http://jewishquarterly.org A magazine of contemporary writing, politics & culture Thu, 11 Mar 2010 00:34:03 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en On the fifteenth day of October the Festival of Judaism began. Its slogan — draped on banners across the entrance and printed on the front of glossy Souvenir Brochures — was ‘the centre of Jewish life is the family home’. In celebration of this theme, the central exhibition of the ... http://jewishquarterly.org/2010/03/united/ The Freudian century began in Vienna but found its eventual home in America. There it was that most psychoanalysts wound up and entered the blood stream of the culture so that Freudian speech and American speech — or at least a certain kind of American speech: broad, aspiring, complaining, witty, ... http://jewishquarterly.org/2009/05/putting-the-id-back-in-yid/ In Empire of Their Own, a worthy, scrupulous and curiously dull account of how immigrant Jews founded the state of mind known as ‘Hollywood’— first in America, then latterly throughout the wider world — its author, Neal Gabler, glosses their Diaspora from the European ghettoes and shtetls, thus: Carl Laemmle, ... http://jewishquarterly.org/2009/05/walking-to-hollywood/ 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. ... http://jewishquarterly.org/2009/05/why-anti-semitism-matters/ ‘The essence of the problem of legislating for electoral reform [in Israel] is that the surgeon is also the patient’ Vernon Bogdanor’s comment written in the early 1990s is as accurate today as it was then. Another Israeli election has passed and another deeply unsatisfactory political picture has emerged. The Israeli ... http://jewishquarterly.org/2009/05/reform-or-die/ 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 ... http://jewishquarterly.org/2009/05/communal-singing/ I love to strum the run of tuneless anti-notes these braided harps have strung from post to post to post, dividing fenced-in dogs from lucky ones on walks and Barbie-trapping bogs of grass from sidewalks. And when stray branches beckon like wishbones from a shrub I wish for one good ... http://jewishquarterly.org/2009/05/when-walking-next-to-chain-link-fences/ For Charles Patterson Translated from the Hebrew by Lisa Katz Only Sunday strollers and bicycle riders will notice the strange facility concealed among vines and fields — a long barracks surrounded by barbed wire, a guard stationed at the electric gate. It’s late.  The second night watch. The villagers sleep. Only a few small foxes and nocturnal ... http://jewishquarterly.org/2009/05/forced-labour/ the last leaves on the trees leaking their slow reds and golds the workers sluggish in the fields who are you that I don’t know how to look away don’t want to    your eyes entering mine the day is short the night long    the Master near http://jewishquarterly.org/2009/05/now/ I feel a contentment in defeat. — J.L.B., ‘Deutches Requiem’ Borges was a rara avis. The intelligentsia in Latin America, particularly the Left-leaning one, has never been particularly interested in things Jewish. (It isn’t overtly anti-Semitic either, although since the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 that intelligentsia has become openly anti-Zionist.) ... http://jewishquarterly.org/2009/05/a-catalogue-of-jewish-symbols-by-ilan-stavans/