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. […]
Painting Nuremberg
Gloria Tessler on the English impressionist who volunteered to paint the Nuremberg Trial. She was one of the best-known artists of the English Impressionist movement, celebrated for her figurative work, ballet dancers and circus performers. Then, as one of the few official women war artists during the Second World War, Dame Laura Knight painted women […]
The Last Word
Nathan Abrams reflects on what he has learned about Stanley Kubrick from a new book of letters. Among Stanley Kubrick fans and scholars, author and screenwriter Frederic Raphael is well-known for having collaborated on the screenplay for that director’s last film, Eyes Wide Shut, which was released in 1999. He is also famous among them […]
Dreamlike and Hallucinatory
Shai Afsai on Reading Bruno Schulz. Years ago, there was a small bookshop on Thayer Street in Providence, Rhode Island, near Brown University’s campus, called College Hill Bookstore. It had late hours — I recall the shop being open until eleven p.m. on weekdays and until midnight on weekends — and its motto was: Dedicated […]
Glory Ride
Julie Carbonara reviews a new musical about cycling champion Gino Bartali. The other day I went to see Glory Ride, a musical about an Italian cycling champion from many years back, Gino Bartali. I had heard of Bartali who was famous for his Giro d’Italia and Tour de France victories before and after WWII, but […]
Who By Fire
Martin Elliot Jaffe recalls Leonard Cohen In The Sinai. “I was afraid at first that my quiet and melancholy songs weren’t the kind that would encourage soldiers at the front—but I learned that these wonderful kids don’t need glorious battle anthems—now between battles they don’t need glorious battle anthems. Now between battles, they’re open to […]
Crooked TV Jews
Elliot Gertel reflects on some nasty recent representations of Jews on US television. “FBI: MOST WANTED” FBI: Most Wanted definitely has it in for older, wealthy Jewish women. And the series reserves its biggest broadsides against this “type” for season closers. In 2021, it was a Southern Jewish heiress to a major grocery chain who was […]
Althea McNish
To mark the Windrush anniversary, Gloria Tessler remembers her late friend, Althea McNish. This year marks the 75th anniversary of the Empire Windrush which first docked in Tilbury on June 22, 1948. What should be a happy event, celebrating the diversity of culture in Britain, has been marred, of course by the trauma experienced by […]
Twelve: When Wisdom of the Catfish met the Gefilte Fish, Part 2
Carole Bent presents the second part of her memoir. As I cast my mind back into the distant past, like a fishing net trawling truths from the deep, memories slowly start to resurface. Large chunks of my life between twelve and sixteen were spent glancing from sorrow to glints of safe sunlight and back again. […]
The Yellow Candle and the Sunflower Seed
Gloria Tessler reflects on the yellow candles, each bearing the name of a Holocaust victim, to commemorate Yom HaShoah. I am thinking today of two German Jews, 60 years apart in age. I have no family history with either of them. And it is unlikely their paths ever crossed in life. But I am thinking […]
“You killed my Jew”
Donald Weber reviews a new book about author and artist Bruno Schulz. In Bruno Schulz: An Artist, A Murder, and the Highjacking of History Benjamin Balint re-visits issues he pursued in Kafka’s Last Trial, awarded the Sami Rohr Prize for 2020 by the Jewish Book Council. In each case, Balint’s subject is “the political implications […]