Its origin is 27 March 1945; the 77th anniversary is a little over a week away. Early that morning, at 7.21am, a V2 rocket landed on Hughes Mansions,… - Jonathan Freedland

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Its origin is 27 March 1945; the 77th anniversary is a little over a week away. Early that morning, at 7.21am, a V2 rocket landed on Hughes Mansions, a block of flats on Vallance Road in the East End. It killed 134 people, more or less instantly. Among them were two sisters, Rivvi and Feige (pronounced fay-ghee). Feige Hocherman was 33 and she left behind two children, a son not yet 11 and a daughter aged eight and a quarter. The little girl was my mother, Sara.
The war was in its final weeks and the bomb that fell that morning would be the very last V2 to land on London. It wasn't a targeted missile, though if it had been it could hardly have delighted its masters more. For of the 134 people killed by that Nazi rocket, 120 were Jews.

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About Jonathan Freedland

Jonathan Saul Freedland (born 25 February 1967) is a British journalist, broadcaster and weekly columnist for The Guardian. He presents BBC Radio 4's contemporary history series The Long View. Freedland also writes thrillers, mainly under the pseudonym Sam Bourne, and has written a play, Jews. In Their Own Words, performed in 2022 at the Royal Court Theatre, London

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Alternative Names: Jonathan Saul Freedland Sam Bourne
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Additional quotes by Jonathan Freedland

The Republican party’s shift away from democratic norms is no longer confined to one man, even if he embodies it and accelerates it. It is embedded in the ethos of the party now. Reversing that trend is a daunting prospect because of another shift, one that has been apparent for a while but which is taking especially vivid form in these midterm elections. It is the polarisation of information, so that Americans now exist in two distinct spheres of knowledge, each one barely touching the other.

And yet, 7 October 2023 is also a landmark event in Jewish history. It will be remembered as a byword for Jewish vulnerability, the more painful for coming in the very place where Jews were supposed at last to have shaken off the powerlessness that blighted them for two millennia.

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