There is a sign on top of what used be to the Spitalfields Great Synagogue on Brick Lane that reads "Umbra Sumus", meaning "We are shadows". It is drawn from an Horatian ode, in which the venerable Roman poet coined the expression: "We are but shadows and dust".

During the autumn of 1962, a young South African schoolteacher called Sylvia Rafael was sitting in her apartment in Tel Aviv, relaxing after a hard day’s work. She happened to be reading The Jewish War by Josephus Flavius, when the phone rang unexpectedly.

The 1930s were a defining period in Anglo-Jewish history.

Winston Churchill was one of the fathers of the modern Middle East. There is therefore at least a case for thinking that he helped create the world's number-one political disaster zone, and then passed that disaster zone on, like a cupful of quivering gelignite, to be the responsibility of America. It was John F. Kennedy who first provided the American security guarantee for Israel.

In the hothouse of Israeli tech success, you may get a surprise if you ask professors which of their graduates they most revere. High up on Boaz Golany's list is the man who led one of Israel's most spectacular failures. Shai Agassi's Better Place company went crashing into bankruptcy last year despite £500 million in investment.

This year has been Holocaust Memorial Year in Hungary, the land of my birth. Seventy years ago, in 1944, the Nazis marched in to deport to Auschwitz the country's 800,000-strong Jewish population.