http://jewishquarterly.org A magazine of contemporary writing, politics & culture Tue, 31 Jan 2012 17:33:50 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en The Wandering Who? A Study of Jewish Identity Politics By Gilad Atzmon Zero Books 2011 Jewish Identity and Palestinian Rights By David Landy Zed Books 2011 So contested has the issue of antisemitism become and so promiscuously is the term used that it is increasingly difficult tofind clarity amid the fog of frenzied debate. The publication ... http://jewishquarterly.org/2012/01/non-jewish-jews/ A selection of Judah Passow's portraits of Jewish Britain can be found in the issue 220 of the Jewish Quarterly. No Place Like Home, an exhibition of Judah Passow's photographs, opens at the Jewish Museum on February 1st. Information can be found here www.judahpassow.com http://jewishquarterly.org/2012/01/in-our-time/ The plight of Mikhail Khodorkovsky raises questions about the place of Russian Jews today Peering from behind bars, his hair shorn to prison regulation length, Mikhail Khodorkovsky maintains a quiet dignity. Once the richest man in Russia and head of the giant Yukos oil conglomerate, he has become a cause célèbre ... http://jewishquarterly.org/2011/12/from-oligarch-to-icon/ Far to Go by Alison Pick Headline Review 2011 The List by Martin Fletcher Thomas Dunne Books 2011 In one way it’s curious that Anne Frank’s diary has become by far the most pre- eminent Holocaust text, because it is also the most oblique. Its power emanates from something never seen directly by its ... http://jewishquarterly.org/2011/12/before-and-after/ The Origin of Violence Fabrice Humbert Serpent's Tail 2011 The Origin of Violence (L’Origine de la Violence), the author’s third novel and the first to be translated into English, was swiftly extolled by the French press as a ‘great novel’ and a ‘revelation’. The novel won Le Prix Renaudot du Livre de Poche ... http://jewishquarterly.org/2011/12/the-origin-of-violence/ As an autograph collector, I can honestly say that all my favourite celebrities are dead. I like them that way: with their auras hermetically sealed. It’s only when celebrities die that we can start to appreciate their lives: what they did for us, how they suffered for their fame. In ... http://jewishquarterly.org/2011/12/signing-on/ Protestors Across the Globe Rely on the Language of Morality of the Great Religious Civilisations Three cities, three continents, three faiths. In Egypt’s Tahrir square, young secular activists worked together with members of the banned Muslim brotherhood in their shared goal to overthrow Mubarak’s regime. In New York, over 1000 people ... http://jewishquarterly.org/2011/12/occupying-god/ Mel Gibson's Planned Judah Maccabee Blockbuster Shows He Still Doesn't Get it. All good heroes have to change. So all the storytelling gurus and literary theorists, from Aristotle onwards, agree. If you get to Act III and there’s been no transformation, you’ve lost your audience. There are, of course, exceptions: sit-com ... http://jewishquarterly.org/2011/12/i-need-a-hero/ 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 ... http://jewishquarterly.org/2011/12/dispatches/ With the collapse of Empire and the transformation of political interaction, the shift of boundaries and the realignment of nations, the ideological and political tremor came to a climax in the late nineteenth century. Then there came the great war, and  the writer emerging from all these circumstances had a ... http://jewishquarterly.org/2011/10/creative-genius-in-central-europe/ German-Jewish Studies at the University of Sussex The University of Sussex, which celebrates its fiftieth anniversary in autumn 2011, has always been a cosmopolitan institution. When I joined the staff as an assistant lecturer in German in autumn 1963 it was a surprise to discover how few of those teaching literature ... http://jewishquarterly.org/2011/10/a-sense-of-mission/ Edited, translated and with an introduction by Polly Zavadivker. The translator would like to thank Robert Chandler for sharing the original version of this essay, and for his beneficial comments on an early draft of the translation. Written soon after the Soviet Army liberated eastern Ukraine from German occupation in mid-1943, ... http://jewishquarterly.org/2011/10/ukraine-without-jews/ As The Palestinians Prepare to Declare Independence, the parallels between Israel and Palestine appear more striking After the first Zionist conference in 1897, Theodor Herzl confided to his diary,“In Basel I created the Jewish state”. By the end of this month, Mahmoud Abbas may also declare — in another Swiss location ... http://jewishquarterly.org/2011/09/two-of-a-kind/ Is The Controversy that Follows Philip Roth Justified? Why does controversy seem to follow Philip Roth around? His first book, Goodbye, Columbus, touched off a riot of a reaction in the Jewish- American community when it was published in 1959. Roth, his detractors said, went out of his way to depict ... http://jewishquarterly.org/2011/09/misreading-roth/ by Jeremy Ben-Ami Palgrave Macmillan. 2011 Jeremy Ben-Ami is a first rate political operator. In four short years he has made J Street a $5 million organisation and successfully built a Washington power base in opposition to the AIPAC juggernaut and the rest of the so called ‘pro-Israel’ lobby. With its mantra ... http://jewishquarterly.org/2011/09/a-new-voice-for-israel/ HBO's hit drama bypasses individualism to expose the systems that fail urban America The American Dream is one of upward mobility, but also sideways movement. The aspiration to greatness comes with a rhetoric of self-sufficiency that causes people to move along and start again, rather than navigating existing structures. Not only ... http://jewishquarterly.org/2011/09/walking-the-wire/ Its over. 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’, pass on my number to cold-callers with special offers for careful drivers of a certain age. I’m now officially old. How do I know? Was it Google’s new social network, Google Plus ... http://jewishquarterly.org/2011/09/the-complete-history-of-the-jewish-people-starting-with-david-scneider/ http://jewishquarterly.org/2011/09/proximity-talks/ 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 ... http://jewishquarterly.org/2011/09/dispatche/ Did Sondheim Destroy the American Musical? It's the other national anthem, saying, If you want to hear - It says, "Bullshit!"… It says: Listen To the tune that keeps sounding In the distance, on the outside, Coming through the ground... We're the other national anthem, folks, The ones that can't get in To the ball park. (Assassins) Sandy Wilson, composer and ... http://jewishquarterly.org/2011/09/happy-ever-after/ Away go the books on the Hapsburgs. The Baedekers for Austria and France, the sale catalogues for auctions in Paris, marked up with the prices realised for family furniture, the books on fashion, on post-war Tokyo, the stack    of Gazette de Beaux Arts. The section of books on Freud and the shelves of Musil, Zweig, ... http://jewishquarterly.org/2011/06/on-packing-my-library/ On the inter-war Jewish choice between Zionism and Communism Gershom Scholem and Walter Benjamin, two great Jewish intellectuals of the early twentieth century and lifelong friends, took opposing sides on one of the great Jewish debates of modernity: was it possible to create a perfect community in an imperfect world, or ... http://jewishquarterly.org/2011/06/dreams-of-utopia/ by Jeremy Dauber Yale University Press, 2010 If the suggestive title of Jeremy Dauber’s In the Demon’s Bedroom attracts the attention of the casual passerby, it will have done more than satisfy the book’s author. Rather, it will have proven one of the book’s primary claims:a writer knows how to pique his ... http://jewishquarterly.org/2011/06/the-demons-bedroom-yiddish-literature-and-the-early-modern/ Vertigo/DC Comics, 2010 ‘I’m waiting for the scenery to look more like how I’d imagined Israel and less like rural Pennsylvania,’ thinks Sarah Glidden, as she stares from her bus window at the plain, flat landscape on her ride north from Ben Gurion airport. Combining light-hearted humour with both the harsh ... http://jewishquarterly.org/2011/06/sarah-gliddens-how-to-understand-israel-in-60-days-or-less/ In a newspaper editorial celebrating the tenth anniversary of Tel Aviv’s most beloved satiric cabaret, Hametateh, poet Leah Goldberg begins by quoting the following saying: ‘The wounds which a lover inflicts are full of loyalty.’ She then explains: ‘this phrase applies perfectly to our self- directed satire which is created ... http://jewishquarterly.org/2011/06/the-broom-and-the-kettle-satire-in-the-cabarets-of-tel-aviv/ 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 ... http://jewishquarterly.org/2011/06/doubled-up-with-laughter/ 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 ... http://jewishquarterly.org/2011/06/what-is-our-security/ Despite his tiny oeuvre and tragically short life, the legendary Polish writer’s legacy to Western literature continues to grow [caption id="attachment_1151" align="alignleft" width="380" caption="© Yuri Dojc. Last Folio: Textures of Jewish Life in Slovakia by Yuri Dojc and Katya Krausova published by Indiana University Press"][/caption] The Street of Crocodiles—Celina Wieniewska’s translation of ... http://jewishquarterly.org/2011/06/appropriations-of-bruno-schulz/ From a short story appearing here for the first time in English Translated by Jessica Cohen More than half a kilometer lies behind you and still you show no physical signs, your pulse holds steady at a moderate rate, you sweat only lightly, and although you are wearing heavy army boots instead ... http://jewishquarterly.org/2011/06/runner/ On the psychpathology of the collector and the attraction of dictator art Anyone like to buy Schindler’s list? I don’t mean a DVD of the film: I mean Schindler’s list. It’s available for $1.2 million on a U.S. website, apparently ‘the opportunity of a lifetime’. But what kind of person would ... http://jewishquarterly.org/2011/06/buying-hitler/