Currently Browsing: Uncategorized 114 articles
Marie Stopes, Eugenics and the Jews
In the third instalment of our series on Jews & Sex, Nathan Abrams considers the darker side of the work of the feminist pioneer and her relationship to Jews. Dr. Marie Stopes (1880-1958) is best remembered as a feminist and a birth control pioneer. As the most forceful sexual revolutionary of her age, as well as […]
J.A.P and S.E.X.
In this first instalment of the Jews & sex series, Jenny Caplan reflects on the stereotypes of the Jewish American Princess. How can you tell a JAP is having an orgasm? She drops her nail file. What is the definition of JAP kinky sex? She moves. What do you call a JAP’s nipple? The tip […]
A Jewish army doctor and the gift of a German war widow
Myra Woolfson reminisces about her late father and the interesting set of items he brought home from the war. My late father, Captain Vernon Smith, was a doctor in the Royal Army Medical Corps from November 1941 until March 1946. He joined up towards the end of his first hospital job following graduation. When he […]
Jews & Chess
Tim Cowen asks if chess is a Jewish game. Beth Harmon, a 9-year-old orphan chess prodigy, walks into a high school. She beats all 12 of the school’s best players simultaneously. The Netflix series The Queen’s Gambit is entirely fictional, but it reveals the reality of the ancient game. An orphan girl can succeed against 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 […]
Art in a Socially Distanced Age: Artist & Instagrammer Jo Israel
Martha Richler talks to artist and instagrammer Jo Israel about her artwork. Perhaps you have seen photographer Jo Israel’s mysterious creations on Instagram (@jo_israel_art and www.jo-israel.com). Her transposed images are both surprising and captivating: sepia in tone, ghostly in appearance, and poignant at a time when many of us can only glimpse each other through […]
Dinner with Ivana and Ivanka
Sue Fox recalls a memorable evening in the company of Ivana and Ivanka Trump. A post-concert dinner in the atrium of the Barbican Centre looked like it was going to be fun. Each table had a flag and name of a famous opera house. I was seated at the Bolshoi. Dearly beloved was far away […]
A Journey through Central Europe
Deborah Friedland’s travelogue reflects on the Jewish history of Central Europe. That we, as Jews, born in the decades after World War II, have a difficult relationship with central Europe is self-evident. Historians provide us with the facts, writers their biographies, filmmakers a record lest we forget a culture that was so swiftly and purposefully […]
A Jew Wave—and Proud of It!
Vincent Brook celebrates the wave of Jewish films that sparked and characterized New Hollywood of the late sixties and early seventies. That Jews ‘invented’ Hollywood is old news and was long before Neal Gabler’s classic 1989 text An Empire of Their Own made it kosher to say so. We Heebs had been running the major […]
The Kabbalist of Co-Working: Adam Neumann, WeWork and the Story of a Capitalist Cult
Nathan Abrams reviews a remarkable book about the spectacular rise and fall of the co-working start-up WeWork and its Jewish founder, Adam Neumann. In 2005, software engineer Brad Neuberg coined the term ‘co-working’. He wanted to find a balance between the grind of office life and the solitude of freelancing but without having to fight […]