Currently Browsing: Uncategorized 114 articles
The Apotheosis of Consumer Culture and a Career
In his continuing exploration of David Cronenberg’s Jewishness, Sean Alexander appraises David Cronenberg’s only novel, Consumed. In 2014, the Baron of Blood and King of Venereal Horror, Canadian Jewish movie director, David Cronenberg, released his last movie to date, Maps to the Stars, and published his first novel Consumed. It brought the filmmaker’s career full […]
An Uncanny Prophecy of Our Time
Donald Weber reviews Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz’s The Passenger. The publication of Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz’s harrowing novel, The Passenger, with a new translation from the original German by Philip Boehm, is a major literary event. Written in the weeks following Kristallnacht, in early November 1938, when Boschwitz was just 23, The Passenger offers an intimate portrait […]
NXIVM: The Story of Jews and a Sex Cult
In our series on Jews & Crime, Nathan Abrams discusses those Jews who became involved the NXIVM, the self-help group cum sex cult. The NXIVM (pronounced ‘Nex-ee-um’) story might have passed you by. It was founded in 1998 by Keith Raniere and Nancy Salzman, a former registered psychiatric nurse, hypnotist, and neuro-linguistics programming expert, as a purported self-improvement organization near Albany, New York. NXIVM started as a […]
The Gonef’s Wedding
In the second piece in our series on Jews and Crime, Jarrod Tanny evokes a gangster’s wedding in an Odessan Jewish Key. Nestled on the shores of the Black Sea, the City of Odessa was a notorious bastion of Jewish criminality and merrymaking, much to the delight of its admirers, but much to the horror […]
Yiddisher Psychogeography of a Small Planet
David Balsmo explores Emanuel Litvinoff, Jewish Space and Place as revealed through the lockdown. It is now just over a year since the pandemic forced the U.K. into lockdown, during this time the promise of an expanding world with multifarious connections has shrunk. Yes, we have Zoom and other platforms, but non-virtual experience contracted with […]
Silent Witness: The Resonance of Artefacts
Robert Katz reflects on the powerful history of artefacts. During the year of America’s bicentennial celebrations, I lived in a small, pale green house on the plains of southeastern Montana, about 60 miles south of the Yellowstone River. Just down the road from my house was the Crow and Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservations. On the […]
Unseat Bibi and End the Occupation
Dana Mills considers Israel’s election results. For hundreds of Palestinians in the neighbourhood of Silwan in East Jerusalem, the Israeli election of 2021 holds existential significance. They could not however vote in this election nor in any other Israeli elections. In Silwan, eviction lawsuits were filed by settlers against about 60 other families. If the government […]
Pandemic Passover 2.0: What Have We Learned?
As Pesach approaches Nathan Abrams argues that we need to step up to help remote Jews. As Pesach approaches it is a good time to take stock of the past year and what we have learned from the ongoing pandemic and continued lockdowns. In July last year, I wrote for JewThink, how things were looking […]
Confident Jews – are we sure?
Dan Rickman responds to Nathan Abrams Did Jews really start speaking out because of the Race Relations Act and Margaret Thatcher, as Nathan Abrams argues? When I was growing up in 1960s London, Jewishness was a very private affair and monoculturalism was the order of the day. With the memory of the Holocaust hanging over them, […]
Are our Jewish nightmares paling into insignificance?
Gloria Tessler asks has the pandemic deepened society’s consciousness and so we Jews have to worry less? Does it seem strange that during the pandemic so many important topics of conversation have suddenly assumed even greater magnitude? Racism in society, gender issues, women’s rights, everything is laid bare before us in terms that were muted […]