Jews & Crime
As any historian will tell you, one of the ways we discover Jews in far-flung places is through accounts of criminal activity both perpetrated by and against Jews. This series proposes to reflect on the relationship between Jews and issues of crime and criminality, opening up the hidden worlds of Jewish criminals and criminal behaviour. […]
The Shmuck and the General
Jennifer Caplan reflects on Mel Brooks’ long-awaited new television series. This week, comedy fans finally got the fulfilment of a promise 42 years in the making as Mel Brooks’ History of the World Part II came into being. Unlike its predecessor, which was a single, sketch-based film, Part II harnessed the power of the changing […]
Jewish Football Royalty
Nathan Abrams reviews a new book by Jewish football executive David Dein. Ken Bates, then Chelsea chairman, who was known for being quick-witted and acerbic once invited Arsenal executive David Dein around for lunch. ‘The first thing he said to me was, “Mazel tov”’, Dein recalls in his new autobiography, Calling the Shots: How to […]
Little People
Excerpts adapted from Stephen Pogany’s Modern Times: The Biography of a Hungarian-Jewish Family. ‘You’re not a Jew!’ snaps my mother, with a sudden and unexpected rush of anger. For an instant, I’m confused, uncertain of what to say or what to think. Was I adopted? Have I been the victim of an elaborate, well-intentioned deception, […]
Soviet Jewish Writing
Donald Weber reviews a new book about postrevolutionary Russian and Yiddish literature and film. In How the Soviet Jew Was Made, Sasha Senderovich maps a fascinating landscape of Jewish literary expression in Eastern Europe between the Russian Revolution and the emergence of the Soviet Union. The ongoing horrific violence in Ukraine and – for perhaps […]
Overcriticism and Forgiveness
Alex Gordon reflects on his father’s Jewishness. In 1935 my father met his idol, the French writer Henri Barbusse, winner of the Goncourt Prize. Barbusse, a member of the French Communist Party who also met with Stalin, sought to persuade my father, a newly minted graduate in literature from Kiev University, to become a communist. […]
Sparring Spares
Gloria Tessler suggests that Prince Harry could spare a thought for Joseph in his coat of many colours. Prince Harry’s revelations about sibling rivalry in his sensational book, Spare, will come as nothing new in the sense that they have exposed, as the late Rabbi Sacks has described it, the root of human conflict. Unsurprisingly […]
Jewish Folk Medicine
Efram Sera-Shriar explores an often forgotten or overlooked tradition. When I used to work for the Science Museum in London, I was often asked by friends and colleagues what my favourite object was in the collection. There is so much fantastic material in the museum’s store, and there are several objects that are dear to […]
Eyes Wide Shut
Nathan Abrams considers the Jewishness of Jordan Peele’s Nope. Two alternative names have been suggested for Jordan Peele’s latest film, Nope, but which have already been taken: “Don’t Look Up” and “Don’t Look Now”. I am going to suggest an alternative if already taken title: Eyes Wide Shut. This is because in quoting Stanley Kubrick’s […]
The Jewish mystical roots of His Dark Materials
The BBC and HBO recently aired the final episodes of the TV show His Dark Materials, based on the books of the same name by Philip Pullman, a self-described Church of England Atheist. When I first read the His Dark Materials trilogy 20 years ago, I knew the books were deemed as heretical. I read […]
Danny Kalb: Jewish Blues Icon
Martin Elliot Jaffe reflects on his musical inspiration since 1966. Reading the New York Times obituary for guitarist Danny Kalb, who died aged 80 in November, I was transported back in time: aged 15, Framus guitar in hand, struggling to find a chord progression as I listened to Projections, a new album from Kalb’s band, […]
The Scream in Kiev
Alex Gordon presents an original story. My grandfather Ilya Gordon was an assistant pharmacist in a Kiev pharmacy. He made and sold medicines, weighed portions of medicines on scales, and was always accurate in his work. He was allowed to settle outside the Pale of Settlement in Tsarist Russia and move from the shtetl […]
An Unfathomable Nightmare
Donald Weber admires a new translation of Lion Feuchtwanger The Oppermanns. “Berlin is a city full of future émigrés,” Lion Feuchtwanger declared in 1931, prophesying his own fate two years before the 1933 publication of his deeply prescient novel, The Oppermanns. By then, the well-known author, a political novelist and playwright affiliated with Brecht and […]
Jewish Culture in Kraków
Shai Afsai reflects on a pre-pandemic Jewish Culture Festival in Kraków. Prior to World War II, about one-tenth of Poland’s population was Jewish, and Jews made up almost a quarter of Kraków’s residents. By the end of the war, 90% of Poland’s Jews had died at the hands of the Nazis and their accomplices. Those […]
Jewish Folk Medicine in Eastern Europe
Efram Sera-Shriar reviews a new book about Jewish Folk Medicine in Eastern Europe. Not so long ago I was having a discussion about traditional Jewish folk customs with my uncle, who is a lawyer. Like me, he’s always been interested in this aspect of Jewish culture, and we chatted about things such as the supposed […]
Dave Chappelle, Jon Stewart and Jewish Anti-Defamation
Rabbi Elliot B. Gertel In response to Dave Chappelle’s Saturday Night Live monologue about who really runs things, Jon Stewart appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert suggesting he would make a better “spokesJew” than those who currently fulfil that role. But would he? And what should we expect from Jewish anti-defamation groups, in the United States and around the […]
The Hollywood Chanukkiah
Barbara Borts discusses an unlikely Jewish Film Star. How does one signal to the public that the characters in a film are Jewish? Well, let me introduce you to the unlit Chanukkiah, which made at least three different appearances in three different films during the 2022 UK Jewish Film Festival. In no particular order, this […]
Where Do You Really Come From?
In the wake of yet another royal race row, Gloria Tessler reflects on where Jews come from. Where do you come from? No, where do you really come from? It’s possible that European Jews may have rarely been asked this question. Although it was put to me several times at school by kids who were […]
But who’s counting?
Daniel Randall critically responds to David Baddiel’s documentary “Jews Don’t Count”. Jeremy Corbyn defending a mural explicitly intended, according to its creator, to demonise Jewish financiers; antisemitic memes peddling conspiracies about “Rothschilds” approvingly circulated in left-wing social media spaces; Adbusters magazine, seen by many as having sparked the Occupy movement, asking in editorials “why won’t […]
Don’t mention the Green
Margaret Harris remembers a childhood incident that still makes her nervous about naming Golders Green
“No Jews were harmed”
Nathan Abrams reviews a new book about the work of the filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen. In a review about the Jewishness of the films of the brothers Joel and Ethan Coen, it would be far too easy to devote attention just to A Serious Man. This is their most obviously Jewish film and probably […]
Jewish velvet – a touching memoire
Keith Kahn-Harris explores how his inability to tolerate the touch of velvet shaped his experience of growing up Jewish.
Atonement is At One Ment
A new poem about Yom Kippur by Gloria Tessler. At One Ment is to be an adult. To be an adult is to be Fractured, dissonant, Uncertain. Finding Footsteps in dark And silent places, Losing your way. At One Ment is to be a child. Graciously perceptive, Holding back tears That may hurt an adult, […]
Mourning a Monarch
In the wake of the Queen’s funeral, Gloria Tessler reflects on the intense Jewishness of mourning. Does it make me a royalist that like so many I was glued to the screen watching the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II as endless queues silently snaked past the coffin which stood draped in the colours of the […]
Mixed
Tamar Hodes shares her thoughts about her new book. I first had the idea of writing a novel called Mixed many years ago, when I attended a talk at Menorah Synagogue, where I was a member. The session was entitled Mixed Marriages and I assumed that it would focus on partnerships, like my own, of […]
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 […]