Currently Browsing: writing 6 articles
No Leaf Is Perfect
Eran Hornick is inspired by Shai Afsai’s poem ‘Forty-four’. In June of last year, my friend Dan and I drove to Maine to hike the renowned Mahoosuc Notch. It is famed by some to be ‘the hardest mile of the AT’ — the Appalachian Trail — and since it was within a four hours’ drive […]
The Poisoned Chalice
David Brauner contemplates the problems of writing a literary biography of Philip Roth. First, we had the previews of the Philip Roth biography by Blake Bailey (reviewed for JewThink by Donald Weber) – notably Joshua Cohen, assuming the voice of the dead Roth (a trick Tim Parrish had pulled off with more wit and elan […]
Shylock
Gloria Tessler shows how Shakespeare turned antisemitism on its head. I have often thought the Bard was the most enlightened philosemite of them all. And the reason? His controversial play, The Merchant of Venice. Many Jews applaud Michael Morpurgo’s decision not to include The Merchant in his forthcoming children’s book, Tales from Shakespeare, but I […]
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 […]
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 […]
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’ […]