Currently Browsing: Jewishness 37 articles
The Jewishness of ‘A Clockwork Orange’
Nathan Abrams explores the underlying Jewishness of Kubrick’s notorious 1971 film. ‘So what is a nice Jewish boy from The Bronx like Stanley Kubrick doing making bizarre films like “A Clockwork Orange”’? Craig McGregor asked in the New York Times, referring to the controversial movie which was released fifty years ago today. One of the reasons was that it dealt with Kubrick’s long-term […]
The Kosher Beatles
As The Beatles: Get Back streams on Disney+, Nathan Abrams considers the Beatles’ Jewishness. As we know, beetles are not kosher but maybe the Beatles are. Let’s put this in context. Liverpool, where the Beatles hail from, has been a magnet for Jews since the eighteenth century. According to JCR-UK, there have been over 20 […]
Rodney Dangerfield, Mensch
Steve Gimbel and Gwydion Suilebhan pay a little overdue respect to the late comedian, who recently would have celebrated his 100th birthday. Rodney Dangerfield was a living contradiction: a successful failure. Fame is the closest thing American culture has to royalty, and America made Dangerfield famous, curiously, precisely because he failed to embody the virtues […]
Challenging TV Stereotypes
Barbara Borts discusses Jews on recent television. We are the stars of this past couple of weeks. Everywhere you look, there we are. There is Ridley Road, Paris Police 1900, Scenes from a Marriage, and, on Shabbat past, Yentl. There was even more, but let’s stop there. Ridley Road and Paris Police 1900 concern themselves […]
The Hidden Jews of ‘Dune’
As the film opens in the UK today, Nathan Abrams explores the Jewishness of the famous novel and its film adaptations. Dune opens in the UK today and while its secret Jewish history has been explored here, the full story has not been told. Much of Frank Herbert’s original 1965 science-fiction novel is explicitly influenced […]
The Diaper Diaspora
Marc Kaye remembers being born Jewish on a US Army Base in Germany. In screenwriting, it is often recommended to place your protagonist in very extenuating circumstances – situations that he would never expect to find himself in. For a Jewish mother, I would think that taking a Jewish son and placing him both in […]
Neshama Reggae
Forty years after his death, Martin Elliot Jaffe reflects on Boby Marley’s Jewish Soul. My heart pounds a bit as the stage lights dim and after a long pandemic-enforced hiatus we return to the jam night stage of the Winchester in Lakewood, Ohio. Guitarists await the count, the drummer signals me and I launch the […]
Ambivalent Jewishness
As antisemitism is on the rise again, Gloria Tessler asks if some of us feel a certain ambivalence about our Jewishness. My parents, both European refugees, had a deep-rooted belief in God and the values of Judaism; they were not religious – we rarely went to shul – but they were not secular either. Like […]
Good To Be A Jew
Robert “Smokey” Miles pens an original poem. How’d you like to be a Jew? Yeah, you could be a Hebrew too when someone says to you, “so nu?” you can say “vos machts du?” too. Think Yiddish, speak British they used to say read the Torah, dance the hora let the klezmer play In […]
A Very Anglicised Jew: Tom Stoppard
Peter Lawson reviews Hermione Lee’s newly published authorised biography of Tom Stoppard It’s a long haul reading Hermione Lee’s authorised biography of Tom Stoppard, Tom Stoppard: A Life (Faber & Faber, 2020). There are 865 pages of text, excluding the bibliography and endnotes. It has to be said Lee has done a thorough job. This […]