Currently Browsing: Covid-19 25 articles
What types of Jewish culture have you been consuming during the pandemic?
To answer this question, I return to a beginning – a discovery in graduate school where my work concentrated on the history and theories of British literature. When we reached the twentieth century, devoid of Jewish content, it was the Anglo-Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen who inspired my fascination with British Jewish history and culture. Although I found Bowen a compelling writer, it was her treatment of British antisemitism […]
How the virus turned us all a little bit Jewish
There was a moment during the lockdown when it seemed the whole world was turning Talmudic. ‘What if?’ became the question on everybody’s lips. Even the letters page of The Grauniad (noch) was filled with arguments straight out of the yeshiva. ‘I live alone’, one reader wrote, ‘If I go and meet my son and his partner in the park, I am breaking the rules […]
Auto-Generation: Religious services on Hendon’s streets
They have always been religious, they have always been rich, and I am welcome there. They don’t need anything from me, I don’t need anything from them. It’s Shabbos many months into coronavirus lockdown and because the dozen or so synagogues within a 15 minutes’ walk are closed, prayers are happening on my parents’ street – average age 60. Someone spoke to the […]
Davening during lockdown
Davening during the lockdown due to Covid-19 has been an entirely different experience. During normal times, davening is confined predominantly to morning Shabbat and Yom Tov services in shul. But during the pandemic, it has involved attending virtual Shacharit services led by Senior Minister Albert Chait of the United Hebrew Congregation, Leeds. I made a […]
Pandemic, Jewish Learning and Us
There is liberation to be gained through reading and writing. One can feel a kind of freedom through the process of placing words and finding order, by the idea that there could be necessity of a function in narrative. Reading and interpretation form much of our Jewish experience, and I wonder how might lived and inherited narratives be used within our private and public lives to develop strategies for […]