Currently Browsing: Jews 37 articles
Discounted Jews
Nathan Abrams finds flaws in David Baddiel’s new book about antisemitism Jews Don’t Count. I finally got my copy of Jews Don’t Count, David Baddiel’s new book about antisemitism. Despite being a longtime fan and bearing more than a passing physical resemblance to him, I desperately didn’t want to like this book. Maybe it’s because the media only seems to pay attention to these issues when it’s a celebrity like Baddiel, Simon Schama or Anthony Julius. As he puts it himself in the book, ‘I am, […]
Who Killed Poetry?
A new poem by Shai Afsai. Poetry has been dead for decades. Its ghost surfaces from time to time for funeral home eulogies, graduation ceremonies congressional speeches, presidential inaugurations, and the like – but that only demonstrates its lifelessness, the way Elvis impersonators prove the King of Rock and Roll surely is no more. […]
George Orwell: Oracle, Political Visionary, Antisemite?
Martin Elliot Jaffe considers the reputation and writings of George Orwell. During my years as a graduate student at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio during the 1970s I read a great deal of political theory and history of England during the 1930’s— the denial of the reality of European fascism, insularity, class-bound decadent aristocratic political […]
The Jewishness of ‘Scanners’
Sean Alexander unpicks the Jewish undercurrents to the film Scanners which was released forty years ago on this day. Probably best known to David Cronenberg fans as ‘the one with the exploding head’, Scanners (1981) has proven to be one of the Canadian’s most remembered and entertaining of early studio features. Following the parasitical excesses […]
Four Jewish John le Carré Adaptations
To mark the passing of John le Carré, who died on 12 December, Nathan Abrams recommends four Jewish adaptations of his work. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) This was the first film adaptation of any le Carré novel. It was directed by Martin Ritt, who was Jewish. Oskar Werner plays the ‘brilliant and principled’ East German Jewish spy Fiedler. The name of the principal female character in the novel, the innocent […]
Six films that would have Roald Dahl turning in his grave
Nathan Abrams revisits those ‘Jewish’ adaptations of the famous author’s works. Roald Dahl has been much in the news this week following the revelation of his family’s apology for his antisemitic comments. ‘There is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity, maybe it’s a kind of lack of generosity towards non-Jews. I […]
The expulsion of the Jews in 1496
Dora Guennes explores the first brain drain from Portugal. On December 5, 1496, King Manuel I signed the decree that expelled most of the Jews from Portugal. The resulting legal act – The Expulsion of the Jews and Moors from the Kingdom of Portugal – marked the diaspora of the Sephardi Jews, a community of […]
Roald Dahl’s Antisemitic Legacy
Sean Alexander takes a deeper look at Roald Dahl’s antisemitism. There is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity, maybe it’s a kind of generosity towards non-Jews. I mean, there’s always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere; even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason. I […]
On Jewish communal sex-that-is-not-sex
Continuing our series, Keith Kahn-Harris revisits Jews & Sex from a more sociological standpoint. Featured image: The Naughty Jewish Boys Calendar In 2018, American Jewry became embroiled in the then-current ‘#MeToo’ movement when multiple allegations of sexual harassment by the prominent sociologist of Jewish life Steven M. Cohen were made public. Cohen did not contest […]
Marie Stopes, Eugenics and the Jews
In the third instalment of our series on Jews & Sex, Nathan Abrams considers the darker side of the work of the feminist pioneer and her relationship to Jews. Dr. Marie Stopes (1880-1958) is best remembered as a feminist and a birth control pioneer. As the most forceful sexual revolutionary of her age, as well as […]