interview Videos 

Video interview with Gadi Taub

I did a video interview with Gadi Taub, a historian at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University and a columnist for the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz. We talked about my novel, The Legacy, and its themes of antisemitism, fractured Jewish diaspora identity and the pull of history, as well as my political and personal memoir, Guardian Angel. Then we talked about the journey I describe in that memoir, “from leftism to sanity” as it’s put on the cover or, as I prefer to style it, from fantasy to realism. We also talked about the…

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The Legacy launches in Jerusalem

I’m delighted to tell you that my novel, The Legacy, will have its Jerusalem launch on August 7 at Beit Avi Chai. I will be speaking about the book with my fellow journalist Matthew Kalman, and I will also be signing copies which will be on sale from Katamon Books. To buy tickets, please click here. A preview of the event has been published by Times of Israel. You can read it below. And please do join me at an exciting evening! What is the legacy of the modern assimilated…

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The legacy of Polish Holocaust denial

The legacy of Polish Holocaust denial The controversy over Poland’s role during the Holocaust has exploded yet again. Remarkably, a joint statement issued by the Polish and Israeli governments intended to draw a line under the row has been denounced by Yad Vashem. Embarrassingly for Israel, it claims that the statement hailed by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu as “safeguarding the historic truth about the Holocaust” includes “grave errors and deceptions” and contains “highly problematic wording that contradicts existing and accepted historical knowledge in this field”. By coincidence my novel, The…

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Lovely review of The Legacy

Blogger Christine Sunderland has posted on her website a lovely review of my novel, The Legacy. This is what she has written: “The Legacy, a first novel by the bold British journalist Melanie Phillips, is a page-turner involving layering mysteries. The mysteries interweave through time to the present day, in a story set in England, America, and Israel. But The Legacy is more importantly a novel of ideas. My novels, too, are novels of ideas, with characters that care about today’s culture, about moral choice, about faith and family, about…

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At last my novel is published – and eerily prescient too

A few weeks ago my first novel, The Legacy, was published in America. Although a work of fiction, it has turned out to be quite eerily prescient. It took me more years to write than I care to admit. Most of that time I was staring at a blank screen telling myself that writing a novel was beyond me. I was merely a journalist who analysed current issues. Other, superior beings were creatives who could excavate from the recesses of their psyche a page-turning plot and characters who leapt from…

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