Currently Browsing: Sue Fox 10 articles
A flashy new diamond
Sue Fox visits the revamped Manchester Jewish Museum and bemoans the lack of storage for an umbrella and raincoat. My father, Jack Fox, who was an insurance broker, had his office in St Marks Lane, Cheetham Hill. There was a kosher slaughterer/ chicken shop and Mr Perlman the greengrocer in the narrow alley, On a visit back […]
The Jewish Kardashians
Sue Fox stays up late binge-watching Netflix’s latest Jewish reality show. It’s too hot to sleep. There are things I could do at 2.00 am like ironing, reading, listening to Proust on Audible, learning a new language or writing a chapter of the book I’ve been working on forever. Nothing appealed quite as much as the seven (or […]
Manchester’s King of Glamour and Strip
In the second part of our series on Jews & Sex, Sue Fox reminisces about her Uncle Arthur and his striptease business. My uncle Arthur Fox died in 1970. Mancunians of a certain age might remember his name. He owned The Revue Bar in George Street. I don’t know where George Street was or even if it still exists. Uncle Arthur was the (very non-PC) black sheep […]
Dinner with Ivana and Ivanka
Sue Fox recalls a memorable evening in the company of Ivana and Ivanka Trump. A post-concert dinner in the atrium of the Barbican Centre looked like it was going to be fun. Each table had a flag and name of a famous opera house. I was seated at the Bolshoi. Dearly beloved was far away […]
Bloated and Angry: Rudolph Giuliani
Sue Fox recalls meting and interviewing one-time New York City mayor, Rudolph Giuliani. Having seen far too much of Rudolph Giuliani – the bloated, angry looking legal advisor to Trump – during this election fiasco, I decided to skim through his 2002 book Giuliani: Leadership. Before the events of 9/11 changed the world, the then […]
My New Qualification
Sue Fox reflects on Jewish cookery from a bygone age. Who knew that £14.40 would pay for an online e-learning certificate in Food Safety Level 2? Until I started volunteering with Food Rescue/Food Banks, I hadn’t given much thought to rat droppings, cockroach excretions or moth webbing. My approach to Best Before dates was a […]
‘Maus’ Forty Years Later
Sue Fox looks back at Maus, and its creator, Art Spiegelman. A beginning. Seems as good a title as any for musing on an everyday story of life these days. It was the Torah portion our older son had for his bar mitzvah twenty-seven years ago. Whilst someone somewhere was reading Bereshit on Saturday, October […]
The Night I Had Dinner with RBG
Sue Fox recollects a memorable evening with Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Karen Skinazi’s article on ‘bageling’ in connection with Mrs America was an eye-opener to this reader who watched the entire series hating Phyllis Schlafly. When evil Phyllis told the maid to collect her child from school, knowing said maid needed to collect her own child, she made me explode with venom. I took it […]
‘The Plot Against America’ comes back to haunt me
I can vividly remember reading Philip Roth’s novel when it was published in 2004 and being completely gobsmacked that Charles Lindbergh was the American President. We were on holiday in Portugal in the same place we’d gone back to every year since who knows when, for a week of walking, Scrabble and reading. I can still […]
Cremation: So What If It’s Heresy?
In the months before lockdown I was training with a group of volunteers to start a project in the borough for the national Dying Matters organisation. As it happens, we were all ‘old’ and Jewish with a wealth of experience in many different professional fields – not just in the voluntary sector. The aim was […]