Labour is Cleaning House, the Tories Must, Too.
Barnaby Marder explains why if the Labour Party is tackling antisemitism, we have a right to expect the same from the Conservatives. In the Jewish Chronicle last week (August 12, 2020) Lee Harpin wrote a puzzling article about how leading Conservatives were ‘baffled over signs of Jewish support for Labour’. Quite apart from the fact that the article seems suspiciously like a non-story, it implies […]
Remembering Rabbi Hugo Gryn
On the twenty-fourth anniversary of his death, I thought I would mark the occasion to remember my friend, Rabbi Hugo Gryn. It was in the mid-1970s, in Jerusalem, when a longtime friend, Rabbi Levi Weiman-Kelman, introduced me to a visiting London rabbi and his family. I had been spending my junior year of college at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem from 1970-1971 and decided to stay on afterwards. Rabbi Levi and I had met when we worked together at […]
A Pickler on the Roof
Jarrod Tanny discusses An American Pickle. *Contains some spoilers* At the risk of deploying an overused pun, we need to begin by alluding to the now well-known pickle Seth Rogen got himself into in July. While discussing his new film, An American Pickle, on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast, where he spent an hour schmoozing with the host about all things ‘Jewy’ and their shared inability to escape their yichus. Rogen was […]
Faithful, Fruitful
A short story by Tamar Hodes. The winter of 1876 was cruel, even by Lithuanian standards. Citizens and animals were numb with cold; foliage was edged in frost; the soil froze. My great-grandfather was a woodcutter in the Algirdas forest where firs stood like giants’ legs against a vanilla sky. All day, he chopped trees […]
Celebrating the gift of a year without Israel tour
This year the selection will not be made. The chosen and the damned, the drowning and the saved, the sheep and the goats – all will be as one. Because this year Israel tour will not take place. For one precious year, our 16 year olds will not face the culling of regular years. For […]
The Enduring Relevance of Avrom Radutski’s Poetry
Phil Alexander finds contemporary echoes in the poetry of Avrom Radutski. At the beginning of 2020, recently embarked upon a British Academy fellowship exploring Scottish-Jewish musical encounters, I was looking forward to days spent leisurely mining the Garnethill Synagogue Archives, the National Library of Scotland, the British Library, and so many other physical treasure chests. […]
‘A Place to Call Home’: The Fantastic Jewish Show You Haven’t Been Watching
Australian drama, A Place to Call Home, by Bevan Lee, premiered in 2013, follows Sister Sarah Nordmann (née Adams), played by Marta Dusseldorp, as she returns from two decades in Europe to 1950s Australia. After nursing in the Spanish Civil War, she spends the rest of the 1930s in Paris, with her Jewish husband — she has converted to Judaism so they can marry. They are caught up in the […]
Joker: A Jewish Stain
As Joker streams in the UK, Sean Alexander considers his Jewish origins. DC Comics, like its rival Marvel, has long been acknowledged for its rich Jewish heritage in terms of the creation of its most iconic characters. While Batman himself was the co-creation of Jews Bob Kane and Bill Finger, it was another Jew – Jerry Robinson […]
How Matter Means: BLM and Mixed Judaism
My family is Jewish, Muslim, and of color. Though our children are white-passing, they are 1/4 African-American, and we are raising them Jewish through a Sufi lens. We live in a predominantly Black working-class neighbourhood where we are welcome and seen. As a third generation survivor, I was immersed in stories of the Holocaust since […]
Sourdough is Goyish, Challah is Jewish
If there was one thing that characterised my social media feeds during the early days of lockdown, it was the sudden appearance of endless photographs of homemade bread. It seems that, stuck at home, even in the face of a national shortage of flour and yeast, most people’s first reaction was to bake a loaf. […]