Currently Browsing: crime 7 articles
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 […]
The Name’s Carver, Elliot Carver
Continuing our series on Jews & Crime, Nathan Abrams explores one of James Bond’s ‘Jewish’ villains. While none of James Bond’s villains in the film versions has been explicitly Jewish, several have been played by Jewish actors. The first-ever Bond villain in 1962’s Dr No, Doctor Julius No, a reclusive Chinese-German scientist, was played by […]
Cronenberg’s Crime Films
Continuing our exploration into the link between Jews and crime, Sean Alexander looks at two David Cronenberg gangster films. You’d be forgiven for thinking that body horror director David Cronenberg’s canon of work is a world away from the crime thriller genre. Admittedly, Cronenberg’s halcyon period between Shivers (1975) and The Fly (1986) rarely crept any […]
Britain’s Small Screen Jewish Gangsters
Contining with our series on Jews and Crime, Nathan Abrams explores British Jewish gangsters and criminals on the small screen. The image of the British Jewish gangster isn’t an obvious one but we’ve had two significant crime families on British television in recent years. McMafia (BBC, 2018) was an eight-part British crime drama television series […]
NXIVM: The Story of Jews and a Sex Cult
In our series on Jews & Crime, Nathan Abrams discusses those Jews who became involved the NXIVM, the self-help group cum sex cult. The NXIVM (pronounced ‘Nex-ee-um’) story might have passed you by. It was founded in 1998 by Keith Raniere and Nancy Salzman, a former registered psychiatric nurse, hypnotist, and neuro-linguistics programming expert, as a purported self-improvement organization near Albany, New York. NXIVM started as a […]
The Gonef’s Wedding
In the second piece in our series on Jews and Crime, Jarrod Tanny evokes a gangster’s wedding in an Odessan Jewish Key. Nestled on the shores of the Black Sea, the City of Odessa was a notorious bastion of Jewish criminality and merrymaking, much to the delight of its admirers, but much to the horror […]
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. […]