A side benefit of reviewing books is that one often gets books one otherwise might not splurge on. A week ago I received the handsome three-volume set of the collected writings of Primo Levi, Italian survivor of Auschwitz. The set is edited by arguably his best translator, Ann Goldstein, and published by Liveright. I will write a thorough and conscientious…
Above & Beyond
Above and Beyond is a documentary produced by Nancy Spielberg that makes fascinating and quite scary watching. It tells the story of Jewish American pilots who in 1948 secretly helped find armaments wherever they could and also fought for Israel in its war of independence. Israel had no air force, not one plane, whereas Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, and Syria did…
Kissinger
Niall Ferguson’s first volume of Henry Kissinger’s biography, which deals with his formative years, is masterful. It’s a difficult read, heavy with research and documentation. Kissinger was without doubt a brilliant man. Perhaps the most influential political advisor in the USA of the late twentieth century. He served across the divide as advisor and Secretary of State, employed most notably…
Experimenter
I recommend a recent film called Experimenter, a dramatization of the work of the American Jewish psychologist Stanley Milgram (1933-1984), released this past October by Magnolia Pictures. It stars Peter Sarsgaard and Winona Ryder, along with other stars. The series of experiments conducted by Milgram at Yale University concerned the way people respond to and obey figures of authority. They…
Factory Farming
Those who work in education delight in their successes and regret the failures. Very often those one expected to shine burnt out and those one expected to struggle shone. One of my pupils was such a disaster academically at school that I wrote on one of his reports that “he was heading like a lemming to disaster”, and indeed at…
Yossi Sarid, Frenemy?
I was in Israel when Yossi Sarid died. Who was he? Most Jews in the diaspora have no idea. On the face of it, he was another left-wing secular Israeli politician, a former Knesset member and government minister. But he was also a weathervane of Israeli society. He witnessed the transformation of Israel from a European, secular Zionist, socialist experiment…