Margaret Thatcher was an incredibly divisive British prime minister. Personally, I could never warm to her. She was, however, credited with standing up to the unions. Although she had the immense good fortune to come to power as North Sea Oil provided the UK with a financial bonanza, she certainly changed the mood of the country from depressed hopelessness to…
Mildly Islamist
The Economist, amongst many others, loves to refer to Recep Erdogan, Prime Minister of Turkey, and his Justice and Development Party, as “mildly Islamist”. He has steered Turkey to new levels of economic prosperity. He has completely overturned the Attaturk secular model of Turkish society and he has turned Turkey into an Islamic State. What I wonder does “mildly” anything…
Massacre Of The Innocents
What the heck is it going to take to get an America to do something about its guns? For all that, I far prefer living in this dysfunctional society than I ever did in Europe. Still there is something sick and decadent in this country (yes, I agree, everywhere else too, mutatis mutandis). It used to be said that every…
Haym Soloveitchik in Jewish Review of Books
I have to go back 50 years to when I first met Haym Soloveitchik, the brilliant son of the magisterial and phenomenal late Rabbi JB Soloveitchik. We were young men in Jerusalem in the early sixties and both made very welcome on Friday evenings at the home of Dr. Yaacov Herzog and his wife, Dr. Pnina Herzog. Yaacov Herzog, if…
Who keeps the Chanukah flame alive?
What is Chanukah? Thus the Talmud asks, in its only reference to the story of Chanukah. And it answers: “On the 25th of Kislev are the eight days of Chanukah. We do not mourn or fast then. Because the Greeks entered the Temple and desecrated all the oil there, and when the Hasmonean dynasty overcame them, they checked and only…
Oliver Stone
The film director Oliver Stone has once again ruffled feathers with a controversial television series that justifies those like me who think that, despite the 75% of corrosive, banal rubbish that appears on television, every now and again an important educational documentary makes having access to it worthwhile. The iconic British series “The World at War” directed by Jeremy Isaacs,…