In 1991, the Nation of Islam first published the Secret Relationships between Jews and Blacks charging Jews with controlling the Atlantic Slave trade. The book has been furiously rebutted by academics but its assertions are still circulating unquestioned on a number of popular Black History sites. How significant is this? How is the Jewish role … Continue reading Jews and the Slave Trade
Take an aging white Jewish baker, add a young black Muslim immigrant, and what do you have? The ingredients story in which bridges are built across religious, racial and generations. Nat (Jonathan Pryce), who runs a kosher London bakery is struggling and facing a hostile takeover bid from a cutthroat developer who wants to … Continue reading Dough
Vivienne Jackson • Jewish Council for Racial Equality • London Race, asylum and immigration are visibly high on the UK political agenda. Europe is witnessing the greatest refugee crisis within its boundaries since the Second World War. Anti-immigration arguments are palpable in sections of the national press, and appear to have lain behind some of … Continue reading Social justice, Jews and the refugee experience in Britain
Unfolding on snowy sidewalks and beneath overcast skies, “Felix and Meira” watches ever so closely as a young Hasidic wife and mother is tempted by the quirky charms of a wayward older man. Yet this tenderly observed love story isn’t about religion — or its lack — but about the attraction of difference and … Continue reading Felix and Meira
Bradford in West Yorkshire started attracting Jews as residents as the City’s Wool Trade grew in the 1830s. The community grew as many migrants first from Germany and then from Russia made their homes in Bradford. In 1881 the first synagogue was opened in Bowland Street built by the German Jewish merchants and in … Continue reading Putting your local Jewish history on the map: the Bradford experience.
In 1996, the historian Deborah Lipstadt was pursued in the UK courts by the notorious Holocaust denier David Irving, for calling him a falsifier of history in her book Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. This movie version of those events, stars Rachel Weisz as Lipstadt and Timothy Spall as Irving. … Continue reading Denial
Yoga is one of at least six Hindu religions as old or older than Judaism. It overlaps through serendipity with the concept of “Adam Kadmon” (original man) in Rabbi Moshe de Leon’s Zohar – published in manuscript form in the late 13th century Castile but attributed by some to Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai the 2nd … Continue reading Kabbalah and Yoga
Adapted from Diane Ackerman’s 2007 non-fiction book, the film follows Warsaw zookeepers Jan (Heldenbergh) and Antonina (Chastain) as they risk their lives to save Jewish townspeople from the Nazis by concealing them in their zoo home-turned-pig farm. From the opening scene of almost fairy-tale idyll, life is transformed by the arrival of the Nazis. The … Continue reading The Zookeepers Wife
Starting with Theodor Adorno’s much-quoted proposition that ‘After Auschwitz it is barbaric to write poetry’, this talk will explore the tension between confronting the reality of the Holocaust and responding artistically through the medium of poetry to human experience. By focusing on individual poems by survivors such as Paul Celan and Primo Levi and … Continue reading No poetry after Auschwitz
Set in the 1830s, the story centres on Rosina da Silva, the sophisticated eldest daughter of a wealthy Jewish Italian family living in a small enclave of Sephardic London Jews. When her father is murdered on the street and leaves behind numerous debts, she refuses an arranged marriage to an older suitor, declaring that she … Continue reading The Governess
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