William D. Rubinstein | |
---|---|
Born | New York City, New York, U.S. | August 12, 1946
Spouse | Hilary L. Rubinstein |
Academic background | |
Alma mater | Swarthmore College Johns Hopkins University |
Academic work | |
Discipline | History |
Institutions | Lancaster University Aberystwyth University Deakin University Australian National University |
William D. Rubinstein (born 12 August 1946) is a historian and author. His best-known work,Men of Property:The Very Wealthy in Britain Since the Industrial Revolution,charts the rise of the 'super rich',a class he sees as expanding exponentially.
Rubinstein was born in New York City,and educated at Swarthmore College and Johns Hopkins University in the United States.
Rubinstein worked at Lancaster University in England from 1974 to 1975,the Australian National University in Canberra during 1976–1978,Deakin University in Victoria,Australia from 1978 to 1995,and from 1995 to 2011 worked at Aberystwyth University,Wales. At Deakin he had a personal chair in history,and at Aberystwyth he was professor of history. He was more recently an adjunct professor at Monash University in Melbourne.
He is an elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, [1] the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, [2] and of the Royal Historical Society. [3]
He was President of the Jewish Historical Society of England from 2002 to 2004 and was the editor of the articles on Britain and the Commonwealth (except Canada) in the second (2006) edition of the reference work The Encyclopaedia Judaica . He was foundation editor (1988 to 1995) of the Journal of the Australian Jewish Historical Society (Victoria). He was one of the founders of the Australian Association for Jewish Studies (established 1987),and served as its President in 1989–91.
In Australia's Queen's Birthday Honours List 2022 he was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) for services to tertiary education and to Jewish history. [3]
Rubinstein is very widely published,essays and articles of his having appeared in various scholarly books and periodicals in Australia and overseas. Books of his have been translated into Finnish,Russian,French,Hebrew,Italian,Chinese,and Japanese. He is particularly known for his research on the wealth-holding classes in modern Britain,making use of probate and other taxation records,in such works as Men of Property:The Very Wealthy in Britain Since the Industrial Revolution (1981) and Capitalism,Culture and Decline in Britain,1750–1990 (1991;Japanese translation,1997). He has co-authored The Richest of the Rich (2007) with Philip Beresford,an account of the 250 richest-ever people in British history since the Norman Conquest. [4] He authored The All-Time Australian 200 Rich List (2004).
A scholar of modern Jewish history,his books on that subject include A History of the Jews in the English-Speaking World:Great Britain (1996) and the controversial work,The Myth of Rescue (1997),which argues that the Allies could not have saved more Jews during the Holocaust. Holocaust historian David Cesarani called The Myth of Rescue "a polemic that will quickly fade,while the monumental scholarship it seeks to denigrate will still be consulted by historians and students for years to come." [5] Rubinstein in return called Cesarani's views of the subject "totally lacking in historical balance or context". [6] Rubinstein has appeared in several historical documentaries on the Holocaust,including the BBC's Secrets of the Dead:Bombing Auschwitz,which premiered in the United States on the PBS network in January 2020. [7]
Rubinstein also researches topics discussed by amateur historians but ignored by academics. His Shadow Pasts (2007) examines such topics as the assassination of President Kennedy,Jack the Ripper,and the Shakespeare authorship question. He also explored the topic of who wrote Shakespeare's works in a book he co-authored with Brenda James,The Truth Will Out (2005),which hypothesizes that Henry Neville (c. 1562-1615),an Elizabethan Member of Parliament and Ambassador to France,was the real author of Shakespeare's works. [8]
His wife Hilary L. Rubinstein is also a historian.
Philosemitism, also called Judeophilia, is the feeling or expression of interest in, respect for, and appreciation of Jews on the part of a non-Jew. It is signified by a non-Jewish individual's fondness for Jewish history, Jewish culture, and Judaism. Although pro-Jewish sentiment has been attested in a number of societies since antiquity, the concept of philosemitism in a modern context has largely been defined by the aftermath of World War II and particularly by the memory of the Holocaust, which was the most violent culmination of antisemitism in recent history. Despite the fact that it is effectively the opposite of antisemitism, American-Jewish historian Daniel Cohen of the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies has asserted that philosemitism "can indeed easily recycle antisemitic themes, recreate Jewish otherness, or strategically compensate for Holocaust guilt."
The Destruction of the European Jews is a 1961 book by historian Raul Hilberg. Hilberg revised his work in 1985, and it appeared in a new three-volume edition. It is largely held to be the first comprehensive historical study of the Holocaust. According to Holocaust historian, Michael R. Marrus, until the book appeared, little information about the genocide of the Jews by Nazi Germany had "reached the wider public" in both the West and the East, and even in pertinent scholarly studies it was "scarcely mentioned or only mentioned in passing as one more atrocity in a particularly cruel war".
Lucy Dawidowicz was an American historian and writer. She wrote books about modern Jewish history, in particular, about the Holocaust.
Issy Smith was a British-Australian recipient of the Victoria Cross (VC), the highest award for gallantry in the face of the enemy that can be awarded to eligible forces of the Commonwealth and United Kingdom. In recognition of his VC, he was also awarded the French Croix de Guerre and Russian Cross of St. George by the respective governments.
David Ian Cesarani was a British historian who specialised in Jewish history, especially the Holocaust. He also wrote several biographies, including Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind (1998).
The history of Jews in Australia traces the history of Australian Jews from the British settlement of Australia commencing in 1788. Though Europeans had visited Australia before 1788, there is no evidence of any Jewish sailors among the crew. The first Jews known to have come to Australia came as convicts transported to Botany Bay in 1788 aboard the First Fleet that established the first European settlement on the continent, on the site of present-day Sydney.
In the decades since the Holocaust, some national governments, international bodies and world leaders have been criticized for their failure to take appropriate action to save the millions of European Jews, Roma, and other victims of the Holocaust. Critics say that such intervention, particularly by the Allied governments, might have saved substantial numbers of people and could have been accomplished without the diversion of significant resources from the war effort.
The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust 1941–1945 is a 1984 nonfiction book by David S. Wyman, former Josiah DuBois professor of history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Wyman was the chairman of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies. The Abandonment of the Jews has been well received by most historians, and has won numerous prizes and widespread recognition, including a National Jewish Book Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Award, the Present Tense Literary Award, the Stuart Bernath Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, and the Theodore Saloutos Award of the Immigration History Society, and was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award."
Perdition is a 1987 stage play by Jim Allen. Its premiere at London's Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, in a production directed by Ken Loach, was abandoned because of protests, and criticism by two historians, over its controversial and tendentious claims.
Peter Novick was an American historian who was Professor of History at the University of Chicago. He was best known for writing That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession and The Holocaust in American Life. The latter title has also been published as The Holocaust and Collective Memory, especially for non-US anglophonic markets.
Paul R. Bartrop is an Australian historian of the Holocaust and genocide. From August 2012 until December 2020 he was Professor of History and Director of the Center for Judaic, Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Florida Gulf Coast University, Fort Myers, Florida. Between 2020 and 2021 he was an honorary Visiting Professorial Fellow at the University of New South Wales, Canberra. In April 2021 he became Professor Emeritus of History at Florida Gulf Coast University, and in 2022 he became an honorary Principal Fellow in History at the University of Melbourne. During the academic year of 2011-2012 he was the Ida E. King Distinguished Visiting Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey.
Otto Adolf Eichmann was a German-Austrian official of the Nazi Party, an officer of the Schutzstaffel (SS), and one of the major organisers of the Holocaust. He participated in the January 1942 Wannsee Conference, at which the implementation of the genocidal Final Solution to the Jewish Question was planned. Following this, he was tasked by SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich with facilitating and managing the logistics involved in the mass deportation of millions of Jews to Nazi ghettos and Nazi extermination camps across German-occupied Europe. He was captured and detained by the Allies in 1945, but escaped and eventually settled in Argentina. In May 1960, he was tracked down and abducted by Israel's Mossad intelligence agency, and put on trial before the Supreme Court of Israel. The highly publicised Eichmann trial resulted in his conviction in Jerusalem, following which he was executed by hanging in 1962.
Holocaust studies, or sometimes Holocaust research, is a scholarly discipline that encompasses the historical research and study of the Holocaust. Institutions dedicated to Holocaust research investigate the multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary aspects of Holocaust methodology, demography, sociology, and psychology. It also covers the study of Nazi Germany, World War II, Jewish history, religion, Christian-Jewish relations, Holocaust theology, ethics, social responsibility, and genocide on a global scale. Exploring trauma, memories, and testimonies of the experiences of Holocaust survivors, human rights, international relations, Jewish life, Judaism, and Jewish identity in the post-Holocaust world are also covered in this type of research.
Suzanne Dorothy Rutland OAM is a Australian-Jewish historian. Rutalnd serves as Professor Emerita at the University of Sydney. She was previously Chair of the Department of Hebrew, Biblical and Jewish Studies, at Sydney University's Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, serving in that position for 11 years. She specializes in the history of Australian Jews and religious education.
International Mission to Jewish People (IMJP) formerly Christian Witness to Israel (CWI) is a Protestant Christian organization dedicated to the evangelisation of Jewish people. It was founded in 1976 as a merger between the International Society for Evangelisation of the Jews and the Barbican Mission to the Jews.
Hilary L. Rubinstein is an Australian historian and author. She researches and writes on British naval history and modern Jewish history.
Israel Finestein QC MA (1921–2009), an English barrister and Deputy High Court Judge, was a leader and historian of British Jewry. His writings analysed the history of divisions amongst the Jews of England; in varied roles he worked for communal change and reconciliation.
The city of Leeds, in West Yorkshire, England has a Jewish community, where many notable people originated or settled. They have played a major part in the clothing trade, the business, professional and academic life of the City, and the wider world. The community numbers now less than 7,000 people.