British Jewry in 1939–1945 manned the war front together with the entire British nation. Together with the gentile British, it bore the burden and the suffering of those years, from the heroic evacuation of the forces in Dunkirk, to the heroic stand in the bombardments of London during the aerial blitz, up to the ballistic missile strikes preceding the end of the war. Such was especially the case in the ordeal that British society underwent during its year of “fighting alone,” from May 1940, after the surrender of France, to June 1941, when Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union. The other two Jewish societies discussed in this book were not put to such a test: The front never closed in on American Jewry or the Yishuv, although Tel Aviv and Haifa were bombarded at the beginning of the war and Rommel approached the Egyptian border in the summer of 1942.

During those calamitous years, the Jewish press in Britain undertook to represent the Jews’ political cause and fight for it in the public domain, even though this cause did not always square with the policy of Britain, which was waging an existential war against the Fascist regime. Although this mismatch of interests led to no political collision, it must serve as a standard in the evaluation that follows of the emphasis that the British Jewish press placed on the special distress of the Jewish people, especially when it was expressed from a pronouncedly Zionist perspective. This press was spearheaded by the Jewish Chronicle, a veteran weekly that celebrated its centenary in 1940; the Labor Zionist daily Di Tsayt; the pro-Revisionist English-language weekly The Jewish Standard; and the main organ of World Agudath Israel, Di Vokhntsaytung. All were mouthpieces not only of the Jews but also of the Zionist national cause.