Currently Browsing: Covid 35 articles
How will Jewish culture be impacted as a result of the pandemic?
I’ve always felt that Nostradamus and I are kindred spirits. We both make predictions and we both get those predictions incredibly wrong. However, the task at hand is to have a stab as to how Jewish culture will be affected by the pandemic and who doesn’t love some blind supposition? For about five years, I’ve […]
How has the pandemic affected how we think about British Jewish culture?
On the one hand, the stress during the pandemic has been on the ‘British’ in British-Jewish culture. Locked-down, quarantined, forbidden from travelling abroad, we find ourselves re-connecting with the local, the places we actually inhabit rather than ‘diasporas of the mind’ (the title of Bryan Cheyette’s 2013 book on ‘Jewish and postcolonial writing’). Diasporic we may be, but cultural diasporas are largely imaginary constructions, ‘imaginary homelands’ […]
Davening during lockdown
Davening during the lockdown due to Covid-19 has been an entirely different experience. During normal times, davening is confined predominantly to morning Shabbat and Yom Tov services in shul. But during the pandemic, it has involved attending virtual Shacharit services led by Senior Minister Albert Chait of the United Hebrew Congregation, Leeds. I made a […]
Pandemic, Jewish Learning and Us
There is liberation to be gained through reading and writing. One can feel a kind of freedom through the process of placing words and finding order, by the idea that there could be necessity of a function in narrative. Reading and interpretation form much of our Jewish experience, and I wonder how might lived and inherited narratives be used within our private and public lives to develop strategies for […]
The Pandemic and British Jewish Culture
Welcome to JewThink. To kickstart our first ‘issue’, we issued an open invitation for reflections on the following questions: 1. What will British Jewish culture look like after the pandemic? 2. How has the pandemic affected how we think about British Jewish culture? 3. What types of British Jewish culture have you been consuming during […]