David Cesarani
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Professor David Cesarani, O.B.E. (born 1956) is an English historian who specialises in Jewish history, especially the Holocaust. He has also written several biographies, notably Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind.
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[edit] Early life
In his teens, Cesarani, himself a Jew, went to work on a kibbutz and became a member of the Israeli peace movement. Of his experience at the time, he said:
"We were always told that the pile of rubble at the top of the hill was a Crusader castle. It was only much later that I discovered it was an Arab village that had been ruined in the Six-Day war." (Source: The Guardian, October 12, 2004) ."
His academic career includes periods at the University of Leeds, where he was Montague Burton Fellow in Modern Jewish History; at Queen Mary, University of London; the University of Southampton; and, most recently, as Research Professor of Jewish History at Royal Holloway, University of London. Between working at Southampton and Royal Holloway he was Director of Studies at the Wiener Library, Britain's largest Holocaust library.
Of the fall of the Iron Curtain, Cesarani has said:
"The study of history is shrouded in half-truths; the reason the Holocaust was driven up the political agenda in the 90s wasn't only due to academic and moral imperatives. There was also an economic undercurrent: the US, the EU and the World Bank were trying to get the former Soviet Bloc countries to revamp their property laws and bring them in line with the west. This meant that minds had to be concentrated on righting wrongs."
[edit] Recent Work and Politics on Holocaust
Cesarani is a member of the Home Office Holocaust Memorial Day Strategic Group and has been Director of the AHRC Parkes Centre, part of the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations. He is co-editor of the journal Patterns of Prejudice and the Parkes-Wiener Series of books on Jewish Studies (published by Vallentine-Mitchell).
In recent years, Cesarani has campaigned against David Irving, the prominent and controversial Holocaust denier, alongside fellow academic Peter Longerich.
David Cesarani has recently made such statements considering freedom of speech to be "a relic of 18th-century liberalism" - a luxury we could no longer afford. He is a prominent historian in the field of the Holocaust, but has some views towards freedom of speech which could easily be considered rather dangerous by certain libertarian academics and journalists [1].
His latest article in the Guardian is about Iranian President Ahmadinejad's conference on the Holocaust. He writes, "to claim that the Jews invented a history of anti-semitic persecution at the hands of the Nazis, culminating in the gas chambers at Auschwitz, and to claim that this was used to squeeze money out of guilt-stricken Germans, is nothing less than a Jewish conspiracy theory on a vast scale that, in addition, draws upon ancient stereotypes of the avaricious Jew." [2]
[edit] Private Life
David Cesarani currently lives and works in the Greater London area, as a research professor of history at Royal Holloway College, University of London. He is married and has two children.
[edit] Bibliography
[edit] As author
- Justice Delayed: How Britain Became a Refuge for Nazi War Criminals (1992)
- The Jewish Chronicle and Anglo-Jewry 1841-1991 (1994)
- Citizenship, Nationality and Migration in Europe
- Eichmann: His Life and Crimes, which was published in the USA under the title: Becoming Eichmann: Rethinking the Life, Crimes, and Trial of a "Desk Killer" (2006)
- Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind
[edit] As editor
- The Making of Modern Anglo-Jewry (1990)
- The Final Solution: Origins and Implementation (1994)
- Genocide and Rescue: The Holocaust in Hungary, 1944 (1997)
- Port Jews: Jewish Communities in Cosmopolitan Maritime Trading Centuries, 1550-1950 (2002)
- "Bystanders" to the Holocaust: A Re-evaluation (2002)
[edit] References
[edit] External links
- Review of Cesarani's biography of Adolf Eichmann
