Trudy Gold
Isaiah Berlin: A Hero of Riga
Summary
A deep appreciation of the life and work of British philosopher and political theorist Isaiah Berlin, best known for his works on liberal political philosophy and the history of ideas, including the concept of “negative liberty.” Berlin won the Jerusalem Prize for his lifetime defense of civil liberties and he contributed a great deal of thinking and writing on Jewish history and the challenges Jews continued to face during his lifetime.
Trudy Gold
Trudy Gold was the CEO of the London Jewish Cultural Centre and a founding member of the British delegation to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). Throughout her career she taught modern Jewish history at schools, universities, and to adult groups and ran seminars on Holocaust education in the UK, Eastern Europe, and China. She also led Jewish educational tours all over the world. Trudy was the educational director of the student resources “Understanding the Holocaust” and “Holocaust Explained” and the author of The Timechart History of Jewish Civilization.
May I suggest you buy the book, Isaiah Berlin, “The Power of Ideas.” And there are sections on his ideas of Jewishness. You’ll find them in there. Look, it’s really, he writes about his Jewishness in many of his books, “Against the Current,” in “Conversations with Isaiah Berlin”. And can I tell you, he writes like a novelist, when I said I love reading Isaiah Berlin, I get a sense because I passionately still want to believe in the Enlightenment. We are living in very interesting times at the moment in England.
He would have hated it. He was friendly, by the way, with Adam von Trott at Oxford, and he had a huge dispute with him. And you should, I haven’t got time to go into it now, but that’s a very important story, look that one up. Look, of course, there were many members of the British establishment who were fascists.
Well, I know that he had huge conversations with Islamic scholars. Remember he dies in the 1990s. He hated violence of any kind. He would’ve hated Islamic extremism as he hated Jewish extremism.