Currently Browsing: Jewish Culture 9 articles
The Jam, Jews and JFS: ‘To Be Someone’ by Ian Stone
Nathan Abrams speaks to Jewish comedian Ian Stone about his new book To Be Someone. Ian Stone might not be the first Jewish standup comedian you’d think of, but he’s been around for over twenty years, appearing on television, radio and podcasts. In his newly published memoir, To Be Someone, he recounts his lifelong passions of listening to The Jam […]
Frum Fetish Shlock: Netflix’s ‘Unorthodox’
The problem with Orthodox Jewish women in popular cultural representations lies with audience desires for shlock and salvation, not with Haredi society. The Netflix series Unorthodox, appearing as it did at the heart of pandemic lockdown, caused a sensation in both the Jewish and non-Jewish world. The four-episode drama offered a tantalizing look at a woman’s escape from her […]
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 […]
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 […]
‘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 […]
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 […]
What if nothing changes?
WiIl the impact of Covid-19 be as ephemeral as the impact of the death of Diana?
Pandemic, Jewish Learning and Us
There is liberation to be gained through reading and writing. One can feel a kind of freedom through the process of placing words and finding order, by the idea that there could be necessity of a function in narrative. Reading and interpretation form much of our Jewish experience, and I wonder how might lived and inherited narratives be used within our private and public lives to develop strategies for […]