http://jewishquarterly.org A magazine of contemporary writing, politics & culture Tue, 15 May 2012 17:27:24 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Saturday, Feb 18. It’s the opening event of Jewish Book Week 2012, and Simon Schama, Linda Grant and Eva Hoffman are sitting onstage, but I’m not looking at them: I’m gazing in mild disbelief at outgoing JBW director Geraldine D’Amico, who has just introduced chair Emily Maitlis as ‘the glamorous ... http://jewishquarterly.org/2012/04/can-we-talk/ New York   You’re 25 and still live with your parents?,’ she asked, aware of the ticking clock and all the other potentials she’d meet in the next two hours. ‘Just for now, until I get my organic cream cheese business running,’ he rushed to finish. ‘I-’ ‘They’re holding you ... http://jewishquarterly.org/2012/04/speed-shrinking/ While a new all-star Haggadah plays it safe, others reinvent the Passover story as a call to action “The point of a seder is to engage people; it’s just a meaningless ritual if it doesn’t engage people. Part of engaging people is asking contemporary questions, speaking in a contemporary idiom...” ... http://jewishquarterly.org/2012/04/tales-of-freedom-and-imagination/ London, 1934 — two of the great Zionist leaders, Ben Gurion and Jabotinsky — meet to discuss the character of the future Jewish State Jabotinsky: (pouring for him) Careful. This is very strong vodka sent over by a priest in the Urals. Only this can stoke the fires of my soul ... http://jewishquarterly.org/2012/03/can-two-walk-together/ NGO's, the last voice of opposition in Israel, are now under threat from anti-democratic laws Last year saw a new front opened up in what has been described as Israel’s democratic recession. This time, it was the country’s proliferation of left-leaning non- governmental organisations that came under attack from legislation that ... http://jewishquarterly.org/2012/03/the-not-so-civil-society/ Translated and edited by Michael Hofmann Granta • 2012 There are plenty of reasons why Joseph Roth might have made a fitful letter-writer. When he wasn’t being whipped on by penury to compose feuilletons — those considered responses to people and places, things and happenings that remind us just how high journalism ... http://jewishquarterly.org/2012/03/joseph-roth-a-life-in-letters/ Judaism: A Way of Being by David Gelernter Yale University Press • 2009 Open Minded Torah: Of Irony, Fundamentalism and Love by William Kolbrener Continuum • 2011 I blame Jonathan Sacks. Across his oeuvre he has pioneered a style of writing about Judaism designed to put even the most refined gentile Englishman at ease. Beautifully ... http://jewishquarterly.org/2012/03/sacks-legacy/ 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 ... http://jewishquarterly.org/2012/03/liberal-zionism-a-contradiction-in-terms/ 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/