(Reviewer: Milton Shain, Vol. 81, #1, Summer 2026) In A History of Christianity, the Oxford scholar Diarmaid MacCulloch – a keen observer of ecclesiastical history and religious conflict – warns against facile and glib constructions of the past. “There is no surer basis for
(Reviewer: David Saks, Vol. 80, #2, Summer 2025) As the adage has it, “many hands make light work”, and that is true of many things. It is not always so, however, when it comes to writing community histories, where it can all too
(Reviewer: David Saks, Vol. 80, #1, Autumn, 2025) In the closing weeks of June 1941, the regime of Nazi Germany launched Operation Barbarossa, as the mass invasion of the Soviet Union was called. Lithuania was one of the Soviet territories invaded, and shortly
[Reviewer: David Saks, Vol 79, #2, Summer 2024) I may be sticking my neck out here, but it may well be that no other Jewish community anywhere has gone about recording its own history with as much avidity as that of South Africa’s. It
EDITOR’S NOTE: To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camps, in 1995 the Cape Town Holocaust Memorial Council published In Sacred Memory: Recollections of the Holocaust by survivors living in Cape Town. The book, which has been reprinted twice,
(Interview with Lynn Joffe, Vol. 78, #3, Spring-Summer 2023) EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION ‘A fizzing, fulsome and fiercely funny heroine, and a novel charged with music, energy, bounce, juice and joy. Like a Jewish Molly Bloom, let loose on history. I love the way
(Reviewer: David Saks, Vol 78, #2, Winter 2023) When Milton Shain’s book The Roots of Antisemitism in South Africa appeared in 1994, it was hailed as the first scholarly examination of the origins, nature and reasons for anti-Jewish prejudice in South Africa from
(Reviewer: David Saks, Vol 78, #2, Winter 2023) David Saks As its title indicates, Challenging the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movement: 20 Years of Responding to Anti-Israel Campaigns examines how world Jewry and its supporters have responded to the international campaign
(REVIEWER: Angela Miller-Rothbart, Vol. 77, #3, Spring 2022) Gita Gordon’s sweeping saga Full Circle will transport the reader back in time, into the shadow of memory and the familiarity of the homes of our grandparents. Under Gordon’s pen the legacy of stories which have been
Editor’s note: Books by and about Jewish participants in the anti-apartheid movement began rolling off the presses even before the final demise of white minority rule in April 1994 and continue to do so even today. In 2011, the SA Jewish Board of Deputies