Currently Browsing: Covid 35 articles
Jewish Art: Where Are You?
The UK is slowly emerging from lockdown and people can see art again. From last week, museums and galleries reopened for visitors. This may not be news for everyone, but art is my love, as well as my profession. Not being able to go to galleries has been a deprivation. I feel starved of the art of others. There has been much art on the internet – […]
Why Isn’t Anybody Talking About…
Why isn’t anybody talking about the North London lockdown murders? You hear a lot about how domestic violence has risen by 24 per cent under lockdown, but nobody talks about the fact that in one area of London – the small, largely Jewish boroughs of Finchley, Hendon and Golders Green — the murder rate has […]
‘And spet upon my Jewish gaberdine’
Jay Prosser reviews The Merchant of Venice on BBC iPlayer. Watching the BBC iPlayer’s screening of The Merchant of Venice, Culture in Quarantine: Shakespeare on the BBC iPlayer in the age of COVID makes for a surreal experience, either like time-travelling or being dropped onto a different planet. It’s not only because this recording is from 2015, of the Royal Shakespeare Company directed under Polly Findlay. Nor is […]
Housework, Covid and Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s ‘Maintenance Art’
In my conversations with friends who are fathers I noticed that many of us feel we are the ones devoting most of the time to our children’s distance learning during the Corona pandemic. Very few women agreed with this view. Men have been writing about the wonderful experiences this period introduced in their lives: being at home, getting […]
Kinder Korner: Singers Hill Synagogue in Birmingham, UK–the Minecraft edition!
Momo Skinazi, 10 years old, recreates the beautiful cathedral synagogue of Birmingham Hebrew Congregation…in Minecraft. Take a tour here!
Grandma in Lockdown*
In the second installment of our new series, ‘You Never Call! You Never Skype!’, a grandmother reflects on her experiences of grandparenting during the pandemic. Thursday 12th March Yesterday was an ordinary Wednesday. I went as usual to my yoga class, did some shopping chores, collected our two oldest grandchildren from the tube station after school, pored over a crossword […]
Zooming in The Family
In the first of a new series, ‘You Never Call! You Never Skype!’, Catherine Temma Davidson reflects on parenting during the pandemic. I grew up in America and I now live in London with my English husband and children. Years of analysing my culture from afar has revealed the ways I am – like many Americans – a self-mythologiser. Coming from a Jewish and Greek background, one of my […]
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 […]
Freud meets Shtisel
For those not lucky enough to have seen it, Shtisel is a Netflix drama about family life in a Haredi community set in Geula, Jerusalem. It offers a unique insight into what living in this close-knit community may be like from the point of view of the Shtisel family including patriarch Shulem, son Akiva, daughter […]
10 Reasons Why Zoom Limmud Is Much, Much Better Than Normal Limmud
1. I didn’t have to book in February to make sure I was charged £8,000 rather than £8,050 for my own room. 2. On my way into a talk, I didn’t have to barge my way past groups of people who attend the same shul and feel compelled, not having seen each other for five […]