JewThink

13/10/2023

As we contemplate Shabbat and try and process the last week's harrowing events, it's worth thinking back to last weekend and mourning the lost festivity. JewThink compiled these accounts of what it felt like to 'celebrate' Shemini Atzeret / Simchat Torah in 2023. Thanks to all who contributed.

Perhaps we should mourn the festivity that was taken away from us, just as we mourn the deaths and suffering that occurred during that festival. JewThink solicited contributions from British Jews reflecting on their experiences of the festival. Let us remember these ruptures even as we try and come....

09/10/2023

JewThink is collating British Jewish reminiscences and reactions of Shemini Atzeret/Simchat Torah 5784/2023. I will probably publish them on JewThink in the next few days but I am open to suggestions for publication elsewhere. This is intended to be a kind of 'first draft of history', or an oral history written in the heat of the moment. Please consider contributing and/or sharing. Here are the details. DO NOT SUBMIT WITHOUT READING FIRST:

1. Send me your accounts of what it meant to experience Shemini Atzeret/Simchat Torah in Britain this year. When did you get the news of what was happening in Israel? How did it impact on the holiday? What happened in synagogue? Was a celebration of sorts of the festival still possible? How did the rabbi and other lay leaders adapt services? For those who are not practicing, how did the awareness that this was a Jewish holiday seep in?

2. This is an unashamedly parochial project: It's for British Jews across the spectrum and is intended to capture what it meant to be a Jew in Britain at one particular moment in time. No need to explain 'insider' vocabulary.

3. While political reactions may be worth writing about (and no position on the Jewish political spectrum is excluded from this project) this isn't the place for manifestos or podium-style speeches. But you are allowed to be as angry as you wish, as confused as you wish, as terrified as you wish and - yes - as apathetic as you wish. Overt racism will not be published though: Remember, this one project is about you, not them.

4. Maximum 500 words. A proofread would be helpful but stylistic rawness is fine.

5. Please state clearly whether you wish your contribution to be anonymous or attributed. Either is fine. Be aware that JewThink content is creative commons so may be shared (although not commercially). If you have safety concerns or want to express something that might subsequently come back to haunt you - stay anonymous.

6. Submit to [email protected] by the end of the week.

7. Feel free to share this call, but make sure you include all the information if you do.

09/01/2023

Nathan Abrams considers the Jewishness of Jordan Peele's Nope.
Read it here:

Nathan Abrams considers the Jewishness of Jordan Peele’s Nope. Two alternative names have been suggested for Jordan Peele’s latest film, Nope, but which have already been taken: “Don’t Look Up” and “Don’t Look Now”. I am going to suggest an alternative if already taken title: Eyes Wi...

05/12/2022

Where Do You Really Come From?

In the wake of yet another royal race row, reflects on where Jews come from. Read it here: https://www.jewthink.org/2022/12/05/where-do-you-really-come-from/

In the wake of yet another royal race row, Gloria Tessler reflects on where Jews come from. Where do you come from? No, where do you really come from? It’s possible that European Jews may have rarely been asked this question. Although it was put to me several times at school by kids who were [&hel...

04/10/2022

Atonement is At One Ment

A new poem about Yom Kippur by - read it here: https://www.jewthink.org/2022/10/04/atonement-is-at-one-ment/

A new poem about Yom Kippur by Gloria Tessler. At One Ment is to be an adult. To be an adult is to be Fractured, dissonant, Uncertain. Finding Footsteps in dark And silent places, Losing your way. At One Ment is to be a child. Graciously perceptive, Holding back tears That may hurt an adult, [&helli...

23/09/2022

Mourning a Monarch

In the wake of the Queen’s funeral, reflects on the intense Jewishness of mourning.. Read it here: https://www.jewthink.org/2022/09/23/mourning-a-monarch/

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In the wake of the Queen’s funeral, Gloria Tessler reflects on the intense Jewishness of mourning. Does it make me a royalist that like so many I was glued to the screen watching the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II as endless queues silently snaked past the coffin which stood draped in the colours o...

23/06/2022

Mixed: Tamar Hodes shares her thoughts about her new book. Read it here: https://www.jewthink.org/2022/06/23/mixed/

19/05/2022

Liberal Drippings of Pork Fat

Stephen Pogany contributes an exclusive extract from his book Modern Times: The Biography of a Hungarian-Jewish Family. Read it here: https://www.jewthink.org/2022/05/19/liberal-drippings-of-pork-fat/

19/05/2022

Salonica’s Ghosts

Ross Bradshaw reviews a new book about Jews and Salonica. Read it here: https://www.jewthink.org/2022/05/18/salonicas-ghosts/

17/05/2022

Keeping Kosher

A new story by MJ Popplewell. Read it here: https://www.jewthink.org/2022/05/17/keeping-kosher/

A new story by MJ Popplewell. Joseph struggled upstairs and into the apartment with his bags. He laid them on the kitchen table and took out a selection of pans: small for milk, medium for vegetables and a large one for meat. He had also bought some cutlery: knives, forks, spoons and so forth, and [...

16/05/2022

Pop Jews Rocking On

David Drimer explores the relationship between Jews, pop and rock ‘n’ roll. Read it here: https://www.jewthink.org/2022/05/16/pop-jews-rocking-on/

David Drimer explores the relationship between Jews, pop and rock ‘n’ roll. We’re endlessly amused by the essentially semitic game “Who’s the Jew?” In my house, we fervently celebrate the Jewish identity of celebrities, athletes, artists and writers or historical figures famous or obscur...

09/05/2022

A Time To Mourn…

Barbara Borts reflects on the importance of Yom HaShoah.

Read it here: https://www.jewthink.org/2022/04/29/a-time-to-mourn/

Barbara Borts reflects on the importance of Yom HaShoah. As a progressive Jew from an earlier time, I hadn’t learned about Tisha B’av, the fast of the 9th of Av. When I began my rabbinical studies, and later my congregational work, Tisha B’Av was beginning to be marked in progressive Jewish ci...

09/05/2022

When Passover Ends

A poem by Bruce Black. Read it here: https://www.jewthink.org/2022/04/24/when-passover-ends/

Passover ended last night but this morning there's still a lump of matzah in my stomach and the taste of dry matzah crumbs on my lips It's like when I leave the beach and come home to find grains of sand stuck between my toes and dried salt from the sea on my legs You […]

09/05/2022

Dating the Exodus

Annette Duckworth asks how did two different dates arise. Read it here: https://www.jewthink.org/2022/04/24/dating-the-exodus/

Annette Duckworth asks how did two different dates arise. In 1822, Jean-Francois Champollion, the French Egyptologist and linguist achieved his first true breakthrough in the translation of Egyptian hieroglyphics, with the decipherment of the two Pharaonic names, ‘Ramesses’ and ‘Thutmose’. T...

09/05/2022

The day before Passover

A poem by Bruce Black. Read it here: https://www.jewthink.org/2022/04/14/the-day-before-passover/

It's the day before Passover and we're preparing to flee Egypt again to leave behind all the tasks we never got around to doing to bid goodbye to old habits and routines that won't take us anywhere but back to where we started to say farewell to the people who enslaved us and treated us […]

27/04/2022

Yom HaSHoah 2022: The Story of George Garai by

Read it here: https://www.jewthink.org/2022/04/27/yom-hashoah-2022-the-story-of-george-garai/

As Yom HaShoah looms, the hidden story of a journalist, told by his granddaughter, reaffirms the importance of giving young people a voice in Holocaust education

13/04/2022

Pour Out Your Rage

Ruben Vis reflects on a key passage in the Haggadah. Read it here: https://www.jewthink.org/2022/04/13/pour-out-your-rage/

Ruben Vis reflects on a key passage in the Haggadah. If the word Seder means order, then every piece in the Haggada must be in its correct place. Why, then, immediately after the meal, do we read a passage that seems out of place and why is it even there in the first place? It […]

13/04/2022

A Weekend of Yiddish

Myra Woolfson kvetches about the joys of planning a Jewish-themed event. Read it here: https://www.jewthink.org/2022/04/13/a-weekend-of-yiddish/

11/04/2022

On (not) celebrating Jewish diversity, by

Read it here: https://www.jewthink.org/2022/04/11/on-not-celebrating-jewish-diversity/

Keith Kahn-Harris explains how highlighting the diversity of British Jews through photography raises some uncomfortable issues

11/04/2022

Cleaning for Pesach

A poem by Bruce Black. Read it here: https://www.jewthink.org/2022/04/11/cleaning-for-pesach/

Cleaning the kitchen for Pesach yesterday I heard the voices of my loved ones who are gone but whose memories live on and return to keep me company. I kneeled to scrub the inside of the oven and suddenly could smell the chicken soup and matzah balls that my grandmother used to make in her […]

04/04/2022

Johanna Kaplan’s Miraculous Ear

Donald Weber reviews an author whose work might not be so well-known in Britain. Read it here: https://www.jewthink.org/2022/04/04/johanna-kaplans-miraculous-ear/

Donald Weber reviews an author whose work might not be so well-known in Britain. Johanna Kaplan arrived on the literary scene almost fifty years ago as a superb interpreter of American Jewish life at mid-century, a time of social mobility, yet also an era haunted by the still raw traumas of the past...

30/03/2022

Uncle Boris the Prophet

Alex Gordon remembers his great uncle Boris, Kyiv, and the Holocaust. Read it here: https://www.jewthink.org/2022/03/29/uncle-boris-the-prophet/

Alex Gordon remembers his great uncle Boris, Kyiv, and the Holocaust. My grandmother Rosa’s brother Baruch, whom we all called Boris, was a prophet. Why did my grandmother’s brother stop being called by the Jewish name Baruch and start being called by the Christian name Boris? Spinoza’s name w...

28/03/2022

Seinfeld Yomi: The English Patient

In another instalment of his Seinfeld Yomi, Jarrod Tanny discusses the episode, “The English Patient”. Read it here: https://www.jewthink.org/2022/03/24/seinfeld-yomi-the-english-patient/

In another instalment of his Seinfeld Yomi, Jarrod Tanny discusses the episode, “The English Patient”. Day 144, Thursday, March 24, 2022, s8e17, first aired on March 13, 1997. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0697691/ MISHNAH: Hillel: The English Patient Shammai: Sack Lunch Hillel: Neil Armstrong Sh...

22/03/2022

Pax Materna

wrote these poems in memory of her birth mother, Dorothy, who died when she was two years old. Read them here: https://www.jewthink.org/2022/03/16/pax-materna/

Gloria Tessler wrote these poems in memory of her birth mother, Dorothy, who died when she was two years old. Dorothy One When I look at you in your photo frame, Contained and smiling, your auburn curls, Re-touched rose cheeks and painted eyebrows, Photo-shopped, old-style, as though your beauty Is....

21/03/2022

A Weekend of Yiddish

Myra Wolfson kvetches about the joys of planning a Jewish-themed event. Read it here: https://www.jewthink.org/2022/03/21/a-weekend-of-yiddish/

18/03/2022

How the Anne Frank Cold Case Team Betrayed the World

Ruben Vis explains how the recent revelations about Anne Frank’s alleged betrayer are wrong. Read it here: https://www.jewthink.org/2022/03/18/how-the-anne-frank-cold-case-team-betrayed-the-world/

Ruben Vis explains how the recent revelations about Anne Frank’s alleged betrayer are wrong. Who betrayed Anne Frank and the others who were hiding with her? The question has been a source of speculation and research ever since Otto H. Frank, Anne’s father and sole survivor of the eight, returne...

17/03/2022

All About Eva

In this exclusive extract from his new book, All About Eva: A Holocaust-Related Memoir, with a Hollywood Twist, Vincent Brook reminisces about his German Jewish parents’ experiences in N**i Germany and their early years as refugees in Los Angeles, where Vincent’s mother, Eva, had an extramarital affair with famed Polish Jewish actor Alexander Granach.

https://www.jewthink.org/2022/03/16/all-about-eva/

In this exclusive extract from his new book, All About Eva: A Holocaust-Related Memoir, with a Hollywood Twist, Vincent Brook reminisces about his German Jewish parents’ experiences in N**i Germany and their early years as refugees in Los Angeles, where Vincent’s mother, Eva, had an extramarital...

10/03/2022

Borowski’s Brutal Vision

Donald Weber reviews Here in Our Auschwitz and Other Stories by Tadeusz Borowski. Read it here: https://www.jewthink.org/2022/03/10/borowskis-brutal-vision/

Donald Weber reviews Here in Our Auschwitz and Other Stories by Tadeusz Borowski. The publication of the Polish writer Tadeusz Borowski’s Here in Our Auschwitz and Other Stories is a significant event for students of Holocaust literature. Sent to Auschwitz as a political prisoner in 1943, at the a...

09/03/2022

The Survivor, by Ken Stern

Read it here: https://www.jewthink.org/2022/03/09/the-survivor/

Doris Stein, a survivor of Birkenau, did not mind walking the extra blocks it took her to reach Osfeld’s Market.  It was a familiar place, and the market’s owner was an obliging Pole.  Normally, Doris would stop to chat with Mr Osfeld, but today she went directly to the aisles, her eye...

09/03/2022

After I’m Gone

A poem by Bruce Black. Read it here: https://www.jewthink.org/2022/03/08/after-im-gone/

When I die, let death come without pain. Let flowers and birds weep and sing a sad lament. Let Heaven open and soak the earth with rain. But, please, let there be no pain. Just the gentle kiss of a loved one's lips on my cheek. The whisper of goodbye, the touch of a hand […]