The Jewishness of a Very Palestinian Intellectual
Aidan Joseph Beatty reviews a new biography of Edward Said. At the very start of the current millennium, in the decade-long interregnum after the end of the Cold War and before the War on Terror, Edward Said, by then the most commanding voice for Palestinian causes in the West, informed the vaguely centrist Israeli journalist […]
Jewish Ghost Stories
Molly Adams writes about Andy Nyman’s Ghost Stories. February 1986. The playwright Tom Stoppard has organised a demonstration in support of the Jewish refuseniks trapped in Russia without human rights or means of leaving. The demonstration, taking place in front of London’s National Theatre, involves various actors, celebrities, and activists reading a roll call of […]
A Forgetting of Benjamin Franklin
Shai Afsai marks the passing of Ben Franklin on 17 April 1790. Rabbis and Jewish scholars have often been unaware of, confused about, or uncomfortable acknowledging American founding father Benjamin Franklin’s influence on Judaism. Franklin specialists have been largely oblivious to it. Though the mussar (practical Jewish ethical instruction) classic Sefer Heshbon Hanefesh (Book of […]
British Jewish Horror
Molly Adams introduces six British-Jewish horror films. Since its birth as a genre, horror films have been preoccupied with religion and why not? The ritual, dramatic iconography, and terrifying promises of punishment in fiery pits for sinners to be found in Christianity are the perfect fuel for horror. However, if you’ve ever wondered where the […]
Cronenberg’s Crime Films
Continuing our exploration into the link between Jews and crime, Sean Alexander looks at two David Cronenberg gangster films. You’d be forgiven for thinking that body horror director David Cronenberg’s canon of work is a world away from the crime thriller genre. Admittedly, Cronenberg’s halcyon period between Shivers (1975) and The Fly (1986) rarely crept any […]
Britain’s Small Screen Jewish Gangsters
Contining with our series on Jews and Crime, Nathan Abrams explores British Jewish gangsters and criminals on the small screen. The image of the British Jewish gangster isn’t an obvious one but we’ve had two significant crime families on British television in recent years. McMafia (BBC, 2018) was an eight-part British crime drama television series […]
The Philip Roth Minefield
Donald Weber offers his verdict on the new Philip Roth biography. Researching his richly-textured Philip Roth: The Biography, authorized by Roth himself in 2012, Blake Bailey recognized the challenge of narrating the story of one of the most celebrated, complex, and controversial figures in contemporary American literature. Roth, Bailey admits at the outset, is ‘too […]
The Apotheosis of Consumer Culture and a Career
In his continuing exploration of David Cronenberg’s Jewishness, Sean Alexander appraises David Cronenberg’s only novel, Consumed. In 2014, the Baron of Blood and King of Venereal Horror, Canadian Jewish movie director, David Cronenberg, released his last movie to date, Maps to the Stars, and published his first novel Consumed. It brought the filmmaker’s career full […]
An Uncanny Prophecy of Our Time
Donald Weber reviews Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz’s The Passenger. The publication of Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz’s harrowing novel, The Passenger, with a new translation from the original German by Philip Boehm, is a major literary event. Written in the weeks following Kristallnacht, in early November 1938, when Boschwitz was just 23, The Passenger offers an intimate portrait […]
Bone Woman
On Yom HaShoah, Gloria Tessler dedicates this poem to her grandmother Irma Kien, who was murdered in Riga. Bone woman, I am woman of bone. lone-woman, my eyes are stone. I break easily, small fissures have marbled me like cracked china. Do not expect me to sing for Old Zion under the sad willow The […]