Introduction: the lives and legacies of David Cesarani

This introduction to the edited collection ‘The Jews, the Holocaust and the Public’ focuses on David Cesarani as autobiographer and biographer. It comprises a brief introduction to Cesarani’s life in academia, his own autobiographical essay and his interest in biography as an academic form, via his studies of Benjamin Disraeli, Arthur Koestler and Adolf Eichmann. This chapter will present the new argument that these three figures can be interpreted as emblematic of three key overlapping themes in Cesarani’s broader research interests: Anglo-Jewish history; migration, minorities and nationalisms; and the Holocaust its history, the prosecution of the perpetrators and its ongoing legacies. It is these themes that comprise a uniquely ‘Cesaranian’ interdisciplinary approach to the Holocaust. It is also these themes, sometimes separately, and at other times in combination, that will animate the considerations of the chapters in this volume for the ‘Holocaust and its Contexts’.N/

A Genetic Association Study of Serum Acute-Phase C-Reactive Protein Levels in Rheumatoid Arthritis: Implications for Clinical Interpretation

A genetic association study by Timothy Vyse and colleagues suggests that there is a significant association between CRP variants and acute-phase serum CRP concentrations in patients with rheumatoid arthritis, including those with chronic inflammation

The violent frontline: space, ethnicity and confronting the state in Edwardian Spitalfields and 1980s Brixton

This article discusses in comparative terms the relationship between space, ethnic identity, subaltern status and anti-state violence in twentieth century London. It does so by comparing two examples in which the control of the state, as represented by the Metropolitan Police, was challenged by minority groups through physical force. It will examine the Spitalfields riots of 1906, which began as strike action by predominantly Jewish bakers and escalated into a general confrontation between the local population and the police, and the Brixton riots of 1981, a response to endemic police harassment of mainly Caribbean youth and long-term economic discrimination in that area of South London. It will begin by dissecting the association of physical metropolitan space with the diasporic ‘other’ in the Edwardian East End and post-consensus South London, and how this ‘othering’ was influenced both by the state and the anti-migrant far right. It will then interrogate the difficult relationship between the Metropolitan Police and Jewish and Caribbean working class communities, and how this deteriorating relationship exploded into in extreme violence in 1906 and 1981. The article will conclude by assessing how the relationships between space, identity and violence influenced long-term national and communal narratives of Jewish and Caribbean interactions with the British state

Lampedusa and the migrant crisis - ethics, representation and history

The tiny Italian island of Lampedusa in the Mediterranean has become notorious in the early twenty-first century through a series of migrant disasters which, until the events of 2015, came to typify the scale and horror of forced migration on a scale not witnessed since the Second World War. This article outlines the background to this story and why Lampedusa became so important in the ‘borderization’ of Europe. It then explores issues of representation, especially within Lampedusa itself, from sources varying from the island’s cemetery to official and alternative sites of heritage (especially the Porto M museum) through to the films, documentaries and plays that have been recently made. Ethical issues are raised including the archaeology of hate speech towards migrants, especially in relation to British Mandate Palestine, and whether there are limits to what can be shown of the horror. Finally, it asks what space there is for the migrant voice to be heard in cultural and political responses to this global crisis