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 […]
Zoom Connections
Roma Cohen writes about organising services, via Zoom, for a small and aging regional congregation. On Sunday 26th July 2020, the 102nd Annual General Meeting of our small northern ‘friendly, warm and welcoming’ Harrogate synagogue took place for the first time through the medium of Zoom. The much respected, dedicated Chair of fifty years plus […]
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 […]
RBG and the Jewish Tradition of Dressing with Intention
Of the many lessons Ruth Bader Ginsburg embodied – that our legal status should not be contingent on gender; that we can value people with whom we virulently disagree, and that disagreement can make us better; that choosing the right life partner can make all the difference – the one that most resonates with me […]
Churchill and Alexander Korda
Peter Lawson finds flaws in the fascinating documentary Churchill and the Movie Mogul A fascinating documentary about Hungarian-Jewish émigré director, Alexander Korda (1893-1956), was screened on 25 September on BBC4. (It is still available to watch on BBC iPlayer. Titled Churchill and the Movie Mogul, it relates the relationship between Korda and Churchill from the […]
A Gloriously Miserable British Sukkot
The worst the weather is on Sukkot, the more perfect the festival is
When Joe Biden announced his candidacy for President of the United States, c1984
Louis Gordon recalls a career-defining speech from over two decades ago. Thirty-six years ago, during my senior year at Brandeis University, I attended Herut USA’s conference in New York City. It was the first such event by Herut in many years and was well attended largely due to the featured speakers who included then former Israeli […]
Metal and the Holocaust: Too Much Transgression?
What do you do when you are drawn to the bad guys, but the baddest guys around are just too bad?
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 […]