Politics, Religion, and Love: The Story of H.H. Asquith, Venetia Stanley, and Edwin Montagu, Based on the Life and Letters of Edwin Samuel Montagu

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NYU Press, 1991 - Biography & Autobiography - 843 pages

This is the story of three fascinating and strong-willed individuals: H.H. Asquith, Prime Minister of England; his friend and confidant, Edwin Samuel Montagu, a Jewish member of the Cabinet, and also Secretary of State for India; and the third, the sexually liberated Venetia Stanley, a brilliant adnd politically sophisticated woman and a member of one of England's oldest aristocratic families.
This book is also a recital of racism and anti-semitism in England in the early century - not merely among the uneducated or the lunatic fringe of the Tory Party, but amoing the well-educated, the stars of Oxford and Cambridge, and the leaders of the Liberal Party as well. It demonstrates that even so educated and affluent a man as Montagu, almost totally assimilated, who spent a life time trying to escape his Judaism, who married a woman who had nothing but scorn for all religions - was not immune from the pain and humiliation of anti-semitism.

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About the author (1991)

Naomi B. Levine, lawyer, graduate of Columbia Law School, editor of the Columbia Law Review, expert in constitutional law, was formerly the National Executive Director of the American Jewish Congress. Currently she is Senior Vice President of New York University.

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