existed for some 75 years (1791- 1866) and Rachel describes their changing fortunes. A chapter is dedicated to another member of the Shapiro family - Chava Shapiro (1878- 1943) - who also came from Slavuta and became one of the first women in the history of Hebrew literature. Several chapters are dedicated to Jewish life in the USSR during Stalin's time, covering the little known contributions of the Jews to Second World War efforts, as well as the periods when the entire existence of the Jewish community was under threat. The final section of the book is devoted to the lives of three, little known Jewish artists, namely: Yehuda Pen, the founder of the famous Vitebsk art school, and the teacher of Marc Chagall, Natan Altman and Anatoly Kaplan.

The first British Jewish chaplain, Reverend Francis Cohen, was appointed in 1892 and ministered in Britain. It was the creation of Reverend Michael Adler, DSO, for commissioned Jewish chaplains to serve alongside soldiers in the field in wartime. At the age of 46, from 1915, Adler spent over three years on the Western Front. Twenty Jewish chaplains served with the British Army in the First World War, and fifty-six Army and RAF chaplains, including twelve locally recruited in mandate Palestine, in the Second. They served in many of the vast theatres of both wars, travelling huge distances in search of widely dispersed Jewish soldiers. Jewish chaplaincy consolidated the integration of a minority faith into the British armed forces. This ground-breaking contribution to British, Jewish, religious and military history is based upon years of research in Victorian archives, military records and family papers. Here, Lewis reveals the colourful and untold story of the British Jewish ministry at war, as well as of its military service in peacetime. It is the story too of the many Jewish soldiers who, rarely if ever seeing a chaplain, brought each other such religious solace as they might.

Here, Letchworth-born Yanky Fachler explores a short-lived (1939- 1971) provincial Jewish congregation that boasted a communal infrastructure typical of much larger communities. Based during the war years around an estate built by Abba Bornstein, most of the community returned to London after the Second World War. The centre of gravity shifted to what former Talmud Torah headmaster Harry Leitner describes as the ' two pyramid houses on Sollershott East - the Sassoon/Feuchtwanger and Fachler homes.' Letchworth was home to the world-famous private Judaica library assembled by David Sassoon. His son, Rabbi Solomon Sassoon, made sure that Jewish children from across the religious spectrum attended the Talmud Torah educational programme after regular school hours. Several rabbinical luminaries were associated with Letchworth, including the communal rabbi, Asher Feuchtwanger, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, Rabbi Eliyahu Dessler, and Rabbi Eliyahu Lapian. Fachler describes a unique community where the orthodox coexisted harmoniously with the non-orthodox, Ashkenazi Jews lived side-by-side with Baghdadi Jews, and wealthy families rubbed shoulders with working class families.

Ruth Ravina's story is one of childhood under duress. She survived hunger, cold, solitude, existential boredom, and life-threatening situations. Born on April 7, 1937 in Warsaw, Poland, she was raised in Kozienice. In 1940, about a year after the German invasion, a ghetto was established in Kozienice, where Ruth was forced to witness executions. Escaping the Kozienice ghetto in the fall of 1942, she had to negotiate the exigencies of three forced labor camps in Poland - Pionki, Skarzysko-Kamienna, and Czestochowa - together with her mother and her cousin Sarah. Being hidden for the most part, Ruth was in constant fear of being caught and killed; children were essentially not allowed in these camps. Her father and most of her very large extended family perished in the Holocaust. Only she, her mother and her cousins Sarah and Rose survived. Though essentially Ruth's 'Invisible Holocaust', the work transcends the memoir form in its presentation of the author's metatexts, her own imperilled childhood in the war. Clearly secondary to Ruth's story, this material nevertheless complicates and intensifies the narrative without relativizing the Holocaust. This kind of dialogue between Jew and German has not taken place before in the Holocaust memoir as a genre. It shows the particular brutality children suffer in war, regardless of the ideological and political position they are forced to occupy.

Drawing on Henrietta Szold's letters and diary, extensive research, and historical sources of that time in Germany and Palestine, the book is a powerful narrative and spellbinding rescue story that brings to life one of the darkest and yet most inspirational chapters in Jewish history. Szold was seventy-three, founder of Hadassah, the Jewish Zionist women's organization, when she was appointed to direct Youth Aliyah, and over the next decade transported over 20,000 Jewish children from Nazi Europe to the safety of Palestine, a feat that she later considered the greatest triumph of her memorable career. David Ben-Gurion called Szold 'the greatest Jewish woman in 400 years.' Labyrinth is the unforgettable story of Szold's stamina and courage as she battled her greatest adversary, mass murderer Adolf Eichmann, for the lives of innocent children. Not only Szold, who made three perilous trips to Berlin during the 1930s under the watchful eye of the Gestapo, but also Hadassah operatives and members of Youth Aliyah stationed throughout Europe, who lived under constant danger, and many of whom gave their lives for the rescue mission. Szold would live in Palestine until her death in 1945.

The editors selected 58 images from noted collections consisting of vintage photography, propaganda posters, newsreel stills, etc. matching each to a poet, short story writer, plus features by essayists. Each writer uniquely interpreted these " silent witnesses" from the period creating new perspectives for our times. The book includes four parts: Part I covers the rise of Nazism and heightening antisemitism. Writers focus on key events such as the Beer Hall Putsch and the Berlin Olympics. Part II revolves around forced labor, ghettos, and extermination, dealing with such topics as death squads, the " final solution," and collaborators. Part III is all about escape, rescue, and resistance, including the Danish rescue of its Jewish population and the Warsaw ghetto uprising. Part IV deals with the aftermath, the liberation of concentration camp prisoners, the refugee crisis, and the Nuremberg trials. Together this diverse group, including writers of color, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, LGBTQ, prominent and emerging writers, have contributed a powerful body of work that challenges international trends of xenophobia and anti-democratic movements by using the power of art to portray truth.

Elia Meghnagi last saw his childhood home in Benghazi when he was only seventeen. A member of the endangered and fast-shrinking millennia-old Jewish community of Libya, in 1958 Elia was forced to flee, finding refuge in Cambridge as a foreign student. Elia built a new life for himself in England, finding friends, community, love, and a career in telecomms engineering that would take him across the globe until he swapped his high-flying career for one, no less challenging, in the kosher food business. Full of nostalgia for his native land and pride in his Sephardi roots, he carries us to the sun-drenched streets of Benghazi and introduces us to its vibrant culture and history, before sharing with us the ups and downs of life as a refugee and, eventually, a citizen, in England. Clear-sighted, compassionate, and often humorous, Elia introduces us to a wide array of the fascinating characters he has met, and the challenging situations he has faced. Perhaps most profoundly, in a narrative suffused with wonder and optimism, Elia shares his experience of fitting smoothly into other cultures while never compromising on his own religious principles or practice.

This is a story of two Jewish families in Nazi-occupied Poland during the Holocaust. They were joined by marriage after the war and Maria was born soon after. Not surprisingly her mother initially urged her to hide her Jewishness. In old age she relented, recognising that testimonies make history, and the lives of those who perished should be celebrated. The book is compiled from survivor memories, unfinished memoirs, letters, photographs, and historical archives. Maria tells of relatives like aunt Lula, who was denounced and shot and her maternal grandmother, who died in the gas chambers of Belzec. There are uplifting stories too, like her great uncle's survival on Schindler's List. Maria documents the kindness of strangers, miraculous escapes, courage, guile, strength, and resilience. Her parents adopted different strategies for survival, and afterwards responded very differently to the traumas they had suffered. The last part of the book covers Maria's early life in Stalinist Poland and her family's emigration to Edinburgh, where she and her parents led fulfilled lives as scientists. Despite this, the traumas continue to ripple through her life and following generations.

This volume contains a collection of essays examining the Holocaust from the perspective of gender. The book is divided into seven sections, each focusing on a different aspect of the discourse between gender and identity. Following a historical introduction delineating the basic framework for understanding women's experiences during and shortly after the Holocaust, the book explores the major research trends evincing themselves since the end of World War II. The topics examined include various aspects of women's experiences during the war years, such as leadership, martyrdom, and social interaction in times of crisis. Other essays illuminate Holocaust heroism through a gender sensitive approach, while an additional section, Postwar Life and Representation, focuses upon gender in a multicultural post-Holocaust society. The book's final section explores the historical/didactic aspect of Holocaust gender study by examining how The Diary of Anne Frank can be used as an educational tool. Here we see how Holocaust gender issues transcend the socio-historical framework in order to become part of the cultural heritage transferred down to later generations. The book concludes with an epilogue and an extensive multi-lingual bibliography of sources and studies dealing with various gender-related aspects of the Holocaust. Several of the essays originally appeared in historical journals or conference proceedings and have been updated and expanded for inclusion in this present volume.

In the mid-nineteenth century Giacomo Meyerbeer dominated the operatic world. The first Jewish composer to achieve international fame, he staged his grand operas in France. His second work, Les Huguenots, became the first opera to reach 1,000 performances at the Paris Opéra. He was born in Berlin in 1791 as Meyer Beer, the eldest son of Jacob and Amalia Beer. As European Jews emerged from the ghetto, his wealthy parents took a leading role in creating a more integrated Jewish identity. Jacob became a pioneer of Reform Judaism, while Amalia held a glittering musical salon. His brother Wilhelm built an observatory, where he and his scientific partner, Johann Mädler, made the first accurate maps of the moon and Mars. A milestone in the history of astronomy. Later Wilhelm became a railway entrepreneur, a banker and a politician. The youngest son Michael was a dramatist and poet who died at the age of 33. His third play was admired by Goethe, who staged it at Weimar. This biography reveals the story of a remarkable family who fought prejudice and intolerance to become role models for their contemporaries, and whose lives illuminate a crucial and formative period in German-Jewish history

Blanche 'Baffy' Dugdale was Arthur James Balfour's niece and his official biographer. She was also a lifelong friend and confidante of Chaim Weizmann, the world-renowned Zionist leader. Privy to an abundance of top-drawer political contacts, Baffy straddled both these worlds, that of the idiosyncrasies of upper-class English politics, and that of a resurgent Jewish nationalism. In this manner, Baffy, playing a behind-the-scenes role, witnessed, and with shrewd insight, commented upon, some of the most dramatic events of the years her diaries cover, 1936-1947. Little of consequence escaped her discerning eye: the Abdication crisis; the Peel partition proposals; the Munich agreement; the May 1939 White Paper; the course of the war and the first news of the Holocaust; the post-war struggle for a Jewish state; and finally, and for Baffy triumphantly, the establishment of the State of Israel. These are some of the tumultuous events Baffy recorded in her detailed, pertinent, and often provocative style. Her diaries offer us a document of genuine historical interest, granting us an invaluable insider's glimpse into the controversial world of politics, domestic and international.

This book explores a facet of British propaganda during the Second World War that has previously hardly been addressed or considered: the apparent anomaly that much of Britain's wartime propaganda was prepared and delivered by foreigners, not least those officially designated as 'enemy aliens'. German-speaking refugees were involved in every aspect of British propaganda: for the Ministry of Information; the BBC and for the intelligence organisations such as Electra House, the Special Operations Executive and the Political Warfare Executive. They played a significant role in propaganda designed for the Home Front, for neutral and Allied countries, and in propaganda directed at the enemy, and were engaged in both 'white' and 'black' (i.e. covert) materials. The book considers the preparedness of the British authorities to avail themselves of the talents of the 'enemy aliens' and the eagerness of many of the refugees to contribute to the British war effort. They brought with them knowledge of every aspect of their home countries as well as their obvious linguistic skills, all of which could be usefully exploited for propaganda purposes. Refugee artists, writers, journalists, broadcasters, actors and academics were all drawn into different aspects of the British propaganda mill. The relationship between the British authorities and the refugees proved a mutually beneficial one. Inevitably, however, problems arose, ranging from internment, through deportation to espionage. All in all, it examines and evaluates an intriguing aspect of British wartime propaganda, the hitherto largely unacknowledged contribution made by German-speaking refugees to the British war effort.

Michael and his sister fled their home in Dubno, Poland, as panicked teenagers in June 1941, and landed in the Soviet Union amid the raging war. A flashback catches them in Stalingrad, besieged by the Germans. A stroke of luck landed them in Uzbekistan where Michael excelled as a veterinary assistant. Two years later, the Soviet Army drafted Michael and trained him to remove mines planted by retreating Germans. After a dogged search, his sister found him and persuaded him to desert. An overnight train took them to Samarkand where they set up shop as weavers and Michael studied Economics at night. At war's end, they hastened home and witnessed the mass graves of Dubno's 8,000 Jews, including their parents. Threatened, they found Moniek's mother and cousins and headed to a Displaced Persons camp in Germany. Britain dashed Michael's hopes to go to Palestine. A year later, Hillel surprisingly awarded him a scholarship to Colby College, where he arrived in 1947. He transferred to MIT and began to build a new life.

This book is the first of its kind: an exploration of the experiences of the Third Generation--the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors--who have particular relationships to the Holocaust, mediated through their interactions with their parents, grandparents, and communities. The book's editors innovatively combine scholarly work that deals with questions of trauma and its transmission across generations, with autobiographical accounts which incorporate many of the concerns raised by scholars. The contributors include historians, literary and cultural studies scholars, psychologists, and sociologists, together with autobiographical narratives from members of the Third Generation, which illuminate the scholarly research presented. ''At a moment when even the last of the Holocaust survivors will soon no longer be able to speak to us directly, In the Shadows of Memory introduces a diverse third generation of grandchildren, all asking what it means to be part of another 'last' cohort, who still knew and lived among the survivors - with their trauma and their resilience - in ways that the next generation will not grapple with the problematic questions of 'legacy', 'generational transmission', and historical responsibility, providing us with a challenging and pioneering contribution to the future of Holocaust memory.'' --Atina Grossmann, Professor of History, Cooper Union, New York

A Fairy Tale Unmasked is two books in one. Part One is the story of Dieter Vaupel, a German high school teacher who, in 1983, uncovered a hidden past when he and his students began researching what happened in their town during the Nazi regime. The picturesque town of Hessisch Lichtenau was where thousands of slave laborers, including 1,000 women and girls from Auschwitz, were forced to work in one of the largest munitions factories in all of Europe. Vaupel and his students broke through the wall of silence surrounding this history and stood up to threats to leave the past alone. Then, amid further controversy, Vaupel and a group of townspeople contacted former forced workers and invited them to come back to Hessisch Lichtenau. In 1986, Blanka Pudler, who as a 15-year-old girl was sent from Auschwitz as a slave laborer, was one of those who returned. Part Two of A Fairy Tale Unmasked is Pudler's account of her enslavement, a story she would go on to tell to thousands of German schoolchildren. In honor of her efforts, in 2012 she was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. Part One is written by journalist D.Z. Stone with the cooperation of Dieter Vaupel. Part Two is by Dieter Vaupel, based on his interviews with Blanka Pudler. This is an extraordinary collaboration that makes for compelling and captivating reading.

This book gives a voice to 12 British-born children of refugees from Nazism - the 'second generation'. In the current zeitgeist of Brexit and beyond, exacerbated by Covid-19, the authors want to ensure that nothing like Nazism and its deeply embedded antisemitism ever happens again. They are all committed to gender, social and sex-based equality, human rights, anti-racism and support for refugees today as the basis of social transformation. They explore how far being the child of a parent who had fled fascism affected their political leanings and made them into the passionate anti-racists and human rights campaigners that they are. They also consider how their heritage gave them a feeling of 'being distinct' and contributed to their political legacy. The book is highly topical, given the contemporary conversations about Britishness and/or Englishness post-Brexit, and the ways that migrants and refugees are now 'othered', marginalised or made to feel different. This is despite the fact that they or their children may have been born in Britain. The authors all empathise with the plight of current migrants and refugees, and most celebrate their own European Jewish heritage.

This is a memoir by one of the few surviving Egyptian Jews to remember the golden age of his community in Egypt. It is also much more than that. Uniting the fascinating, evocative, and sorrowful story of his own family's experience of being Jewish Egyptians in the middle part of the twentieth century with meticulous academic research, Gabriel Tamman provides unique insights that are moving and informative. For many years, the story of the Egyptian Jews remained largely untold except within Jewish Egyptian and niche academic circles. The horrors of the European Holocaust became, and remain, the best-known narrative of twentieth-century Jewish history. However, Jewish history is complex, and the stories of the Egyptian Jews, their lives in Egypt, their sad departure, the roles that they have played subsequently in Israel and around the world, and their memories of the past, all warrant close examination. With no bitterness or rancour, his clear voice illustrates a rich history and way of life that is no more, and invites a close examination of Jewish Egyptian history, calling on Jews and Egyptians alike to come together to explore this fascinating aspect of Middle Eastern heritage.

Professor Michael Berkowitz, the Professor of Modern Jewish History at University College London, has said that 'The Haham Moses Gaster (1856-1939) is one of the most significant figures in modern Jewish history but has not yet attracted a full-blown biographical study in either English or Hebrew.' Cecil Roth, the foremost Anglo-Jewish historian of his time, said 'If Moses Gaster fell short of unquestioned primacy in any of his multitudinous activities, it was for the very reason that his enormous ability was diverted through so many channels and brought him such high distinction in all.' Moses Gaster was, however, an unusual British spiritual leader. His heart remained in his native Romania, where he made a major contribution to the literary history of what was then a new country. He was fascinated by the ancient world: folk-lore, spells, Biblical archaeology, the relations between empires long forgotten. Moses Gaster held many offices in bodies like the Folk-Lore Society, which saw in a Jewish rabbi a man equally informed about their outlook and interests.