History

In her memoir, Manhattan, When I was Young, Mary Cantwell recalls how, as an Irish-American woman with a Jewish boyfriend (soon to become her husband) during the summer Julius and…
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When Isaiah Berlin left Oxford in July 1940 he was single – “inépousable” according to his future mother-in-law – a relatively unknown philosophy don, prone to dark moods. While…
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This essay began in 2002 when we were in Thessaloniki for a conference at the Aristotle University on the cultural history of the body. Hesse’s mother, a child of the region’s…
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My father, Curt David Bloch, was a smartass. But that wasn’t the reason he lost his first job when he was 25 years old. He was fired in 1933 when, overnight, it became illegal for…
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I am sitting in the chair reading, and hear a group of people talking on the street. A woman enquires whether anything is known about the family living at number 30. “They were…
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For myself, I’ve always hated the term “self-hating Jew.” A device to shut down dissent, dished out when the dissident has crossed some line marked out by other Jews, it’s also a…
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Michael Ignatieff moved to Budapest in 2016 to run Central European University (CEU). Instead the Canadian-born author, academic and former politician is fighting for its survival.…
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The Origins of Totalitarianism is on the US bestseller lists, while tweet-size fragments of her thoughts cascade through social media; Hannah Arendt is trending. As with George…
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Faced with unhappy memories, it is difficult to know the best thing to do. The tendency is to think that when we are haunted by ghostly figures and events from the past, it is…
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The Jews of Egypt, in the years after Suez, were fond of a punning French joke: “Qui est votre historien préferé? Philon d’Alexandrie.” (Who is your favourite historian? Philo of…
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