The Communal Gadfly

Founded in 1841 the London-based Jewish Chronicle is the world's oldest continuously circulating Jewish newspaper. Since 2002 its prestigious flagship 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.