The Bill Rubinstein Collection

Professor Bill Rubinstein

Professor Bill Rubinstein (1946-2024) was a New York-born scholar and public intellectual who lived and worked in Australia for many years, acquiring dual citizenship. His varied interests and prolific output embraced British economic and political history, modern Jewish history, chess history – he wrote on Jews in chess for the Encyclopaedia Judaica’s revised edition (2006), for which he also wrote on Commonwealth Jewries except Canada’s) – baseball history, the study of genocide, and the Shakespeare authorship question.

Our library is proud to house a part of Professor Rubinstein’s private book collection. The collection was generously presented to the library by his wife Hilary. 

Professor Bill Rubinstein (1946-2024)

Toddler Bill with his Father after borrowing books from the Brooklyn Public Library

This photo, taken by his mother, American-born to Polish-Jewish parents from Korets (now in Ukraine) and Lomza, shows him with his Warsaw-born father and books just borrowed from the Brooklyn Public Library, one of the family’s frequent destinations. Related in his paternal grandfather’s Lodz-based line to the great pianist Artur Rubinstein, Bill intensely appreciated certain genres of classical music: he hoped eventually to compose an avant-garde piece himself. Following his sudden death outdoors (of a ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm) he was aptly described by Sam Lipski in a message of condolence as “a great champion of Israel and the Jewish people”. Politically centre-right, Bill wrote regularly for Quadrant, and contributed articles to conservative journals of opinion overseas. “He inveighed against such figures as Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, local Holocaust revisionist John Bennett, antisemites of the League of Rights, and Israel-haters of various stripes, but was never as uncompromising regarding a solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict as might be assumed”, observes his wife Hilary.

Bill met Hilary, then an overseas exchange student, at Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania, just after the 1967 Six Day War. They were in the same small weekly modern history honors seminar, based on the Oxbridge tutorial system. Says Hilary: “Bill is sometimes misleadingly described as a political or social scientist. He was always primarily a historian. He chaired the so-called Campus Conservative Club, a tight knit active group, one of a network of such clubs at that time, and my view of the world aligned with his.”

Bill and Hilary, Swarthmore, June 1968

Graduating in 1968, Bill subsequently gained an MA in British political history at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, and a PhD in British wealth-holding from the same university. His resultant work on British economic elites won him the UK Economic History Society’s T.S. Ashton Prize in 1977.  At Hopkins Bill’s academic supervisor, noting his impatient nature, memorably observed that Bill had “energy enough for ten men”. Says Hilary: “That remark captured Bill’s essence. In scholastic zeal and output he never slowed down.” Following research positions at Lancaster University in England, and then the ANU, Bill taught from 1978 until 1995 at Deakin University in Geelong, where he was awarded a personal chair in social and economic history and introduced a course in modern Jewish history. He was also deeply involved in Jewish communal life in Melbourne, through his early work with Australia-Israel Publications (run by Sam Lipski and Michael Danby) and its campaign against the anti-Israel agenda of community radio station 3CR and broadcaster Bill Hartley (‘Baghdad Bill’), through his column and articles in the Australian Jewish News, his roles (1983-95) on the ECAJ during Isi Leibler’s presidency, and as chair (1989-91) of the Anti-Defamation Committee of the Jewish Community Council of Victoria (JCCV). He was deeply involved in the establishment (1984) and work of the Australian Institute of Jewish Affairs.  A key founder (1986) of the Australian Association for Jewish Studies, he was (1989-91) its second president, and would serve on its journal’s editorial committee.  He edited (1988-95) the Australian Jewish Historical Society’s newly established Victoria-published journal. From 1995-2011 he was professor of modern history at the University of Wales in Aberystwyth. In 1996 in New York he breakfasted with eminent intellectual Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr, who in his Journals 1952-2000 (NY, 2007), mentions that occasion and highly praises Bill’s controversial 1997 work The Myth of Rescue. From 2002-04 (succeeding such iconic figures as Chief Rabbi Dr Herman Adler, Israel Zangwill, and Sir Isaiah Berlin) Bill was president of the venerable Jewish Historical Society of England, founded in 1893. After returning to Victoria he was (2013-15) an adjunct professor in Monash University’s Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation. In 2022 he received an OAM for service to tertiary education and Jewish history, and in 2023 Deakin University gave him honorary professor status. Various key writings of Bill’s were translated into Hebrew, French, Italian, Finnish, Chinese, and Japanese. At his sudden death he had several works in progress and others planned. For further details see the “Festschrift” section of the Australian Jewish Historical Society Journal, vol. 27, part 3 (2025), https://collections.ajhs.com.au/ (in which Bill’s long-term UK publisher Dr John Spiers comments: “We miss him every day. We shall not see his like again”).