Fear Street
Mirushe Zylali reviews Leigh Janiak’s Fear Street. *Warning: this review contains spoilers* Leigh Janiak’s Fear Street is the story of a scapegoat revealing the truth. The enemies in this story? On a textual level, ambiguous prejudice; human hunger for power; the fear of not having control over one’s life and actions. On a subtextual level, […]
Shaddai
Mirushe ‘Mira’ Zylali reviews Loolwa Khazzoom’s new album. The Aramaic-language piyyut ‘Yah Ribbon “Alam”’ ends with a prayer for a restored Jerusalem. Written in the late 1500s by Rabbi Israel Najara, the then-rabbi of Gaza, it has been sung for four hundred years as a Shabbat hymn – that’s 21,000 Shabbatot. On Shabbat, God asks […]
Benjamin Franklin and the Parable against Persecution
Shai Afsai explores how Benjamin Franklin’s parable has a Jewish source. According to Ben Franklin’s correspondence with Benjamin Vaughan, the inspiration for two of his parables was taken ‘from an ancient Jewish tradition.’ One of these parables — commonly referred to as either the Parable against Persecution or as Abraham and the Stranger — is […]
WeWTFWork*
Nathan Abrams finds something fresh in a new book about the co-working startup, WeWork and its founder Adam Neumann. WeWork was the co-working company started by the charismatic Israeli Adam Neumann which grew into a billion-dollar unicorn. Neumann styled it as a Kabbalistic-infused capitalist kibbutz. I won’t recount the story here because Neumann and WeWork […]
What the Dickens?
by Clarissa Hyman I never learnt to tango or teach myself Russian (to read Tolstoy in the original, of course), nor did I excavate the loft, repaint the kitchen or sort out the old family photos. And don’t even bring up the subject of updating the website. I baked far too many loaves of banana […]
The Jewish Kardashians
Sue Fox stays up late binge-watching Netflix’s latest Jewish reality show. It’s too hot to sleep. There are things I could do at 2.00 am like ironing, reading, listening to Proust on Audible, learning a new language or writing a chapter of the book I’ve been working on forever. Nothing appealed quite as much as the seven (or […]
איך האָב זיך געידישט I have Yiddished
Rabbi Dr Barbara Borts reflects on the expansion of Yiddish. The Yiddish language and I have dated over the years. I was raised with the sonic background of Yiddish. My father’s parents, Bobie and Zeidie, spoke Yiddish to each other. My parents spoke some Yiddish to each other but more importantly, my father peppered his […]
The Book of Sarah
Zanne Domoney-Lyttle reviews Sarah Lightman’s graphic novel The Book of Sarah. Sarah Lightman’s The Book of Sarah is an ambitious and moving text-image chronicle of her experiences from childhood to parenthood, embedded within a framework of Jewish feminist approaches. It is a biography intertwined with a hazy memory, family mythology, and some meaningful and other […]
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 […]