Why Anti-Semitism Matters by Denis Macshane

The first political pamphlet I ever wrote was in 1978. It revealed and denounced the indifference of British newspapers and television to the problems facing the black and Asian communities in the UK. It asked why there were no Afro-Caribbean or Asian broadcasters, reporters, news-readers or by-lines in our papers. I cited the anti-Semitism of the Daily Mail and Daily Express in the 1930s when they told readers that too many Jews were being allowed into Britain from Germany and that our small island could not face any more aliens arriving to disturb social harmony or compete for professional jobs. I argued that in some respects the media treatment of the then BME communities in the 1960s and 1970s had some similarities.
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Communal Singing

These days, when only the mentally ill, the professionally hired and the irrepressibly Welsh have the nerve to do it, it’s easy to forget there was a time when public singing was as much a part of daily life as public drinking and public moaning about public transport. Students crooned the anthem of their academy, factory workers lullaby’d their shift away, pubs rattled to the rafters with cryptic lyrics involving sailors (I am basing this largely on Ken Loach films: although of the right age to remember such things, I’m also Jewish, with about as much experience of singing in pubs as I have of abseiling down the Alps). My wife’s grandfather serenaded her grandmother beneath her window through the cruel Transylvanian winter. And while not everyone could be a nightingale, even the croakiest crow knew whether he was tenor, alto or baritone. But say serenade or baritone to my teenage Zak, and he’d assume it was new medication for his attention-deficit disorder.

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The Language Barrier by Gabrielle Rifkind

Language is the medium that allows us to understand the world. We see nature, society and human motives not as they are but as our language allows us to see.

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There’s No Place Like Home by Joseph Finlay

Surely we’re all multiculturists now. We accept the necessity of the pluralist democratic state, with multiple groups sharing a contested yet neutral public space. We know, as children of modernity, that we can never be fully ‘at home’, that communities are virtual, free flowing and in flux, and that identities are multiple. We know, from the tradition of post-colonial thought that homelands are always ‘imagined’. We know these things as a society, at least in part, because Jews have taught them to us. As the pioneers of the modern project, Jewish ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ were instrumental in creating a world where the borders of nation states were transcended and internationalism became a defining value.

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The End of Diaspora and the Rise of a Global Jewish Community

Dear Gil,

As a professor of Jewish Studies and an avid reader of the Jewish Telegraph Agency’s daily news reports, I keep up on global Jewish affairs. Lately, I have been struck by the number of stories about Jewish life thriving in places that might seem surprising: a new Jewish radio station and cultural center in Madrid, Indian Jews leaving Israel to go back to India, hip underground Jewish clubs in Moscow.
At the same time, study after study comes out documenting how American Jews in particular, and some parts of global Jewry in general, are becoming less connected to Israel and are less focused on anti-Semitism as a central element of their Jewish identity. What is going on? Read more

Commentary

Last Saturday, while watching Preston North End hammer Bristol City, I was struck not for the first time by the sight of my fellow fans sporting headphones. Now, it’s possible that some were listening to music. Perhaps the spectacle of Stephen Elliott bludgeoning the visiting defence is further enhanced by St Matthew’s Passion or Girls Aloud belting into your eardrums. Read more

Exclusion

Of all the wounds that rend the human heart, what aches so keenly or heals so slowly as exclusion? The childhood gang we weren’t allowed to join; the lovers entwined, oblivious to our presence; the decision of Southport’s Reform Synagogue to dispense with our rabbinical services over a matter as trivial as a single Opal Fruit on Yom Kippur; each spurning smoulders on down the years like an Everlasting Light. Read more