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The Jewish Vigilantes Who Fought Fascism in Postwar Britain
(Ha'aretz) Adrian Hennigan - Tommy Gould and Gerry Flamberg were war heroes. Gould helped remove an enemy bomb from his torpedoed submarine, later receiving the Victoria Cross. Flamberg parachuted into Arnhem, took a bullet to the shoulder, and single-handedly took out a German tank with a strategically aimed grenade. The two were founding members of a predominantly Jewish group of vigilantes (men and women) whose remarkable story is recounted in a new book, We Fight Fascists: The 43 Group and Their Forgotten Battle for Post-War Britain, by Daniel Sonabend. From 1946 to 1950, what began as a handful of Jewish ex-servicemen confronting fascists in London's East End became 2,000 members with intelligence and surveillance branches. In the 1930s, Oswald Mosley and his British Union of Fascists managed to attract thousands of supporters, but Mosley had been interned during World War II and released at the war's end. It wasn't long before he and his movement were back on the streets of London. But in the shadow of the Holocaust, a large number of young Jews were mad as hell and not going to take this anymore. Sonabend concludes: "The 43 Group realized that to defeat the fascists you had to beat them at their own game and hit them twice as hard as they hit you, and doing so was a moral imperative."