Currently Browsing: History 46 articles
Liberal Drippings of Pork Fat
Stephen Pogany contributes an exclusive extract from his book Modern Times: The Biography of a Hungarian-Jewish Family. Throughout her married life in Budapest, my Jewish grandmother invariably cooked with pork fat. She also spread pork dripping liberally on toast as a tasty snack for herself and her family, in open defiance of one of the most […]
Salonica’s Ghosts
Ross Bradshaw reviews a new book about Jews and Salonica. A number of Jewish people I know have found a few letters and postcards in Yiddish among their parents’ and grandparents’ possessions, sent by half-forgotten or unknown relatives living in Eastern Europe prior to the war. These ghostly messages from the past, in a faded […]
A Time To Mourn…
Barbara Borts reflects on the importance of Yom HaShoah. As a progressive Jew from an earlier time, I hadn’t learned about Tisha B’av, the fast of the 9th of Av. When I began my rabbinical studies, and later my congregational work, Tisha B’Av was beginning to be marked in progressive Jewish circles, mostly as the […]
How the Anne Frank Cold Case Team Betrayed the World
Ruben Vis explains how the recent revelations about Anne Frank’s alleged betrayer are wrong. Who betrayed Anne Frank and the others who were hiding with her? The question has been a source of speculation and research ever since Otto H. Frank, Anne’s father and sole survivor of the eight, returned from Auschwitz in the summer […]
Volodymyr Zelensky: From Rootless Cosmopolitan to Democratic Icon
Martin Elliot Jaffe profiles the Ukrainian Jewish President. “Both Ukrainians and Jews value freedom and they work equally for the future of our states to become to our liking—not the future others want for us—we know what it’s like not to have our own state and land and with weapons in hand at the cost […]
“Solomon & Gaenor” and #MeToo
Jaclyn Granick reviews Paul Morrison’s Solomon and Gaenor through new eyes. I logged into the Yiddish New York festival website last December to look at the curated film selection this year. The first film listed was Solomon & Gaenor. To my surprise, it included two non-English languages: Welsh and Yiddish. Welsh?! As Cardiff University‘s first […]
Eddie Cantor and Black Lives Matter
On what would have been his 130th birthday, Steven Gimbel and Gwydion Suilebhan reflect on the famous Jewish performer and racism. Eddie Cantor was perhaps the first true modern celebrity. There were certainly famous performers before he arrived on the scene, but Cantor was the first to enlarge his fame by devoting himself to humanitarian […]
Running to Remember
Julie Carbonara reflects on an unusual way to commemorate Holocaust Memorial Day. The 1936 Berlin Olympics were supposed to be a showcase for the Aryan race to dazzle, show its power, demonstrate its superiority over the other, inferior humanoids – at least that was Adolf Hitler’s plan. But which is the event the 1936 Olympics […]
The Kosher Beatles
As The Beatles: Get Back streams on Disney+, Nathan Abrams considers the Beatles’ Jewishness. As we know, beetles are not kosher but maybe the Beatles are. Let’s put this in context. Liverpool, where the Beatles hail from, has been a magnet for Jews since the eighteenth century. According to JCR-UK, there have been over 20 […]
Ridley Road
Joseph Finlay reviews the history and politics of Ridley Road and prays there is not a second series. Before September 2021 I didn’t know I needed a BBC drama about British Jews fighting fascists in 1960s London. And having seen all four parts of Ridley Road — I’m still not sure I do. As a […]