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 […]
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 […]