Currently Browsing: Covid-19 25 articles
Grandma in Lockdown*
In the second installment of our new series, ‘You Never Call! You Never Skype!’, a grandmother reflects on her experiences of grandparenting during the pandemic. Thursday 12th March Yesterday was an ordinary Wednesday. I went as usual to my yoga class, did some shopping chores, collected our two oldest grandchildren from the tube station after school, pored over a crossword […]
Zooming in The Family
In the first of a new series, ‘You Never Call! You Never Skype!’, Catherine Temma Davidson reflects on parenting during the pandemic. I grew up in America and I now live in London with my English husband and children. Years of analysing my culture from afar has revealed the ways I am – like many Americans – a self-mythologiser. Coming from a Jewish and Greek background, one of my […]
‘Gentiles, not funny’: Revisiting The O.C.
One of the unexpected silver linings of lockdown is that it has afforded me some much-needed extra down time. So, rather than doing anything productive, I decided to revisit an old favourite from my youth. The O.C., for those who have been living under a rock for the last two decades, is the pinnacle of American teen drama which ran for […]
Locked Down Jews in Leicester
As the lockdown extends in Leicester, Lucy Michaels considers the pros and cons of being based in a small Jewish community during COVID-19.
Mindy Kaling and Lang Fisher’s Never Have I Ever: When is a Jewish stereotype useful?
In the first part of this two-part series on new culture and old Jewish stereotypes, I wrote about Jewish money, solidarity, and privilege in Candice Carty-Williams’s Queenie. For this post, I’m going to move across the pond to discuss the new American Netflix series Never How I Ever. This series, like Queenie, has a diverse group of girlfriends at its core and a problematic Jewish figure framed in […]
A welcome democratisation of British Jewish culture
For me, the pandemic has produced a welcome democratisation of British Jewish culture. No longer is living in a remote fringe of the United Kingdom, a hindrance to full participation in British Jewish cultural life. The current situation has led to a levelling up: Jewish culture, once previously inaccessible either because of location and/or cost, is now free and accessible. I no longer […]
What if nothing changes?
WiIl the impact of Covid-19 be as ephemeral as the impact of the death of Diana?
How has the pandemic affected how we think about British Jewish culture?
On the one hand, the stress during the pandemic has been on the ‘British’ in British-Jewish culture. Locked-down, quarantined, forbidden from travelling abroad, we find ourselves re-connecting with the local, the places we actually inhabit rather than ‘diasporas of the mind’ (the title of Bryan Cheyette’s 2013 book on ‘Jewish and postcolonial writing’). Diasporic we may be, but cultural diasporas are largely imaginary constructions, ‘imaginary homelands’ […]
How will Jewish culture be impacted as a result of the pandemic?
I’ve always felt that Nostradamus and I are kindred spirits. We both make predictions and we both get those predictions incredibly wrong. However, the task at hand is to have a stab as to how Jewish culture will be affected by the pandemic and who doesn’t love some blind supposition? For about five years, I’ve […]
Davening during the Pandemic
I am a regular shul goer and wherever I am I try to attend services. On a Shabbat I’m usually in shul and on a Sunday morning at home in Leeds I head for the 8.00 a.m. minyan. The pandemic has put a stop to all that. But since 22nd March 22, I have been a member of a virtual community led by the Reverend Albert Chait of the United Hebrew Congregation […]