Currently Browsing: Identity 8 articles
Mourning a Monarch
In the wake of the Queen’s funeral, Gloria Tessler reflects on the intense Jewishness of mourning. Does it make me a royalist that like so many I was glued to the screen watching the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II as endless queues silently snaked past the coffin which stood draped in the colours of the […]
The Flying Camel
In the preface to the new edition of The Flying Camel, Loolwa Khazzoom explains how her book was birthed in 1992, and how to use it in 2022. I began compiling and editing the stories in this anthology back in 1992, shortly after graduating college. I finished editing the first version of the first edition […]
Good To Be A Jew
Robert “Smokey” Miles pens an original poem. How’d you like to be a Jew? Yeah, you could be a Hebrew too when someone says to you, “so nu?” you can say “vos machts du?” too. Think Yiddish, speak British they used to say read the Torah, dance the hora let the klezmer play In […]
A Very Anglicised Jew: Tom Stoppard
Peter Lawson reviews Hermione Lee’s newly published authorised biography of Tom Stoppard It’s a long haul reading Hermione Lee’s authorised biography of Tom Stoppard, Tom Stoppard: A Life (Faber & Faber, 2020). There are 865 pages of text, excluding the bibliography and endnotes. It has to be said Lee has done a thorough job. This […]
Time To Heal
Emma Franks, a practising visual artist describes how her brother’s increased religiosity and Deborah Feldman’s Unorthodox inspired her commitment to producing work that explores the female narrative and perspective. In the middle of the global pandemic last year, when we noticed birdsong and the joys of being at one with nature people also discovered the […]
Vessel
In this personal essay, Polish translator Marta Dziurosz explores her Jewish roots, her uneasy path to engaging with them, and how literature helped her along the way. There are rooms of silence attached to this piece of writing. Things I don’t know; things I should know; things I’ve been asked not to write about; things […]
Reviving a Personal Identity
Robert Katz reflects upon events that may not be precisely accurate but nevertheless reveal layers of meaning and the topography of his experiences. In the mid 1950s, my parents uprooted our family from the congested Bronx apartment building they moved into after World War II, to a neighbourhood in Brooklyn, New York, where our neighbours […]
An Open Letter to Jessica Krug on Rosh Hashanah
The lessons of the festival of Rosh Hashanah offers good news for Jessica Krug.