Can We Talk? Jewish Book Week 2012

Saturday, Feb 18. It’s the opening event of Jewish Book Week 2012, and Simon Schama, Linda Grant and Eva Hoffman are sitting onstage, but I’m not looking at them: I’m gazing in mild disbelief at outgoing JBW director Geraldine D’Amico, who has just introduced chair Emily Maitlis as ‘the glamorous face of TV news’. The title of the evening is ‘60 Years On’. I don’t think it’s meant to be ironic.

The years in question span the trajectory of JBW since its inception in 1952. These nine days of events are a celebration of ongoing survival — although how that makes these nights different from all other Jewish festival nights is a question worth asking. There is more here — much more — than the Holocaust and the fate of Israel. Cookery writer and food anthropologist Claudia Roden will talk eloquently about the Sephardi conversos, eating pork to deflect the Spanish Inquisition. The indefatigable 87-year- old filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, director of Shoah, will discuss his time in the French Resistance (and make mincemeat, pork or kosher, of interviewer Alan Yentob. Why does this please me so? Because any man who talks about Lanzmann and Jean-Paul Sartre ‘sharing’ the author of The Second Sex deserves to become dinner). Lawyer Anthony Julius and Deborah Lipstadt will discuss both her new book on the Eichmann trial and their joint overcoming, in court, of David Irving’s Holocaust denial. We have a rich history, we Jews. We have survived a LOT. But the question that bubbles to the surface again and again, as I shuttle between talks on books, discussions of books, readings and signings and Willow Winston’s book-covered art installation in the King’s Place lobby, is this: do we have to talk about survival all the time? Read more

Salt Beef in Soho + Channukah in Budapest

Salt Beef in Soho



On a London street nowhere near the Jewish heartland, next to a restaurant specialising in pork and opposite a musical about a green monster, a ‘kind of Jewish deli with cocktails’, has bloomed. In a sense, E. Mishkin has been here a while: the distressed planks coating the walls were once floorboards, and the net curtains and squeezy ketchup bottles are as retro as the ‘On Air’ sign above the booth at the back. In another sense, though, he was never here at all. Ask about Mr Mishkin and you’ll get the story of Ezra, a Ukrainian Jew who fled the 1919 pogrom and opened a café in London where his fellow immigrants could get a taste of home. The pogrom is fact, but Ezra Mishkin, like this joint, is the creation of Russell Norman, owner of those famously Jewish restaurants Polpo, Spuntino, Da Polpo and Polpetto.

Norman wanted a name like the old East London cafés but his own isn’t up to the job: if he had been lurking in the Ukraine when the Cossacks galloped in, they would have swerved past him. So, why does a non-Jew known for hip Italian food open a Jewish deli serving Polish pork hotdogs? Is London en route to New York- style culinary integration? A deli has just opened in Marylebone; there’s even a Jewish pop-up restaurant. But both of those are kosher, in every sense. Mishkins is something else. Read more