Tag Archives: The Tablet

ANN KLAUSNER: Baruch Dayan Emet: Norman Geras 1943-2013

Ann Klausner

[first published on Anne’s blog Anne’s Opinions]

With great sadness I learned that one of my favourite bloggers passed away on Friday: Professor Norman Geras, otherwise known as “normblog“.

I never had the privilege of meeting or getting to know Professor Geras but from I have read about him, he was a remarkable man both in his academic career and in his personal traits. A short excerpt from his obituary in The Tablet might explain some of his essence:

Continue reading

THE TABLET: Norman Geras: 1943-2013—Remembering the academic, writer, and fighter against anti-Semitism

Ben Cohen

[first published on The Scroll, The Tablet‘s news commentary blog]

Norman Geras

Norman Geras

There is one memory of Norman Geras—the distinguished academic, prolific author and blogger, and doughty fighter against anti-Semitism and racism, who passed away in England earlier today—that has stayed with me for the last twenty-five years. It was a dreary afternoon in the northern English city of Manchester, late in 1988. About twenty students, nearly all of us professed Marxists, had gathered for Geras’s weekly university seminar on Marxism. As we discussed how class interests manifest in politics, one participant, who clearly wasn’t a Marxist, opined that not every owner of the means of production was hellbent on class warfare. Could we not accept, in his inimitable phrase, that there were “cuddly capitalists?”

Continue reading