Robert Wistrich

Robert Solomon Wistrich (April 7, 1945 – May 19, 2015) was the Erich Neuberger Professor of European and Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the head of the University's Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism. According to Indiana University, Wistrich was "a leading scholar of the history of antisemitism."

Wistrich was born in Lenger, in the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic on April 7, 1945. His parents were leftist Polish Jews who had moved to Lviv in 1940 in order to escape the Germans; however, they found Soviet totalitarianism to be little better. In 1942 they moved to Kazakhstan, where Wistrich's father was imprisoned twice by the NKVD. His parents returned to Poland under a repatriation agreement between Stalin and the Polish government-in-exile.

Later, finding the post-war environment in Poland to be dangerously anti-Semitic – the family moved to France. The author grew up in England, and went to Kilburn Grammar School where he was taught by "Walter Isaacson, a refugee from Nazi Germany who first taught me how to think independently" (Dedication in Wistrich (2012) From Ambivalence to Betrayal: The Left, the Jews, and Israel)

in December 1962, aged 17, Wistrich won an Open Scholarship in History to Queens' College. In 1966 he graduated with a BA (Hons) from the Cambridge, which was raised to a MA degree in 1969. At Cambridge, he founded Circuit, a literary and arts magazine that he co-edited between 1966 and 1969. Between 1969–1970, during a study year in Israel, he became the youngest ever literary editor of New Outlook, a left-wing monthly in Tel Aviv, founded by Martin Buber.

...
Wikipedia