Stamp of Approval
In the third of three poems, Bruce Black reflects on prayer. Do prayers receive a stamp of approval when they arrive in heaven? Maybe there’s an angel sitting at a desk reading each prayer, deciding which one gets passed on to God and which gets dismissed—tossed into the wastebasket to be shredded later— while those […]
Tikkun Olam in a Frying Pan
Michal Nahman tells us about the Bristol-based Mizrachi food project. As a kid, it felt like our family was an odd and outlandish mixture. I’d hear my dad’s Ladino intermingled with my mum’s family’s Romanian in our Israeli home in a lower middle-class suburb of Toronto. ‘Ach Patron del mundo’, my dad would plead, as […]
Yizkor
In the second of three poems, Bruce Black reflects on Jewish prayer. Under the folds of my prayer shawl that I drape over my head before beginning to pray, I greet my parents, my grandparents, my uncles and aunts, imagining each embracing me again, holding me in their arms. Under the folds of my prayer […]
The Hidden Jews of ‘Dune’
As the film opens in the UK today, Nathan Abrams explores the Jewishness of the famous novel and its film adaptations. Dune opens in the UK today and while its secret Jewish history has been explored here, the full story has not been told. Much of Frank Herbert’s original 1965 science-fiction novel is explicitly influenced […]
Where Prayer Comes From
Prayer comes from a hidden reservoir deep within the heart, and words flow at times like a river in flood. The mystery is that you can pray at all, that your lips can form words, that you can find a way to reach out to God even if you question God’s existence and doubt anyone […]
A Jewish Magician Among the Spirits
Efram Sera-Shriar remembers Harry Houdini’s investigations into spirit and psychic phenomena at the turn of the twentieth century. In 1926, the famous American magician Harry Houdini (née Ehrich Weisz) participated in a series of congressional hearings to determine whether ‘fortune telling’ should be made a criminal offence in the District of Columbia. For many observers […]
East of Here
Ophir J. Bitton Which way should I look, a question I should have never asked, the aim followed by the blast, parts parted before my eyes, nothing said from the shouting and the cries, why do I still stand, why, I do not understand nor any of it, for now, I cannot look.
The Diaper Diaspora
Marc Kaye remembers being born Jewish on a US Army Base in Germany. In screenwriting, it is often recommended to place your protagonist in very extenuating circumstances – situations that he would never expect to find himself in. For a Jewish mother, I would think that taking a Jewish son and placing him both in […]
A Talmudic Director
Nathan Abrams reflects on the Jewishness of Mike Leigh’s work. Although he hasn’t made a film since 2018, Mike Leigh is back on the radar. Today, a new edition of Faber’s Mike Leigh on Mike Leigh edited by Amy Raphael is released. The BFI is celebrating his work with a major retrospective at its Southbank […]
Do Not Underestimate the Determination of a Quiet Rabbi
Gloria Tessler considers the welcome activities of some of our rabbinate but decries the misguided priorities of others. When we think of great rabbis we sometimes look back to philosophers of the past. Maimonides, the Baal Shem Tov, Rabbi Nachman of Breslau, Abraham Heschel, the Lubavitcher Rebbe. Great thinkers who have died and left us […]