First Published in 1986 Modern Britain 1700-1983 presents an interpretation of major trends in the domestic history of the United Kingdom since the beginning of the eighteenth century. It is not intended to offer a comprehensive history of Britain and in particular, foreign and colonial policies are not considered: the focus is on the recreation and analysis of what it felt like to live in Britain throughout the period in question. Many features of present-day Britain have their roots in the eighteenth century- industrialization, urbanisation, mass communications, constitutional monarchy, the rule of parliamentary law. To examine British history since 1700 is to approach directly an understanding of our own world. The period sees the development of a predominantly agricultural country into the first industrial nation, the progression from still high infant mortality and early death to sophistication of modern medicine, from the dominance of the traditional landed ruling class to the rise of the Liberals and of the Labour Party and of a New Conservatism. Dr Alderman's history will illuminate our past for a new generation of students.

British Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks - now Baron Sacks of Aldgate in the City of London - launched his tenure of office in 1991 with the aim of an inclusivist Decade of Jewish Renewal. Within a few years, fulfilling his installation prediction that 'I will have failures, but I will try again, another way, another time, ' he was attracting calls, from opponents and supporters, for his resignation and the abolition of his office. Reviewing Sacks' early writings and pronouncements on the theme of inclusivism, Another Way, Another Time demonstrates how, repeatedly, the Chief Rabbi said 'irreconcilable things to different audiences' and how, in the process, he induced his kingmaker and foremost patron, Lord (Stanley) Kalms, to declare of Anglo-Jewry: 'We are in a time warp, and fast becoming an irrelevance in terms of world Jewry.' Citing support from a variety of sources, this study contends that the Chief Rabbinate has indeed reached the end of the road and explores other paths to the leadership of a pluralistic - and, ideally, inclusivist - community

First Published in 1989 London Jewry and London Politics 1889-1986 is a study of the relationship between the London Jewish community, the London County Council, and the Greater London Council. Geoffrey Alderman draws on a wealth of primary and secondary material to illuminate a dialogue that began, a hundred years ago, in a mood of great optimism and co-operation, but which ended, in the early 1980s, in a welter of insults and antagonisms. Alderman adopts a chronological approach, looking first at the Jewish involvement in London government prior to the establishment of the London County Council in 1889. He then analyses the contribution made by London Jewry to the periods of progressive control and conservative rule. With the arrival of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe the nature of the Jewish electorate underwent considerable change and Alderman describes how the government exploited prejudice against the Jewish community causing LCC to adopt blatantly antisemitic policies. The Labour victory of 1934 was in part due to the Jewish vote, but the period of Labour rule was a disappointment and an anticlimax. This illuminating account of hundred years is an essential read for scholars and researchers of British history.

Founded in 1841, the London-based Jewish Chronicle is the world's oldest continuously circulating Jewish newspaper. Since 2002 its prestigious fl agship "Comment" column has been written by Oxford-educated Dr Geoffrey Alderman, the leading authority on the Jews of modern Britain, a prolific and controversial scholar whose views have attracted warm support and sweeping condemnation in equal measure. This anthology brings together over a hundred of his Jewish Chronicle op-eds, on subjects as diverse as Jewish Orthodoxy, Ultra-Orthodoxy, Non-Orthodoxy, Islamic Judeophobia, Islamophobia and Jewish approaches to politics and sex. "I have tried to be funny," Alderman declares, "when occasion has seemed to me to warrant the deployment of a certain humour, which can be a valuable didactic tool and a powerful medium of communication. I have on occasion employed sarcasm and irony. But I have always tried to be scrupulously accurate as to facts, and to locate my comment within that groundwork. Above all, true to my vocation as a rebel who has refused to toe the communal line, I have always presented a point of view that is unashamedly mine."

Professor Geoffrey Alderman is the acknowledged authority on the history of the Jews in modern Britain. During an academic career spanning forty years he has produced some of the most authoritative and controversial studies in this field, lighting up the dark corners of the Jewish existence in Great Britain and revealing secrets the Anglo-Jewish communities would rather have kept from public view. In this book he presents sixteen of these essays, covering fields as disparate as the history of the Jewish vote in the UK, the true story of the British Chief Rabbinate, and the uneasy tenure of Sir Jonathan Sacks in that office. He also considers the role of the historian in Anglo-Jewish life, and the troubled careers of some of its leaders and scholars.

The past two decades have witnessed a remarkable renaissance in the academic study of the history of the Jews in Great Britain and of their impact upon British history. In this volume, Professor Geoffrey Alderman presents essays that reflect the richness of this renaissance, penned by a new generation of British and American scholars who are uninhibited by considerations of communal image and public obligation that once exercised a powerful influence on Anglo-Jewish historiography. History does not have lessons, says Alderman, but it may provide signposts, and he adds that in the case of the essays presented here 'I believe there is one signpost that we would all do well to ponder: in multicultural Britain hard-working immigrants may be welcome, or they may be feared - or both. They are destined to remain not quite British, and, for better or worse, they are destined to bequeath this otherness to the generations that follow them'.

British Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks - now Baron Sacks of Aldgate in the City of London - launched his tenure of office in 1991 with the aim of an inclusivist Decade of Jewish Renewal. Within a few years, fulfilling his installation prediction that 'I will have failures, but I will try again, another way, another time, ' he was attracting calls, from opponents and supporters, for his resignation and the abolition of his office. Reviewing Sacks' early writings and pronouncements on the theme of inclusivism, "Another Way, Another Time" demonstrates how, repeatedly, the Chief Rabbi said 'irreconcilable things to different audiences' and how, in the process, he induced his kingmaker and foremost patron, Lord (Stanley) Kalms, to declare of Anglo-Jewry: 'We are in a time warp, and fast becoming an irrelevance in terms of world Jewry.' Citing support from a variety of sources, this study contends that the Chief Rabbinate has indeed reached the end of the road and explores other paths to the leadership of a pluralistic - and, ideally, inclusivist - community.

In 1987 Oxford University Press commissioned Geoffrey Alderman to write a history of the Jews of the United Kingdom since emancipation effectively the story of British Jewry since the mid-nineteenth century. The volume (published in 1992) was conceived as a sequel to the History of the Jews in England which, written by the late Dr Cecil Roth, was first published in 1941, and which had virtually ended with the granting of full political equality in 1858. This work of which a second edition was published in 1998 - is designed to take the story forward, but also to avoid some of the limitations that had characterised the Roth volume, especially its preoccupation with what the author called, in 1992, public relations history, its superficial treatment of certain topics then perceived as sensitive (such as the anti-Jewish prejudice that had accompanied the great immigration of Jews from eastern Europe at the end of the 19th century) and its reluctance to address what we would call nowadays contemporary history. The text of this volume is based, on the 1998 history bringing that up to date. The opportunity has been taken to correct some errors, and to expand the narrative and its attendant footnotes to take account of recent research. The final chapter is substantially an original essay, based to some extent on materials made available on a non-attributable basis.