Currently Browsing: Uncategorized 110 articles
The Sackler Cartel
Continuing our series exploring Jews & Crime, Nathan Abrams reviews a fascinating new book about how the Sackler family amassed its fortune. Generally, when one thinks of drug pushers, one thinks of the illicit drug trade between Latin America and the United States. One might picture the Mexican and Columbian drug cartels in particular. Someone like Pablo Escobar. Or dealers pushing their products on […]
No Leaf Is Perfect
Eran Hornick is inspired by Shai Afsai’s poem ‘Forty-four’. In June of last year, my friend Dan and I drove to Maine to hike the renowned Mahoosuc Notch. It is famed by some to be ‘the hardest mile of the AT’ — the Appalachian Trail — and since it was within a four hours’ drive […]
Billion-Dollar Bullshit
Nathan Abrams reviews a new documentary film about Jewish entrepreneur Adam Neumann and his co-working startup, WeWork. The billion-dollar start-up, WeWork, founded by Jewish entrepreneur Adam Neumann, which I wrote about here has been inspiring some interest of late. First, there was a book, then a podcast and now there is a documentary film with another book and even a television series based on […]
The Auto-Destructive-Creative World of Gustav Metzger
Gloria Tessler looks back at the work of Gustav Metzger, the subject of a forthcoming retrospective. If you get down on your hands and knees and crawl on the ground beneath the yellow-star-coloured cover, you can touch an enlarged photograph of Jews forced to scrub the pavements of Vienna clean. The figures are larger than […]
Not in My Name?
Dan Rickman It is impossible to watch the news from Israel/Palestine just now without tears in one’s eyes, wherever your sympathies lie. And whilst the conflict with Hamas is sadly all too familiar, the sort of mob violence inside Israel itself is shocking and something new, or at least something which recalls the early days […]
The Poisoned Chalice
David Brauner contemplates the problems of writing a literary biography of Philip Roth. First, we had the previews of the Philip Roth biography by Blake Bailey (reviewed for JewThink by Donald Weber) – notably Joshua Cohen, assuming the voice of the dead Roth (a trick Tim Parrish had pulled off with more wit and elan […]
Am Yisrael Chai: In Support of Israel and Zionism
Jayden Jasper-Lee Martin expresses his passion for the achievements of Zionism, Israel, and the Jewish people, to which he seeks to lend his voice to support. In recent years the social and political Left’s preoccupation with denouncing Israel and its increasing support of the Boycott, Divest, Sanction (BDS) movement has proven particularly infelicitous, for the […]
Hitchcock’s Jews
Nathan Abrams reviews a new biography of the master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock. Alfred Hitchcock was not Jewish. Nor does the author of a new biography claim him to be. But as a colossus who bestrode the film industry between 1927 and 1976, spanning the silent era, the talkies, black and white, colour, 3D, expressionism, […]
Napoleon and the Jews of Europe
On the bicentenary of Napoleon’s death, François Guesnet reflects on his relationship with Europe’s Jews. During a stagecoach journey in the north of France in 1799, an agent of the secret police struck up a conversation with a Jewish fellow traveller to find out what he thought of the revolution. The answer was prudent enough: […]
Prayer
Bruce Black offers up four new poems on prayer. 1) Every day I listen Every day, dear God, I listen,wanting to hear Your voice— Just a word or two, even the soundof Your breath— Hoping for a sign that You arelistening to my prayer.__ 2) Your face is hidden Your face ishidden behinda cloud. When […]