Currently Browsing: Covid 35 articles

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Locked Down Jews in Leicester

As the lockdown extends in Leicester, Lucy Michaels considers the pros and cons of being based in a small Jewish community during COVID-19.

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Mindy Kaling and Lang Fisher’s Never Have I Ever: When is a Jewish stereotype useful?

In the first part of this two-part series on new culture and old Jewish stereotypes, I wrote about Jewish money, solidarity, and privilege in Candice Carty-Williams’s Queenie. For this post, I’m going to move across the pond to discuss the new American Netflix series Never How I Ever.   This series, like Queenie, has a diverse group of girlfriends at its core and a problematic Jewish figure framed in […]

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A welcome democratisation of British Jewish culture

For me, the pandemic has produced a welcome democratisation of British Jewish culture. No longer is living in a remote fringe of the United Kingdom, a hindrance to full participation in British Jewish cultural life.   The current situation has led to a levelling up: Jewish culture, once previously inaccessible either because of location and/or cost, is now free and accessible.   I no longer […]

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What types of British Jewish culture have you been consuming during the pandemic? Part 1

This description embarrassed me, because it felt a little too real. Let’s face it: Jews make a pastime of touting our minority status. We are the victims of millennia of discrimination and oppression. We hold fast to this self-image, even when we share in much of the privilege of whiteness—and sometimes more of it than many white people.

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What if nothing changes?

WiIl the impact of Covid-19 be as ephemeral as the impact of the death of Diana?

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Auto-Generation: Religious services on Hendon’s streets

They have always been religious, they have always been rich, and I am welcome there. They don’t need anything from me, I don’t need anything from them. It’s Shabbos many months into coronavirus lockdown and because the dozen or so synagogues within a 15 minutes’ walk are closed, prayers are happening on my parents’ street – average age 60. Someone spoke to the […]

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Covid has made me more engaged with the community

A former frummer, my life used to revolve around Shul, Shabbat meals, family and learning. Social interactions have also played a massive role in my life, and this hasn’t changed significantly. I’ve slowly become less religious over the past decade, and my relationship to Judaism has changed, evolved and adapted. My identity is now expressed […]

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How the virus turned us all a little bit Jewish

There was a moment during the lockdown when it seemed the whole world was turning Talmudic. ‘What if?’ became the question on everybody’s lips. Even the letters page of The Grauniad (noch) was filled with arguments straight out of the yeshiva. ‘I live alone’, one reader wrote, ‘If I go and meet my son and his partner in the park, I am breaking the rules […]

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What types of Jewish culture have you been consuming during the pandemic?

To answer this question, I return to a beginning – a discovery in graduate school where my work concentrated on the history and theories of British literature.  When we reached the twentieth century, devoid of Jewish content, it was the Anglo-Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen who inspired my fascination with British Jewish history and culture.  Although I found Bowen a compelling writer, it was her treatment of British antisemitism […]

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Davening during the Pandemic

 I am a regular shul goer and wherever I am I try to attend services. On a Shabbat I’m usually in shul and on a Sunday morning at home in Leeds I head for the 8.00 a.m. minyan. The pandemic has put a stop to all that.   But since 22nd March 22, I have been a member of a virtual community led by the Reverend Albert Chait of the United Hebrew Congregation […]

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