David Glover on 100 years of immigration control

Steve Bell and Eli Valley on Jews, Stereotypes and Causing Offence

Protestors Across the Globe Rely on the Language and Morality of the Great Religious Civilisations

EJ Hobsbawm 1917-2012

Naomi Alderman on the ghost that haunts every Jewish writer

Joshua Plaut on how Jews have participated in, satirised and transformed the ‘holiday season’.

Yosl Bergner by Clive Sinclair

From Gutenberg to the Kindle – the reading goes on

Interrogating the Ideas Behind the Politics

Hatufim and Homeland: recent Israeli and American dramas reveal a common mentality

by Nitzan Ben Shaul and Adva Segelman

Tea with Norman Podhoretz, the grandfather of Neo-Conservatism

The Conversations and Silences of Jewish Book Week 2012

While a new all-star Haggadah plays it safe, others reinvent the Passover story as a call to action

NGO’s, the last voice of opposition in Israel, are now under threat from anti-democratic laws

REBECCA STEINFELD Liberal Zionism is in vogue. It underpins the thinking of groups like J-Street, Yachad, and the New Israel Fund, as well as the writings of figures like Peter Beinart and Gershom Gorenberg. They claim that liberalism and Zionism can be fused. Some even claim the two are complementary, asserting that Zionism’s socialist origins lend it a collectivist penchant [...]

The plight of Mikhail Khodorkovsky raises questions about the place of Russian Jews today

Mel Gibson’s Planned Judah Maccabee Blockbuster Shows He Still Doesn’t Get it.

As The Palestinians Prepare to Declare Independence, the parallels between Israel and Palestine appear more striking

HBO’s hit drama bypasses individualism to expose the systems that fail urban America

Jonathan Ames and the emasculated Jewish male The notion that Jewish men are somehow less masculine than their gentile counterparts is an old anti-Semitic trope: Jewish men menstruate, medieval anti-Semites asserted, and need periodic top-ups of human blood.The ancient Greeks abhorred circumcision, and Antiochus IV, the Seleucid king, tried to have it banned. ‘The castration complex,’ said Freud, ‘is the [...]

Despite his tiny oeuvre and tragically short life, the legendary Polish writer’s legacy to Western literature continues to grow

When in the late summer of 1939 Stefan Zweig drafted his contribution to the 17th international PEN congress in Stockholm, he called history not only a ‘poetess’ but historical episodes ‘God’s workshops’. It was rare for God to feature at all, let alone prominently, in his work. Since the mid-1920s, Stefan Zweig, an Austrian Jew, had been one of the [...]

Figuring the Jew in Postwar French Thought ‘Nous sommes tous des juifs allemands!’We are all German Jews. This is the famous slogan taken up by throngs of students during the May 1968 protests in Paris.The cry was most immediately the response of a crowd to the news that the movement’s leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit had been denied re-entry into France after [...]

There is a familiar view about Judaism—and specifically its difference from Christianity—that is expressed in the contrast between particularism and universalism. On this view, Christianity is inclusive, embracing all people everywhere regardless of their national or ethnic identity. Judaism, in contrast, is exclusive, a private club for the chosen few.There are Jews as well as Christians who subscribe to this view. Some are embarrassed by our so-called tribalism. Others take pride in our supposed superiority. Sometimes, especially these days, this pride takes the form of a politics that asserts our prerogative and privilege over other groups. But, whatever form it takes, there is a fatal flaw, a tiny ingredient that is missing from this characterization of the Jewish people: its Jewishness.

In his 1931 short story, ‘Awakening,’ the writer Isaac Babel recalls one of the great cultural spectacles of his childhood in fin-de-siecle Odessa. ‘[In] the course of ten years or so,’ he writes, ‘our town supplied the concert platforms of the world with infant prodigies. From Odessa came Mischa Elman, Zimbalist, Gabrilowitsch. Odessa witnessed the first step of Jascha Heifetz.’ [...]

Since its formation in 1999, the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra has prompted an energetic mix of rapture and hostility. Founded by conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim and scholar and writer Edward Said, the organisation has provoked considerable debate through its much-lauded aim to bring together young Israeli and Arab musicians to engage in a ‘constructive musical dialogue’. Said and Barenboim’s many [...]

The May 14th demonstration began as any other. Some 400 protestors convened in the small park in the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah as they have done each Friday for months. The bus from Tel Aviv unloaded activists from the coastal city; the circle of drummers, the trade mark of the Sheikh Jarrah movement, began infusing the event with [...]

I have spent many years of my professional life as a lawyer and human rights activist struggling to save Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank from being used to establish illegal Israeli settlements. But as the years passed more settlements were built and the landscape in the region where I lived was vanishing. Even after it was affirmed in [...]

A polemical book can be one of quality. A strongly argued text can be solidly grounded in reliable evidence. So I wonder whether Will Skidelsky, chairman of the judging panel for the 2009 Jewish Quarterly Wingate literary prize, thought he had such a book in his hands when he described one of the six contenders, Dennis MacShane’s Globalizing Hatred: The [...]

I. I was sixteen when I first met the poet Yehuda Amichai. It was the summer after my junior year of high school. I was still the star of the film of my life, then, and a soundtrack followed me wherever I went. If I’d met Amichai at another moment — even a year earlier, when I was too little [...]