Apartheid and South African Jewry: An Exchange

The author and publisher Ronald Segal was deeply involved with the antiapartheid struggle in South Africa, writing, lecturing, fighting in the courts, and accepting exile as the cost of his activism. Born into affluence in South Africa, he used his family’s wealth and his own inexhaustible energy to defend Nelson Mandela and champion an economic boycott of the apartheid regime. Through his magazine, Africa South, and the Penguin African Library, he brought international attention to the continent of his birth.

South Africa–born Dan Jacobson was an all-around man of letters, a novelist, essayist, memoirist, and critic who shifted easily between literary genres. Jacobson’s early novels dealt with South Africa’s racism; his later ones addressed universal ethics. Still later, he turned toward Jewish subjects, following his family’s trail to Lithuania and researching the life of his grandfather, a rabbi.