Currently Browsing: Uncategorized 114 articles
The Power of Holocaust Art
Caroline Slifkin reflects on her Holocaust art for schools project. I first got involved in creating a schools Holocaust arts project for Bolton’s Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD) events in 2011. The completed art display toured The Town Hall, The Market Place and Bolton University, raising awareness in the wider community. Due to the success of […]
Neshama Reggae
Forty years after his death, Martin Elliot Jaffe reflects on Boby Marley’s Jewish Soul. My heart pounds a bit as the stage lights dim and after a long pandemic-enforced hiatus we return to the jam night stage of the Winchester in Lakewood, Ohio. Guitarists await the count, the drummer signals me and I launch the […]
The Real-Life Inglourious Basterds
Nathan Abrams reviews a new book about the true history of those Jewish commandos who fought against the Nazis and helped to win World War II. The idea that Jews went like sheep to the slaughter during the Holocaust is a common one. But a spate of recent books is challenging that idea. One of […]
Ambivalent Jewishness
As antisemitism is on the rise again, Gloria Tessler asks if some of us feel a certain ambivalence about our Jewishness. My parents, both European refugees, had a deep-rooted belief in God and the values of Judaism; they were not religious – we rarely went to shul – but they were not secular either. Like […]
The Sackler Cartel
Continuing our series exploring Jews & Crime, Nathan Abrams reviews a fascinating new book about how the Sackler family amassed its fortune. Generally, when one thinks of drug pushers, one thinks of the illicit drug trade between Latin America and the United States. One might picture the Mexican and Columbian drug cartels in particular. Someone like Pablo Escobar. Or dealers pushing their products on […]
No Leaf Is Perfect
Eran Hornick is inspired by Shai Afsai’s poem ‘Forty-four’. In June of last year, my friend Dan and I drove to Maine to hike the renowned Mahoosuc Notch. It is famed by some to be ‘the hardest mile of the AT’ — the Appalachian Trail — and since it was within a four hours’ drive […]
Billion-Dollar Bullshit
Nathan Abrams reviews a new documentary film about Jewish entrepreneur Adam Neumann and his co-working startup, WeWork. The billion-dollar start-up, WeWork, founded by Jewish entrepreneur Adam Neumann, which I wrote about here has been inspiring some interest of late. First, there was a book, then a podcast and now there is a documentary film with another book and even a television series based on […]
The Auto-Destructive-Creative World of Gustav Metzger
Gloria Tessler looks back at the work of Gustav Metzger, the subject of a forthcoming retrospective. If you get down on your hands and knees and crawl on the ground beneath the yellow-star-coloured cover, you can touch an enlarged photograph of Jews forced to scrub the pavements of Vienna clean. The figures are larger than […]
Not in My Name?
Dan Rickman It is impossible to watch the news from Israel/Palestine just now without tears in one’s eyes, wherever your sympathies lie. And whilst the conflict with Hamas is sadly all too familiar, the sort of mob violence inside Israel itself is shocking and something new, or at least something which recalls the early days […]
The Poisoned Chalice
David Brauner contemplates the problems of writing a literary biography of Philip Roth. First, we had the previews of the Philip Roth biography by Blake Bailey (reviewed for JewThink by Donald Weber) – notably Joshua Cohen, assuming the voice of the dead Roth (a trick Tim Parrish had pulled off with more wit and elan […]