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It’s ‘Shirley’ Something to Remember: Airplane! 40 Years Later
Emilio Audissino celebrates the classic spoof Airplane! and its creators Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker. An apt way to seek some solace and distraction in this virus-laden 2020 is to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of Airplane! Released in the US and UK theatres in the summer of 1980, the film was the directorial debut of David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, […]
Masks, Jews and the Holocaust
Nathan Abrams explores the similarities between rightwing Americans and orthodox Jews over their refusal to wear masks. The wearing of masks has evoked contradictory emotions and reactions. Some see it as an important means to halt the spread of Covid-19, as well as a sign of social consideration and altruism. Others have politicised the issue, […]
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 […]
Agent Sonya: Eshet Chayil
Nathan Abrams on Agent Sonya, a book about a remarkable Jewish spy. Not many non-fiction books open a paragraph with the sentence, ‘Ursula lay awake wondering whether to murder her nanny’. But then the subject of this book is unusual: a Jewish woman, housewife and spy, who spied for the Soviet Union and successfully escaped the clutches of Stalin, MI5 and […]
Borat is Back
Nathan Abrams looks forward to Borat sequel and how it will deal with contemporary antisemitism. It has been fourteen years since the release of Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006) but the trailer for the sequel has just dropped. In that initial installment, Sacha Baron Cohen treated us to […]
The Ladle & The Dreidel: Chicken soup and Covid-19
Laura Godfrey-Isaacs, artist, midwife and birth activist, discusses Jewish penicillin and poverty. My family and I have just prepared our 500th portion of soup, in our South London kitchen. Fifty new portions sit neatly in rows, with our stickers, The Ladle & The Dreidel on top and are ready to be distributed to people living […]
Sometimes it’s funny being Jewish in Ireland!
I’m not a religious Jew. But I am culturally and secularly Jewish. And living in Ireland. This year, as in the previous few, I attended my local Jewish community’s Rosh Hashana service. This year, though, due to Covid, it took place online, on Zoom. All fifteen of us in our little boxes on the screen, […]
Lockdown and Motherhood
Miki Shaw, an artist, illustrator and graphic designer based in London, reflects on parenthood during lockdown. Lockdown, when it first came, felt oddly familiar to me. Not the large-scale and tragic backdrop of it, but the personal-scale isolation, and being stuck at home. I’ve been locked down in some ways since I first became a […]
A ‘Modern’ Blood Libel
Dan Rickman reflects on controversial issues of halacha and the language of orthodox Judaism. It is 1966, and Rabbi Dr Immanuel Jakobovits is angry. I’d like to explain what caused this anger, and why this still matters today. The person responsible for his ire was Dr Israel Shahak, a professor of Chemistry at the Hebrew […]
‘La Haine’ Twenty Five Years Later
Matthieu Kassovitz’s La Haine turns twenty-five this year. It’s a powerful and explosive movie about racial tensions and police brutality in the French banlieues. It is also one of the more unusual — if not one of the best — Jewish movies of the last quarter of a century. As a French-Jewish director and sometimes […]