NXIVM: The Story of Jews and a Sex Cult
In our series on Jews & Crime, Nathan Abrams discusses those Jews who became involved the NXIVM, the self-help group cum sex cult. The NXIVM (pronounced ‘Nex-ee-um’) story might have passed you by. It was founded in 1998 by Keith Raniere and Nancy Salzman, a former registered psychiatric nurse, hypnotist, and neuro-linguistics programming expert, as a purported self-improvement organization near Albany, New York. NXIVM started as a […]
The Gonef’s Wedding
In the second piece in our series on Jews and Crime, Jarrod Tanny evokes a gangster’s wedding in an Odessan Jewish Key. Nestled on the shores of the Black Sea, the City of Odessa was a notorious bastion of Jewish criminality and merrymaking, much to the delight of its admirers, but much to the horror […]
A Study of Jewish Criminality
Nathan Abrams reviews a new biography of the gangster Bugsy Siegel and argues we need to study Jewish criminality in more depth. Of the nearly fifty volumes in Yale’s Jewish Lives series, this is the first about a bootlegger, racketeer, gambler and murderer, writes Michael Shnayerson at the outset of his new biography of Bugsy […]
Jews & Crime
As any historian will tell you, one of the ways we discover Jews in far-flung places is through accounts of criminal activity both perpetrated by and against Jews. This series proposes to reflect on the relationship between Jews and issues of crime and criminality, opening up the hidden worlds of Jewish criminals and criminal behaviour. […]
Yiddisher Psychogeography of a Small Planet
David Balsmo explores Emanuel Litvinoff, Jewish Space and Place as revealed through the lockdown. It is now just over a year since the pandemic forced the U.K. into lockdown, during this time the promise of an expanding world with multifarious connections has shrunk. Yes, we have Zoom and other platforms, but non-virtual experience contracted with […]
Silent Witness: The Resonance of Artefacts
Robert Katz reflects on the powerful history of artefacts. During the year of America’s bicentennial celebrations, I lived in a small, pale green house on the plains of southeastern Montana, about 60 miles south of the Yellowstone River. Just down the road from my house was the Crow and Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservations. On the […]
Unseat Bibi and End the Occupation
Dana Mills considers Israel’s election results. For hundreds of Palestinians in the neighbourhood of Silwan in East Jerusalem, the Israeli election of 2021 holds existential significance. They could not however vote in this election nor in any other Israeli elections. In Silwan, eviction lawsuits were filed by settlers against about 60 other families. If the government […]
Defining antisemitism – again, and again…
A couple of new antisemitism definitions have ridden into town. Keith Kahn-Harris girds his loins.
Pandemic Passover 2.0: What Have We Learned?
As Pesach approaches Nathan Abrams argues that we need to step up to help remote Jews. As Pesach approaches it is a good time to take stock of the past year and what we have learned from the ongoing pandemic and continued lockdowns. In July last year, I wrote for JewThink, how things were looking […]
A Very Anglicised Jew: Tom Stoppard
Peter Lawson reviews Hermione Lee’s newly published authorised biography of Tom Stoppard It’s a long haul reading Hermione Lee’s authorised biography of Tom Stoppard, Tom Stoppard: A Life (Faber & Faber, 2020). There are 865 pages of text, excluding the bibliography and endnotes. It has to be said Lee has done a thorough job. This […]