The International Energy Agency predicts that global oil demand will go up more than a third by 2030. (source: IEA World Energy Outlook 2006) World levels of oil production, however, are likely to go into decline before this. As the industry debates when the production peak will occur, we look at alternatives and actions open to individuals, communities, businesses and governments.

Array

A small and gentle fish was swimming in the middle of a peaceful ocean.  All of a sudden, the fish saw a shark that wanted to devour him. He then began to swim very quickly, but so did the shark. Suddenly the fish stopped and called to the shark: ‘Why do you want to devour me? We can play together!’ [...]

The difficulties of organising alternative Jewish culture in contemporary Hungary

A Jewish cultural tourist in Beijing – Limmud China and philosemitism

Participants choose a queue — depending on whether they want to solve or sell their personal stories — and move along, given three minutes with each head-doctor or literary guru.

As an autograph collector, I can honestly say that all my favourite celebrities are dead

Salt Beef in Soho, Channukah in Budapest

I’m old. I write to you now as an old person. Amend the census, tick the age box marked ‘35 to what-does-it-matter-he’s-pastit-now’

The Big Cheese The wild, top-hat-and-jeans-clad compére jumped onto the stage to announce the 20 semi-finalists of the second annual New York Cheesemonger Invitational. The crowd roared approval at those über-mongers who could detect age, nationality, name and bloom. For this, the third of four rounds, each contestant was to cut two 1/4 pound chunks of cheese and wrap each in cheese paper in under a minute. To mad [...]

On the self-destructive quest to feel secure ‘Security. A word that these days seems simultaneously both to conceal so much and to reveal so much.’ – John Berger A man is told that he will die from a fall. Such is the terror this generates in him that he decides never to leave his home again. But confining himself to [...]

On the Psychgy of the collector and the attraction of dictator art

One of the first original compositions that the young Bob Dylan debuted in folk clubs in New York upon arriving from Minnesota in 1961 was ‘Talkin’ Hava Negilah Blues.’ Introduced by Dylan as ‘a foreign song I learned in Utah,’ the song consists almost entirely of the singer trying to get the words ‘hava nagila’ out of his mouth. ‘Ha… [...]

On the hijacking of sacred texts for political purposes in Israel

If you happened to walk past the tiny Othman Ibn-Affan street on a Friday evening, you might have been struck by a rather uncommon event: a large group of Palestinians of all ages and left-wing Israeli secular peace-activists gathered around a table on the porch, listening to young religious men and women reciting Kiddush. This anomaly is part of the [...]

The bible, we often hear, has little relevance to modern, metropolitan life. It records the myths and rituals of primitive men, who lived a hand-to-mouth existence and knew nothing of the Universe. Why should we live our lives according to the fantasies of Neolithic shepherds? In these days of factory farms and cloned sheep, they have a point. But perhaps not all the green Arcadia of the mind is yet concreted over. In the space of a few recent days, two of the biggest bosses in football have issued important dairy-related statements

As a British-born Israeli who works to overcome internal divisions within Israeli society, I watched the recent hard-fought British elections with considerable envy. While comparisons between societies and political cultures are always problematic — and certainly those made between two as different in history and circumstances as our own — such an exercise can nevertheless provide helpful insights. The purpose [...]

I first recall hearing the term ‘delegitimisation’ applied to Israel six or seven years ago at a rather turgid conference in Brussels, when Nathan Sharansky presented it as part of his 3D test for unfair criticism of Israel. The way you could detect this ‘new antisemitism’, he said, was if the critic was applying double standards to Israel, demonising the [...]

Representation is a moving target. Jewish culture is undergoing such changes that to pin it down to one representation is an illusion. Prof. Jonathan Webber, 1999 I’m a Jewish vegetarian atheist. Jonathan Ornstein, director, Jewish Community Center, Krakow, Poland, 2009 In the mid-1990s I began exploring a phenomenon that I described as ‘filling the Jewish space’ in Europe. Along with [...]

When will Emmanuel Olisadebe finally become a real Pole? Only when he too apologises for Jedwabne.’ This cryptic Warsaw joke becomes clear only if one knows that Mr. Olisadebe, originally from Nigeria, is the sometime star of the Polish national football team, and Jedwabne is a town in northeastern Poland where 65 years ago the ethnic Polish part of the [...]

A brief exchange on language, love and life.

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 [...]

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 [...]

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.

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 [...]

A debate between Professor David Shneer and Professor Gil Troy in anticipation of their appearance at Limmud Conference 28th December 2008 — 1st January 2009

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.

How can we not, as Jews, have compassion for asylum seekers? We have only to look to our own history.

‘Maturity,’ wrote the Norwegian scholar Stig Itinder Mikserssen, ‘means learning to wait.’ As new-born infants, we feel the mother’s absence — be it only for a few moments — as an absolute loss which, psychoanalysts and mothers-in-law claim, can traumatize us for life. Later, as toddlers, waiting for anything — food, home, tomorrow — whips up in us the boundless, impotent rage of a pint-sized thunder-god. Not until adolescence do we grasp that a period of inactivity is something to be filled — with cigarettes, music, ambivalent grunting, depending on the phase — rather than to be wished away. By then we are on our way to Mikserssen’s ‘maturity’: the understanding that anticipation is more fun than consummation. Unfortunately, it’s only then that we realize we’ve just squandered twenty years of precious waiting-time yearning to be grown-ups.

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 [...]