Europe's Jews were a sitting target

Was the Holocaust predictable? That was the question asked in 1975 by the Israeli historian Jacob Katz. His answer was a clear negative.

More..

Beinart is wrong: We won't build Israel's future by boycotting it today

In the course of promoting his new book, The Crisis of Zionism, Peter Beinart has argued that American Jews should promote a boycott of settler–produced goods.

More..

How far can Jewish tolerance stretch?

'I think you're wrong, but I'll put up with it. I'll accept our differences - but don't be fooled. I still think you're wrong."

Tolerance is required only for what we don't agree with, for what is by definition intolerable. As a minority in Britain, understanding our position - whether we are "tolerated", or something beyond that, is existentially important.

More..

Work is essential to human dignity

It was one of Maimonides’ most penetrating insights. Listing the eight rungs of the ladder of tzedakah, he places highest of all one “who provides someone with a gift or a loan or a business partnership or in some other way helps him find employment”. The highest degree of tzedakah, exceeded by none, he writes, is to help someone start a business or find a job.

More..

Britain as refuge: the real story

I was recently researching the tabloid press archives for a new book on Britain's treatment of refugees, when I came across two eye-popping stories from 2003. The first claimed that a group of asylum seekers was capturing, killing and baking the Queen's swans; the second, that asylum seekers had abducted donkeys from Greenwich Royal Park, also for food. Neither paper was able to substantiate these claims, but they did not hurry to retract them either.

More..

The principles of communal unity

We traditionally respond to cultural freedom by rejecting it, or embrace it and cast off our Judaism. But a third way is gaining ground: passionate pluralism.

More..

Our intellectuals must find their Jewish voice

Our artists and scientists must inject Judaism into today's great debates

In 1756 Voltaire, self-proclaimed defender of liberty, published a virulently antisemitic essay about the Jews. They had, he said, contributed nothing to the civilisation of the world, no art, no science, no philosophy, no original thought even in religion. "In short," he concluded, "we find in them only an ignorant and barbarous people who have long united the most sordid avarice with the most detestable superstition."

More..

We face a new kind of hatred

Antisemites have attacked our religion and our race. Now they are going after the Jewish nation.

On January 27, 2000, heads of state or senior representatives of 44 governments met in Stockholm to commit themselves to a continuing programme of Holocaust remembrance and the fight against antisemitism. Barely two years later, synagogues and Jewish schools in France and Belgium were being firebombed and Jews were being attacked in the streets.

More..

How to heal ourselves - and then the world

We need more co-operation between those who want to save the world, and those who want to save Jewish life

Towards the end of 1999, I received a strange request. A professor of medieval history at Boston University, Richard Landes, asked to see me. He had, he said, something urgent and important to communicate. I was intrigued. What, I wondered, could be urgent and important about medieval history? We agreed to meet.

More..

We must be a symbol of hope in a world of fear

‘Without a vision", says the Book of Proverbs, "the people perish". Of no people is this truer than of Jews.

Historically we were supremely the people of prophetic vision, who defined our identity and predicated our survival on the power of ideas - ideas about covenant, the rule of law, justice, compassion, the dignity of the individual and the sanctity of human life, about memory, history and hope, ideas at once spiritual and practical that eventually transformed the world.

More..

A community of contradictions

After 25 years in Israel, a former Brit evaluates Anglo-Jewry

It is a question I have been continually asked during the past two years. Around the Shabbat lunch table, or at a reception after a lecture, there is always someone who will ask me, "Tell us how you think the Anglo Jewish community has changed in the past 25 years."

More..

We are all global Jews now

There is no such thing as a ‘diaspora Jew' or ‘Israeli Jew' any more

As a professor of Jewish Studies, I keep up on global Jewish affairs. Lately, I have been struck by the number of stories about Jewish life thriving in places that might seem surprising: a new Jewish radio station and cultural centre in Madrid, Indian Jews leaving Israel to go back to India, hip underground Jewish clubs in Moscow.

More..

We need a literature that merges past and future

Why are today’s authors so quick to abandon our great written tradition that defines us as Jews?

A wistful passage from the final chapter of the Mishnah’s Sotah tractate states, in poetic Hebrew: Nifteru ziknei Yerushalayim ve-halchu lahen.  In more prosaic English, it might be rendered: “The elders of Jerusalem got up and left.” The departure of the elders of Jerusalem, when examined in the context of this hauntingly literary tractate, signifies the relationship to past, present, and future that I seek in Jewish literature.

More..

Time to make friends with India and China

It is in our interests to reach out to the world’s emerging superpowers

The Spanish Jewish poet Yehuda Halevi, who lived in the 12th century, famously said: “My heart is in the East, and I am at the ends of the West.” He was referring to a deep-seated longing for Zion, but these days the talk about the East is dominated by China and India.

More..

How my parents' rows made me a scientist

Jewish argument is key to our success in the sciences — and to a proud religious identity

My mother was highly argumentative. Indeed, some of my most vibrant early memories are of the rousing arguments between my mother and father. These disagreements were not necessarily acrimonious and they clearly had a most passionate and deeply loving relationship. It was a massive tragedy for my mother when my father died ridiculously young, after a mere 11 years of a very strong and happy marriage, when I was just nine.

More..

We have a moral duty to help asylum-seekers

We, who know about survival, must make the case for refugees publicly I suppose one could say that my professional life began at the age of 20 when I entered the former German concentration camp of Bergen Belsen a few months after its liberation. I was the youngest member of the Jewish Relief Unit, a unit that was formed during the war and had been training its recruits to work for the rehabilitation of Holocaust survivors as soon as the war had ended.

More..

What Chanie’s journey to aliyah says about racism

Our correspondent, recently back from Ethiopia, sees Israel’s treatment of the Falashmura as a symptom of the mess that is aliyah

Chanie Tewabe Baruk left Ethiopia three weeks ago for a Jewish Agency absorption centre in the Galilee. As a Falashmura, the descendant of Ethiopian Jews who converted to Christianity but kept some kind of connection with their Jewish relatives, the life-long Christian will receive full Israeli citizenship after he undergoes a ten-month conversion procedure.

More..

The consequences of 1948 are still unclear

Sixty years on, the shock of Israel’s foundation is still impacting on Christian, Muslim and Jewish thought

From time to time, certain events “shock” history, bring about a rupture in continuity, and throw the future on to a radically new trajectory. This event can be short or stretch over generations, random and accidental or built into the very dynamics of historic processes, sometimes taking the form of an extraordinary person and other times an aggregation of events.

More..

Do not discount the power of faith

Religion has a special role to play in a globalised world, says the former prime minister Let me summarise my argument to you. Under the momentum of globalisation the world is opening up, and at an astonishing speed. Old boundaries of culture, identity and even nationhood are falling. The 21st century world is becoming ever more interdependent. In this world, religious faith, crucial to so many people’s culture and identity, can play a positive or a negative role.

More..

Together we are the world’s voice of hope

Judaism is the only civilisation whose golden age is yet to come. This is what makes us distinctive.

More..