Currently Browsing: Covid-19 25 articles
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 […]
Lockdown and Motherhood
Miki Shaw, an artist, illustrator and graphic designer based in London, reflects on parenthood during lockdown. Lockdown, when it first came, felt oddly familiar to me. Not the large-scale and tragic backdrop of it, but the personal-scale isolation, and being stuck at home. I’ve been locked down in some ways since I first became a […]
Rosh Hashana 5781
Nigel Grizzard reflects on the new and improved Rosh Hashana services this year. What were my abiding memories of Rosh Hashanah as a child growing up in Woodford Green, Essex? Full shuls and long services that finished around two o’clock in the afternoon. Fifty years on in Leeds, things have not improved much. Schlep it […]
Being Jewish in Aberdeen, Rosh Hashanah 5781
Mark Taylor reflects on a strange year in Britain’s most northerly congregation. Looking back at this year, as you do during Rosh Hashanah, it has been a surreal year. This is Aberdeen Synagogue’s 75th anniversary year, and plans were ongoing to have a celebratory party but all of this has been put on hold. The weather is still beautiful. It has […]
Reflecting on Rosh Hashana: A Call for Contributions
JewThink would like to mark this extraordinary Rosh Hashanah by collating and publishing some reflections on other Jewish new years past and present. These can be brief, funny and irreverent or longer and more reflective. What was your most disastrous Rosh Hashanah? What was your most uplifting? What new possibilities does Rosh Hashanah in semi-lockdown […]
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. […]
COVID, Ducks and Balak the Crazy Dog
A dream-like state. Thousands of random flashing images gradually replaced by a piercing, high frequency sine-wave and my wife’s urgent pleas to ‘wake up! Wake up! Kirk, wake up!’ After initial confusion, I realised I had passed out in the lobby of our apartment block. I remembered exiting the lift and telling my wife I […]
Jewish Art: Where Are You?
The UK is slowly emerging from lockdown and people can see art again. From last week, museums and galleries reopened for visitors. This may not be news for everyone, but art is my love, as well as my profession. Not being able to go to galleries has been a deprivation. I feel starved of the art of others. There has been much art on the internet – […]
‘And spet upon my Jewish gaberdine’
Jay Prosser reviews The Merchant of Venice on BBC iPlayer. Watching the BBC iPlayer’s screening of The Merchant of Venice, Culture in Quarantine: Shakespeare on the BBC iPlayer in the age of COVID makes for a surreal experience, either like time-travelling or being dropped onto a different planet. It’s not only because this recording is from 2015, of the Royal Shakespeare Company directed under Polly Findlay. Nor is […]
Housework, Covid and Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s ‘Maintenance Art’
In my conversations with friends who are fathers I noticed that many of us feel we are the ones devoting most of the time to our children’s distance learning during the Corona pandemic. Very few women agreed with this view. Men have been writing about the wonderful experiences this period introduced in their lives: being at home, getting […]