Currently Browsing: After the pandemic 19 articles
JewThink writers explore how the Jewish world will look after the pandemic is over.
How will Jewish culture be impacted as a result of the pandemic?
I’ve always felt that Nostradamus and I are kindred spirits. We both make predictions and we both get those predictions incredibly wrong. However, the task at hand is to have a stab as to how Jewish culture will be affected by the pandemic and who doesn’t love some blind supposition? For about five years, I’ve […]
Locked Down Jews in Leicester
As the lockdown extends in Leicester, Lucy Michaels considers the pros and cons of being based in a small Jewish community during COVID-19.
How has the pandemic affected how we think about British Jewish culture?
On the one hand, the stress during the pandemic has been on the ‘British’ in British-Jewish culture. Locked-down, quarantined, forbidden from travelling abroad, we find ourselves re-connecting with the local, the places we actually inhabit rather than ‘diasporas of the mind’ (the title of Bryan Cheyette’s 2013 book on ‘Jewish and postcolonial writing’). Diasporic we may be, but cultural diasporas are largely imaginary constructions, ‘imaginary homelands’ […]
What types of British Jewish culture have you been consuming during the pandemic? Part 1
This description embarrassed me, because it felt a little too real. Let’s face it: Jews make a pastime of touting our minority status. We are the victims of millennia of discrimination and oppression. We hold fast to this self-image, even when we share in much of the privilege of whiteness—and sometimes more of it than many white people.
Mindy Kaling and Lang Fisher’s Never Have I Ever: When is a Jewish stereotype useful?
In the first part of this two-part series on new culture and old Jewish stereotypes, I wrote about Jewish money, solidarity, and privilege in Candice Carty-Williams’s Queenie. For this post, I’m going to move across the pond to discuss the new American Netflix series Never How I Ever. This series, like Queenie, has a diverse group of girlfriends at its core and a problematic Jewish figure framed in […]
Kinder Korner: Singers Hill Synagogue in Birmingham, UK–the Minecraft edition!
Momo Skinazi, 10 years old, recreates the beautiful cathedral synagogue of Birmingham Hebrew Congregation…in Minecraft. Take a tour here!
Celebrating the gift of a year without Israel tour
This year the selection will not be made. The chosen and the damned, the drowning and the saved, the sheep and the goats – all will be as one. Because this year Israel tour will not take place. For one precious year, our 16 year olds will not face the culling of regular years. For […]
The Enduring Relevance of Avrom Radutski’s Poetry
Phil Alexander finds contemporary echoes in the poetry of Avrom Radutski. At the beginning of 2020, recently embarked upon a British Academy fellowship exploring Scottish-Jewish musical encounters, I was looking forward to days spent leisurely mining the Garnethill Synagogue Archives, the National Library of Scotland, the British Library, and so many other physical treasure chests. […]
Cremation: So What If It’s Heresy?
In the months before lockdown I was training with a group of volunteers to start a project in the borough for the national Dying Matters organisation. As it happens, we were all ‘old’ and Jewish with a wealth of experience in many different professional fields – not just in the voluntary sector. The aim was […]