Professor David Cesarani (1956-) is an English historian who specialises in Jewish history, especially the Holocaust. He has also written several autobiographies, notably Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind.
Life
In his teens, Cesarani went to work on a kibbutz, which led to his becoming a member of the Israeli peace movement. He said of this experience that:
- "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 the University of Leeds, followed by Queen Mary College, and then Southampton university. He then became director of studies at the Wiener Library (Britain's largest Holocaust library) - to Manchester and now to his current position as research professor of Jewish history at Royal Holloway. He has said of the fall of the Iron Curtain that:
- "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."
He is director of the AHRB Parkes Centre for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations; co-editor of journal Patterns of Prejudice and Parkes-Wiener book series (Frank Cass) and member of the British Home Office Holocaust Memorial Day Strategic Group.
In recent years, he has launched attacks on David Irving, the prominent holocaust revisionist.
He is married with two children.
Bibliography
- 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
- Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind (1998/9 - sources vary)
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)
External links
