When France Embraced a Jewish Avenger
‘Vive la France, Vive la France!” Some 81 years ago this month, a person in Warsaw would have enjoyed the odd spectacle of a mob of Jews surrounding France’s Polish embassy, wildly proclaiming the greatness of the French Republic. The occasion: Jews everywhere were celebrating France because, after a sensational eight-day trial (which even made the front page of The New York Times), a jury of 12 petit-bourgeois Parisians had astonishingly acquitted the Ukrainian-born Jewish immigrant and anarchist Sholom Schwartzbard of the charge of murder for shooting to death former Ukrainian president Symon Petliura in the middle of the Latin Quarter, an act the accused fully acknowledged committing.
Radio Rabbi Creates Community Over the Airwaves
LONDON — Rabbi Lionel Blue is arguably the most popular Jew in the United Kingdom. He is funny and irreverent and considered by some to be an iconoclast. Cherub-faced rabbis who share recipes, pen travel books and yuk it up onstage in stand-up routines, after all, are few and far between.But mainly, Blue owes his status as one of England’s
