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."