How Austria’s Jewish chancellor helped country evade responsibility for Nazi past – A new book by Israeli diplomat Daniel Aschheim examines Bruno Kreisky, Austria’s longest-serving leader, and his ambivalent relationship with his own Judaism and the Jewish state | Timesofisrael

LONDON — For more than a decade after he came to power in 1970, Bruno Kreisky dominated Austrian politics and placed the small central European country firmly on the world stage.
Born to an upper-middle-class Jewish family, Kreisky was Austria’s longest-serving chancellor, winning four consecutive terms in a country with a long and dark tradition of antisemitism.
But as Israeli diplomat Daniel Aschheim explores in his new book, “Kreisky, Israel and Jewish Identity,” in the eyes of many, Kreisky’s personal and political achievements were colored — if not tainted — by his “ambivalent and often-confrontational relationship with his Jewishness, Jews, and Israel.”