Davar Bristol

A Land of Milk and Mufletta: what Israeli food says about Israeli culture
2022-03-10 19:30 - 20:30 (Europe/London) | Redland Quaker Meeting House, 126 Hampton Road , Bristol, BS6 6EJ, United Kingdom
Joel Harber • Jerusalem
Israeli chefs have recently conquered the culinary world, but what about all those foods they left behind at home? What do these dishes say about Israel itself? From falafel to petitim, meurav Yerushalmi to mufleta, Joel will reveal the culture behind the distinctive foods that make Israel so deliciously… Israeli.
Joel Haber researches, writes about and lectures on the topic of Jewish food history, with a focus on understanding Jewish culture and history via its foods. His writing appears on his blog (www.tasteofjew.com) along with articles in such publications as The Nosher, Tradition and The Jewish Journal. He has spoken widely to hundreds of attendees, in both online and in-person venues in multiple countries. Joel is currently writing a book that examines Shabbat stews from around the world, using them as a way of tracing the routes of Jewish migrations throughout history. Additionally, Joel has worked as a licensed tour guide in Israel for nearly a decade. His most popular single tour is a culinary tasting and history tour in Jerusalem’s famous outdoor market, Shuk Machane Yehuda. Joel was born and raised in New Jersey, lived for many years in both New York City and Los Angeles, and immigrated to Israel in March 2009. He is proud to live in the special city of Jerusalem.
Share this:Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)Click to print (Opens in new window)

Yentl
2022-02-23 20:00 - 22:00 | Scott Cinema, Bristol, Northumbria Drive, Henleaze, Bristol, Avon, BS9 4HN, United Kingdom
Yentl is an American romantic musical drama film directed, co-written, co-produced, and starring American entertainer Barbra Streisand. It is based on Isaac Bashevis Singer‘s short story ‘Yentl the Yeshiva Boy’. The film incorporates humour and music to tell the story of an Ashkenazi Jewish girl in Poland who decides to dress and live like a boy so that she can receive an education in Talmudic Law after her father dies. The film’s musical score and songs were composed by Michel Legrand. The film received the Academy Award for Best Original Song Score and the Golden Globe Awards for Best Motion Picture—Musical or Comedy and Best Director for Streisand, making her the first woman to have won Best Director at the Golden Globes.
‘The best thing about Yentl is its earnestness. It may resemble a vanity production from afar but even at its kitschiest it seems to be heartfelt’ (Janet Maslin, NY Times)
Share this:Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)Click to print (Opens in new window)

Ernest Bloch: more than a Jewish composer
2022-02-10 19:30 - 20:30 | Redland Quaker Meeting House, 126 Hampton Road , Bristol, BS6 6EJ, United Kingdom
Yoav Ben-Shlomo • Bristol
Ernest Bloch, though not a religious Jew, is probably the most famous Jewish composer of the twentieth century. Born in Geneva in 1880, he studied in Brussels, Frankfurt, Munich and Paris before creating his “Jewish cycle” and ended his life in the USA. However, he also composed other important musical works including chamber music and symphonic works that were more impressionistic, influenced by Debussy and other 20th century composers. Whilst, much of his music has strong Jewish themes, he always viewed his works as universalistic with a message that “…transports us into another world and makes us think, feel, love differently.” This talk will play excerpts from many of his varied works to illustrate the power of this message.
Yoav Ben-Shlomo is a lover of music, including classical, jazz and klezmer. He has collected classical pieces inspired by Jewish themes over the years and enjoys sharing his love of music with others. Yoav is an academic at the University of Bristol and Chair of DAVAR.
Share this:Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)Click to print (Opens in new window)

Everything is Illuminated
2022-01-26 20:00 | Scott Cinema, Bristol, Northumbria Drive, Henleaze, Bristol, Avon, BS9 4HN, United Kingdom
USA 2005, 104 mins, English, Russian, Ukrainian
Director Liev Schreiber, featuring Elijah Wood, Eugene Hütz
This American biographical comedy was adapted from Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel of the same name. Jonathan Safran Foer, a young American Jew, goes on a quest to find the woman, Augustine, who saved his grandfather, Safran Foer, during the Holocaust in a small Ukrainian town called Trachimbrod that was wiped off the map when the Nazis liquidated Eastern European shtetls. His guides are a cranky, seemingly antisemitic grandfather, his wound-up dog named Sammy Davis, Jr., Jr., and his enthusiastic grandson, Alex, who constantly chatters with a unique command of English and a passion for American pop culture that keeps the arduous journey lighter.
‘Liev Schreiber’s Everything is Illuminated begins in goofiness and ends in silence and memory. How it gets from one to the other is the subject of the film, a journey undertaken by three men and a dog into the secrets of the past.’ (Robert Ebert)
Share this:Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)Click to print (Opens in new window)

The Ghetto: Travelling through history
2021-12-09 19:30 - 21:00 | Redland Quaker Meeting House, 126 Hampton Road , Bristol, BS6 6EJ, United Kingdom
“Ghetto” is an extraordinarily complex word which is both a noun and an adjective. It has layers of contrasting meanings accrued over five hundred years and a bewildering array of settings across the globe. It refers to medieval and early modern Jewish history; black experience in the great northern cities of America in the twentieth century; nineteenth-century imaginary ghettos; and our contemporary sense of cities and countries segregated by race and class. What makes “the ghetto” unique is that it is a place full of historical memory. Sometimes memory makes the ghetto “real”; at other times past versions of the ghetto are forgotten. But, from the beginning, ghettos have had a variety of histories and connotations. This talk will show how different ghettos (urban, racial, colonial) travel across time and space.

Bryan Cheyette is Chair in Modern Literature and Culture at the University of Reading, and a Fellow of the English Association. He has authored or edited eleven books, most recently The Ghetto: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford UP, 2020). He loves to travel and has held visiting positions at Dartmouth College, the University of Michigan, and the University of Pennsylvania, and he also holds fellowships at the universities of Leeds, Southampton and Birkbeck College, London. He is a past book’s editor of The Jewish Quarterly and writes for the Jewish Chronicle and the Jewish Renaissance. A self-confessed “revieweroholic”, he reviews fiction for several British newspapers including the Times Literary Supplement and the Times Higher.
Share this:Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)Click to print (Opens in new window)

A Call to Spy
2021-11-24 20:00 - 22:10 | Scott Cinema, Bristol, Northumbria Drive, Henleaze, Bristol, Avon, BS9 4HN, United Kingdom
A Call to Spy is an historical drama inspired by the true stories of women recruited into England’s Special Operations Executive (SOE) during World War II. Desperate for new recruits, the SOE, created in 1940 after the fall of France and before the US joined the war, decided to train women as spies as it was believed that women could move more freely than men in occupied territories. Vera Atkins, a Romanian Jewish immigrant in London, was the spymistress in charge of the program. The work was extremely dangerous, with all recruits risking death and many were killed or sent to concentration camps. The film follows the stories of Vera Atkins and two recruits: Virginia Hall, an American with a prosthetic leg and Noor Inayat Khan, a Muslim pacifist born of Indian and Russian parents.
A Call to Spy is an engrossing and often thrilling spy drama and a tribute to this courageous and diverse group of women who showed extraordinary bravely and ingenuity. Sarah Megan Thomas (writer, producer and actor) believes that its themes are timeless. “It’s about standing up as individuals and taking action for what you believe in.”
USA 2019, 124 mins, English
Director Lydia Dean Pilcher featuring Sarah Megan Thomas, Stana Katic, Radhika Apte
Share this:Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)Click to print (Opens in new window)

The Secret Jews of Majorca Island
2021-11-11 19:30 - 21:00 | Redland Quaker Meeting House, 126 Hampton Road , Bristol, BS6 6EJ, United Kingdom
During the Inquisition, the Crypto-Jews or Chuetas publicly professed Catholicism while privately adhering to Judaism. Synagogues were secretly built in private homes. Signs of this “secret” community can still be found today. We will visit the inside of the permanent exhibit in the Jewish Quarter Interpretation Center inaugurated in 2015 as we trace the footsteps of the Jewish Conversos who walked the narrow alleyways of the casco antiguo – or old town. We will learn about the famous failed boat escape of 1688 when 40 Crypto-Jews tried unsuccessfully to flee the Inquisition of the island. We will look for clues and hints that suggest a robust Jewish community that was extinguished over centuries in the fires of the Inquisition. In this new and cutting-edge virtual tour, Dani brings his wealth of Jewish informal education to pull back the curtain on the Spanish island’s secret Crypto-Judio and Converso history.

Dani Rotstein is a film producer, history-teller, and community organizer living in the Balearic Islands of Spain. Originally from New Jersey, Dani moved to Majorca in 2014 where he learned of the taboo history of the Conversos or Chuetas native to the island. Since then, he has made it his life’s passion to continue exploring, uncovering, and sharing this interesting piece of little-known Jewish history. He believes that the revival of modern Jewish life in Spain can be a shining light to the rest of the world.

Share this:Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)Click to print (Opens in new window)

Sarah’s Key
2021-10-27 20:00 - 22:00 | Scott Cinema, Bristol, Northumbria Drive, Henleaze, Bristol, Avon, BS9 4HN, United Kingdom
Adapted from Tatiana de Rosnay’s best-selling novel of the same name, Sarah’s Key is an account of research by a journalist into a shameful incident in French history which intertwines with a story of a young Jewish girl from that time period.

‘In Paris in 1942 the French police round up 10-year-old Sarah (Mélusine Mayance) and her family. To save her little brother, Sarah locks him in a closet and closely guards the key on her awful journey, which starts at the stifling Vélodrome d’Hiver, where Jews were packed in and made to wait for transport to the camps. Sixty or so years later, Julia (Kristin Scott Thomas, excellent as always), an American journalist married to a Frenchman, researches an article about that roundup. Because of the article and an accident of real estate, Julia starts to obsess about Sarah and her fate, even as her own comfortable Parisian life begins to crumble’ (Rachel Saltz, NY Times)
France 2010, 111 mins, French, English
Director Gilles Pacquet-Brenner featuring Kristin Scott Thomas
Share this:Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)Click to print (Opens in new window)

Willesden Jewish Cemetery
2021-10-14 19:30 - 21:00 | Redland Quaker Meeting House, 126 Hampton Road , Bristol, BS6 6EJ, United Kingdom
Willesden Cemetery, which opened in 1873, is one of London’s most prestigious Jewish cemeteries. It is run by the United Synagogue who were fortunate to be awarded a £1.7m grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund to open Willesden Jewish Cemetery as a place of heritage for the public. The United Synagogue website describes the Cemetery as “a place of great tranquillity, the cemetery charts the development of London’s Jewish community over nearly 150 years, with graves and memorials rich in social history and genealogical detail”. Tours and since COVID, online presentations, seek to convey this richness to audiences by bringing alive the stories of a sample of those buried in the Cemetery. This will be a first for Deborah presenting to a live audience outside the Cemetery.
Deborah Cohen lives close by the Cemetery and became a volunteer tour guide in 2019. She is a former NHS director, and has not quite stopped working as she chairs a local safeguarding adults board, does some consultancy, and is a Mental Health Act manager. Deborah describes her experience as a tour guide as being on a voyage of discovery, as she learns more and more about the “residents” of the Cemetery, including people who made remarkable contributions to life in the UK and beyond during their lives.
To register for attending either in person or virtually please book via eventbrite
Share this:Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)Click to print (Opens in new window)

Fiddler: A Miracle of Miracles
2021-09-29 20:00 - 22:00 | Scott Cinema, Bristol, Northumbria Drive, Henleaze, Bristol, Avon, BS9 4HN, United Kingdom
Max Lewkowicz’s richly detailed documentary celebrates the illustrious Broadway show Fiddler on the Roof, the evergreen shtetl-set musical first staged in 1964 with choreography and direction by Jerome Robbins and starring Zero Mostel as Teyve, the milkman.
Contributions from a range of interviewees – including people attached to the original production, such as producer Hal Prince and lyricist Sheldon Harnick, and famous fans of the show, including Fran Lebowitz and Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda – help to structure the history lesson about how Fiddler became a massive international hit. That account is filled out with footage of recent productions from around the world as well as the 1971 film version, starring Chaim Topol and directed by Norman Jewison. What makes this documentary are the organically introduced digressions into, among many other things, the history of the Pale of Settlement, Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem and Marc Chagall. (modified from Leslie Felperin, Guardian)
USA 2019, 97 mins, English
Director Max Lewkowicz

Share this:Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)Click to print (Opens in new window)

Klezmer Music: History and Contemporary Practice Around the World
2021-04-08 19:30 - 21:00 | Virtual streamed
Klezmer – the instrumental music of Eastern European Ashkenazi Jews – has survived assimilation, suppression and eradication and is now a recognisable ‘world music’ commodity, as well as an object of serious musicological study. But what relationship does today’s klezmer bear to its 19th and early 20th century roots, and what happens to traditional music when its community context changes or disappears? In this talk Phil will give an overview of klezmer’s journey, exploring where the music came from, and where it now finds itself. He will also discuss his work with his own klezmer-ish band Moishe’s Bagel. Includes musical examples.
Phil Alexander is a British Academy research fellow at the University of Edinburgh, where he studies historical Scottish-Jewish musical interactions. His book Sounding Jewish in Berlin: klezmer and the contemporary city will be published with Oxford University Press in early 2021. Phil is also a busy musician, leading the band Moishe’s Bagel and collaborating regularly with folk and jazz musicians around the UK and beyond.
Share this:Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)Click to print (Opens in new window)

The Wolf of Baghdad: Memoir of a Lost Homeland
2021-03-11 19:30 - 21:00 | Virtual streamed
In the 1940s a third of Baghdad’s population was Jewish. Within a decade nearly all 150,000 had fled. Of those remaining, most escaped in the 1970s or were killed. Today, fewer than half a dozen remain.

This graphic memoir of a lost homeland is a wordless narrative by an author homesick for a home she has never visited. It is illuminated by the words and portraits of her family, along with an afterword with a brief history of Baghdadi Jews and background of this work. Says Isaacs: ‘The Finns have a word, kaukokaipuu, which means a feeling of homesickness for a place you’ve never been to. I’ve been living in two places all my life; the England I was born in, and the lost world of my Iraqi-Jewish family’s roots.’
Carol Isaacs is a musician and, as The Surreal McCoy, a well-known cartoonist published in the New Yorker, Private Eye and Sunday Times. The Wolf of Baghdad is also an animated slideshow with its own musical soundtrack, which is often performed by a live band including Isaacs on accordion and keyboards, playing music of Iraqi and Judeo-Arabic origin. Carol has worked with many artists including Sinead O’Connor and the Indigo Girls. She is co-founder of the London Klezmer Quartet and Hamsa.
Share this:Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)Click to print (Opens in new window)

Stanley Kubrick: New York Jewish Intellectual?
2021-02-11 19:30 - 21:00 | Virtual streamed
Stanley Kubrick is generally acknowledged as one of the world’s great directors. Yet few critics or scholars have considered how he emerged from a unique and vibrant cultural milieu: the New York Jewish intelligentsia. In this talk, Nathan Abrams re-examines the director’s work in context of his ethnic and cultural origins. Focusing on several of Kubrick’s key themes – including masculinity, ethical responsibility, and the nature of evil – it demonstrates how his films were in conversation with contemporary New York Jewish intellectuals who grappled with the same concerns. At the same time, it explores Kubrick’s fraught relationship with his Jewish identity and his reluctance to be pegged as an ethnic director, manifest in his removal of Jewish references and characters from stories he adapted.
Nathan Abrams is Professor in Film and Director of Impact and Engagement for the College of Arts, Humanities and Business at Bangor University. He co-convenes the British Jewish Contemporary Cultures network. He lectures, writes and broadcasts on UK and American popular culture, history film and intellectual culture. He co-founded Jewish Film and New Media and recent books are Eyes Wide Shut: Stanley Kubrick and the Making of His Final Film (with Robert Kolker, Oxford University Press, 2019), Stanley Kubrick: New York Jewish Intellectual (Rutgers University Press, 2018), Hidden in Plain Sight: Jews and Jewishness in British Film, Television, and Popular Culture (Northwestern University Press, 2016).

Share this:Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)Click to print (Opens in new window)

Ferramonti: Salvation behind the barbed wire
2021-01-14 19:30 - 21:00 | Virtual streamed
In 1982 nearing the end of a remarkable life, consultant David Henryk Ropschitz put pen to paper to share his own story of 1940s wartime survival. His highly personal novel is about life in the Italian internment camp, Ferramonti, where thousands of Jews and other ‘undesirables’ were imprisoned. In his novel Dr Ropschitz looks back with tenderness and humour at these traumatic years and takes the reader on a journey from wartime Calabria to the Abruzzi, from barbed wire to freedom, exploring the themes of faith, humanity and psychoanalysis along the way.
Yolanda Ropschitz-Bentham was born in Derby and grew up in West Yorkshire. After many travels and adventures she moved to Bristol in 1984 and then settled on a smallholding in rural Somerset, raising her family and teaching Psychology for over 25 years. She also wrote some comic pieces, two of her stories featured on BBC Somerset, and worked as a volunteer presenter on local radio. Following retirement in 2016 Yolanda turned to her late father’s manuscript, “Ferramonti.” Researching his autobiographical novel led to regular visits to the Ferrramonti di Tarsia camp museum in Calabria and meetings with former internees from the 1940s and their descendants. This connection, culminating in the publication of “Ferramonti: Salvation behind the barbed wire,” has produced one of the most rewarding periods of her life so far, affording Yolanda cherished opportunities to travel to Italy, Israel and South America. Life stories from former internees are now forming the basis of her next book: “The People of Ferramonti: Then and Now.”
Share this:Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)Click to print (Opens in new window)

Finding 100 Faces: capturing Jewish diversity
2020-12-10 19:30 - 21:00 | Virtual streamed
In early 2018, composer and film maker Benjamin Till, who had only recently discovered he was Jewish, decided to make the film 100 Faces to find out more about the community he’d been a member of for 43 years without realising. His mission was to find one UK-based Jewish person born every year from 1918 to 2017 and it became an odyssey of discovery which took him all over the world. His final 100 people include Jewish people from all walks of life. Rabbis and chazans rub shoulders with Dames, Lords, holocaust survivors, kinder-transportees, well-known actors, musicians, writers and presenters and two men who fought at Cable Street. The whole film is set to music. Benjamin wrote an original score which was performed by the Israel Camera Orchestra. Sit back and enjoy the film (approx 6 mins) and then hear about the bumpy and inspirational ride which led there!

Benjamin Till is a multi-award-winning filmmaker and composer and pioneer in the field of the documentary musical. He grew up in Northamptonshire and describes himself as a fanatical Midlander of Welsh and Jewish extraction! He has many works to his credit including Our Gay Wedding: The Musical (Channel 4, BAFTA-nominated, winner, Rose D’Or, Grierson and Prix Italia.) This film is considered one of Channel 4’s most successful ever broadcasts. His most recent film, 100 Faces, which features the UK Jewish Community, won the gold award at the Robinson’s International Short Film Competition. Benjamin sings with, and is Resident Composer for, the Jewish Male voice choir, Mosaic Voices at New West End Synagogue, London. Their most recent recording of Benjamin’s arrangement of Kol Nidrei was played on Radio 3.
Share this:Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)Click to print (Opens in new window)

Fiddler: A Miracle of Miracles - CANCELLED DUE TO LOCKDOWN RESTRICTIONS
2020-11-25 20:00 - 22:00 | Scott Cinema, Bristol, Northumbria Drive, Henleaze, Bristol, Avon, BS9 4HN, United Kingdom
Dir. Max Lewkowicz; 2019; 97 min; English
Director Max Lewkowicz’s richly detailed documentary celebrates the illustrious Broadway show Fiddler on the Roof, the evergreen shtetl-set musical first staged in 1964 with choreography and direction by Jerome Robbins and starring Zero Mostel as Teyve, the milkman. Contributions from a range of interviewees – including people attached to the original production, such as producer Hal Prince and lyricist Sheldon Harnick, and famous fans of the show, including Fran Lebowitz and Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda – help to structure the history lesson about how Fiddler became a massive international hit. That account is filled out with footage of recent productions from around the world, including one in Japanese and one by some African American high-school kids in Brooklyn
What really makes this documentary are the digressions into, among many other things, the history of the Pale of Settlement, who exactly was Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem (who wrote the stories the show is based on), Marc Chagall, and the show’s ghostly connection to the Holocaust, even though it’s not mentioned in the show itself. Despite its age, this musical engages audiences, both Jewish and non-Jewish, all over the world and has a remarkable ability to seem relevant to every era, including the present day with the rise of the ultra right and anti-semitism.
Share this:Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)Click to print (Opens in new window)

Creativity against the odds: Art and Internment during World War Two
2020-11-12 19:30 - 21:00 | Virtual streamed
To mark the 80th anniversary of the British government’s controversial decision to ‘collar the lot’, this illustrated lecture will examine the art produced in the British internment camps, mostly but not only on the Isle of Man. It will do so in the broader context of art produced in other internment situations, from the Japanese-American camps in the USA to the Nazi POW and concentration camps. Just what is it that makes human beings feel the urge to create in such adverse and inauspicious circumstances? To hear a recording of this talk please click on the following link which will take you to the Insiders/Outsiders youtube channel

Monica Bohm-Duchen is a London-based art historian. Her book Art and the Second World War was published in 2013. She is the initiator and creative director of the nationwide, year-long Insiders/Outsiders Festival (https://insidersoutsidersfestival.org/), which celebrates the huge contribution made to British culture by refugees from Nazi-dominated Europe – many of whom were interned as ‘enemy aliens’ by the British government in 1940.
Share this:Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)Click to print (Opens in new window)

The Band's Visit
2020-10-28 20:00 - 22:00 | Scott Cinema, Bristol, Northumbria Drive, Henleaze, Bristol, Avon, BS9 4HN, United Kingdom
Dir. Eran Korilin; 90 minutes; English, Hebrew, Arabic
This award winning charming Israeli comedy is the tale of an Egyptian police band stranded overnight in a quiet Israeli settlement after taking the wrong bus. It features lovely performances from Sasson Gabai as the band’s impeccably behaved conductor and actress Ronit Elkabetz as an Israeli bar owner who puts him up for the night. A beautifully controlled piece, it marks the impressive debut of director and screenwriter Eran Kolirin, who handles the delicate shades of politics with subtle tones. The Egyptians encounter a few Israeli townspeople, who respond with curiosity about the band, are variously friendly and wary, and provide them with shelter, food, music and companionship during their visit.
“In the morning, the band reassembles and leaves: An interlude involving two “enemies,” Arabs and Israelis, that shows them both as only ordinary people with ordinary hopes, lives and disappointments. It has also shown us two souls with rare beauty.” (Roger Egbert)

Share this:Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)Click to print (Opens in new window)

Medicine in Ancient Judaism: Why does G-d attempt to kill Moses in Exodus 4?
2020-10-08 19:30 - 21:00 | Virtual streamed
Directly after the burning bush scene, G-d inexplicably tries to kill Moses (Exodus 4:24-26). Fortunately, Moses’ life is saved by Zipporah’s enigmatic “Bridegroom of Blood” ritual. Commentators both ancient and modern have proposed many solutions by filling in the gaps, proposing reasons such as Moses’ failing courage or procrastination. But what did this episode mean in its original setting? This talk will look at how G-d’s attempt on Moses’ life is better understood in the broader historical context of ancient medicine. In this talk, Dr Askin will draw upon recent research from her current project, Medicine in Ancient Israel and Early Judaism, to explore how and why the Bible’s portrayals of medicine and healing seems so mysterious and distant to us.

Dr Lindsey A. Askin is Lecturer in Jewish Studies, University of Bristol. She is the author of Scribal Culture in Ben Sira (Brill, 2018), which is based on her doctoral thesis (University of Cambridge, 2012-16). Her research interests include mental illness and medicine in the Bible and ancient Judaism, scribal culture and literacy, Ben Sira, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Book of Jubilees.
Share this:Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)Click to print (Opens in new window)

JoJo Rabbit
2020-09-30 20:00 - 22:00 | Scott Cinema, Bristol, Northumbria Drive, Henleaze, Bristol, Avon, BS9 4HN, United Kingdom
Dir. Taika Waititi,
Starring Taika Waititi, Roman Griffin Davis, Scarlett Johansson, Rebel Wilson ; 2019, 123 mins, English
Since the days of Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, film-makers have adopted naive or comedic perspectives to pierce and deflate the hideous bubble of Nazi ideology. Now, in this Golden Globe-nominated adaptation of Christine Leunens’s book Caging Skies, New Zealand writer-director-performer Taika Waititi plays a camp, slapstick version of Hitler, who exists in the mind of a German boy, Jojo. Roman Griffin Davis plays the 10-year-old growing up under the Third Reich, whose jolly dreams of becoming an Aryan war hero are thwarted by his innate sensitivity and squeamishness. Beneath the fanaticism, Jojo is a frightened boy whose sister has died and whose father has disappeared in battle. But his mother, Rosie (Scarlett Johansson), has a secret: she’s a covert anti-fascist who is hiding a Jewish girl, Elsa (Thomasin McKenzie), in the attic. When Jojo stumbles upon Elsa, he is initially horrified, believing her to be a monster. But gradually the pair strike up a love-hate relationship that infuriates imaginary Adolf and causes Jojo to start to rethink his allegiances. Through Elsa, Waititi articulates some fundamental and insidious tenets of antisemitism that are being touted even now. She is the real conduit for empathy in the audience, regardless of whether you’re Jewish or not
Share this:Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)Click to print (Opens in new window)

Finding 100 Faces: capturing Jewish diversity
2020-04-02 19:30 - 21:00 | Redland Green Bowling Club, Redland Green Road, Redland, BS6 7HE
THIS MEETING HAS BEEN CANCELLED BECAUSE OF COVID-19

In early 2018, composer and film maker Benjamin Till, who had only recently discovered he was Jewish, decided to make the film 100 Faces to find out more about the community he’d been a member of for 43 years without realising. His mission was to find one UK-based Jewish person born every year from 1918 to 2017 and it became a journey which took him all over the world. His final 100 people include Jewish people from all walks of life. Rabbis and chazans rub shoulders with Holocaust survivors, kinder-transportees, well-known actors, musicians and writers, and two men who fought at Cable Street. The film is set to an original score performed by the Israel Camera Orchestra. Sit back and enjoy the film (around 6 mins), and then hear about the bumpy and inspirational ride which led there.

Benjamin Till is an award-winning filmmaker and composer. He grew up in Northamptonshire and describes himself as a fanatical Midlander of Welsh and Jewish extraction. He has many works to his credit including Our Gay Wedding: The Musical, a Bafta-nominated film is considered one of Channel 4’s most successful broadcasts. His most recent film, 100 Faces, won the gold award at the Robinson’s International Short Film Competition. Benjamin sings with, and is Resident Composer for, the Jewish male voice choir Mosaic Voices at New West End Synagogue, London.

Share this:Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)Click to print (Opens in new window)

Wondrous Oblivion
2020-03-25 20:00 - 22:00 | Scott Cinema, Bristol, Northumbria Drive, Henleaze, Bristol, Avon, BS9 4HN, United Kingdom
THIS FILM HAS BEEN CANCELLED BECAUSE OF COVID-19

UK 2003, 106 mins, English
Director Paul Morrison
In this comedy drama, David Wiseman is mad about cricket but faces two problems: he’s Jewish and he’s absolutely hopeless at playing the game. When a Jamaican family move next door, the father Dennis schools him in the delicate arts of bat and ball. David’s parents come out of their shells thanks to Dennis, while David learns about growing up and becoming assertive both on and off the pitch.
‘The movie presents a pretty convincing account of its time and is well acted. Like Paul Morrison’s earlier movie, Solomon and Gaenor, Wondrous Oblivion is somewhat contrived and occasionally sentimental. But it’s warm, kindly, and has a heart the size of the Oval.’ (Philip French, Observer review)
Share this:Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)Click to print (Opens in new window)

Stanley Kubrick: New York Jewish Intellectual?
2020-03-11 19:30 - 21:00 | Redland Green Bowling Club, Redland Green Road, Redland, BS6 7HE
PLEASE NOTE THIS TALK HAS NOW BEEN CANCELLED TO AVOID RISK OF COVID-19 (CORONA VIRUS) INFECTION
Stanley Kubrick is widely acknowledged as one of the world’s great directors. Yet few critics or scholars have considered how he emerged from a unique and vibrant cultural milieu: the New York Jewish intelligentsia. Nathan Abrams reexamines the director’s work in context of his ethnic and cultural origins and focuses on several of Kubrick’s key themes-masculinity, ethical responsibility, and the nature of evil.-At the same time, he will explore Kubrick’s fraught relationship with his Jewish identity and his reluctance to be pegged as an ethnic director.
Nathan Abrams is Professor in Film at Bangor University. He co-convenes the British Jewish Contemporary Cultures network. He lectures, writes and broadcasts widely on UK and American popular culture, history film and intellectual culture. He co-founded Jewish Film and New Media and recent books are Eyes Wide Shut: Stanley Kubrick and the Making of His Final Film (with Robert Kolker, Oxford University Press, 2019), Stanley Kubrick: New York Jewish Intellectual (Rutgers University Press, 2018), Hidden in Plain Sight: Jews and Jewishness in British Film, Television, and Popular Culture (Northwestern University Press, 2016).
Share this:Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)Click to print (Opens in new window)

My Polish Honeymoon
2020-02-26 20:00 - 22:00 | Scott Cinema, Bristol, Northumbria Drive, Henleaze, Bristol, Avon, BS9 4HN, United Kingdom
France 2018, 88 mins, French with English subtitles
Director Elise Otzenberger
Packed with charm and laughter, this delightful comedy follows recently-married Parisian couple, Anna and Adam, as they head off on a belated honeymoon to Poland, leaving their baby in the hands of Anna’s parents. Whilst Anna hopes to find out something of her family’s history, Adam is more interested in having a few days alone with his wife. Immersed in a new but strangely familiar culture, they discover a Poland awash with absurd and wonderful characters, picture perfect beauty and unbearable sadness. Élise Otzenberger’s debut feature is an entertaining and life affirming tale about rediscovering roots and being Jewish today.
Share this:Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)Click to print (Opens in new window)

Henri Tajfel: Explorer of identity and difference
2020-02-13 19:30 - 21:00 | Redland Green Bowling Club, Redland Green Road, Redland, BS6 7HE
Henri Tajfel was one of the most influential European social psychologists of the 20th century. Rupert Brown will trace his life from his birth in Poland in 1919, his time as a prisoner-of-war of the Germans in World War II, his post-war work with Jewish orphans in France and Belgium, and thence to his short but brilliant career as a social psychologist. Tajfel was interested in how and why groups see and treat each other in negative ways. He conducted a famous set of studies – known as the minimal group experiments – and developed Social Identity Theory, the heart of which is that people’s identities are often intimately tied up with the groups they belong to and they will work hard to make those groups appear superior to other groups. This theory paved the way for subsequent work which shows how mass-scale human violence, such as the Holocaust, might be possible.
Rupert Brown is Emeritus Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Sussex. He obtained his PhD under Tajfel at the University of Bristol and has been an active researcher in the field of intergroup relations and prejudice. He was the recipient of the 2014 Henri Tajfel medal, awarded by the European Association of Social Psychology and is the author of two widely used student texts, Group Processes (2019) and Prejudice (2010). His biography of Tajfel is published by Routledge (2019).
Share this:Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)Click to print (Opens in new window)

Remember
2020-01-29 20:00 - 22:00 | Scott Cinema, Bristol, Northumbria Drive, Henleaze, Bristol, Avon, BS9 4HN, United Kingdom
Canada/Germany 2015, 94 mins, English
Director Atom Egoyan featuring Christopher Plummer and Martin Landau
‘Christopher Plummer puts on a master class in acting, and his director, Atom Egoyan, delivers one in audience manipulation in Remember a psychological thriller featuring that most blood-boiling of plot devices: a Nazi who escaped justice.’
Mr. Plummer is Zev and Martin Landau plays Max, fellow residents in an assisted-living complex. Max realizes they were both at Auschwitz. He is the brains and Zev is the brawn, so to speak, of a plan Max has hatched to seek vengeance on a concentration camp official who escaped to the United States under a false identity. Max is in a wheelchair, but he arms Zev and sends him on a cross-country journey to interview four people who could be the missing Nazi, the hope being that he’ll kill the man once he finds him. But Zev is floating in and out of dementia, complicating the task and giving Mr. Plummer a chance to turn in a very fine performance.’ (Neil Glezinger, NY Times review)
Share this:Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)Click to print (Opens in new window)

Medicine in Ancient Judaism: Why does G-d attempt to kill Moses in Exodus 4?
2019-12-12 19:30 - 21:00 | Redland Green Bowling Club, Redland Green Road, Redland, BS6 7HE

Back to Berlin
2019-11-27 20:00 - 22:00 | Scott Cinema, Bristol, Northumbria Drive, Henleaze, Bristol, Avon, BS9 4HN, United Kingdom
Following eleven modern-day Jewish bikers on an epic journey from Tel-Aviv to Berlin, crossing nine European countries and 4,500 km in twenty-four days. Their mission, to deliver the Maccabi torch to Hitler’s infamous 1936 Olympic stadium, for the opening ceremony of the 2015 European Maccabiah Games. These riders follow in the tracks of the early 1930s’ bikers who set out from Tel Aviv to all corners of Europe. En route, each country holds a chilling resonance for our motor-cycling Holocaust survivors, descendants of survivors and the grandson of a 1930s Maccabiah Rider. Stories of defiance and survival are revealed, as well as those of horrifying tragedy. As resurgent populism and anti-Semitism once again rear their ugly heads, this film brings an important message through the voice of those who have been personally affected by one of the darkest pages in human history. This isn’t simply a “Jewish” story. It is the story of people overcoming the worst from fellow man to restate our common humanity.
Share this:Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)Click to print (Opens in new window)

Here I am; Capturing the Stories of the South Wales Jewish Community
2019-11-14 19:30 - 21:00 | Redland Green Bowling Club, Redland Green Road, Redland, BS6 7HE
There have been two projects in Cardiff over the last 10 years that have used oral history to capture the stories of the Cardiff Jewish community, as well as preserving written records. The talk will look at how we went about it and some of the advantages of oral history, and will give some fascinating snippets from the stories people had to tell. It will also look at what we learnt about identity and belonging and the diversity of experience of the community, from the last Barmitzvah in a synagogue in Cologne ten days before Kristallnacht to the first Jewish wedding in Kidwelly, a village in West Wales.
Colin Heyman was involved in the Hineni Oral History project which started the work in 2009 and John Minkes of the Jewish History Association of South Wales has continued the work over the last three years. In our other lives, Colin is a trainer and facilitator, John a retired criminologist. Our other joint activity is going to see Cardiff City play
Share this:Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)Click to print (Opens in new window)

A bag of marbles (un sac de billes)
2019-10-30 20:00 - 22:00 | Scott Cinema, Bristol, Northumbria Drive, Henleaze, Bristol, Avon, BS9 4HN, United Kingdom
Last year this film was sold out, so we are reshowing it. Canadian director Christian Duguay explores the horrors of World War Two from the perspective of two young Jewish boys living in Nazi-occupied France in Un Sac de Billes (A Bag of Marbles). Based on the acclaimed memoirs of the same name by Joseph Joffo, A Bag of Marbles is a lavishly shot production that is brilliantly acted and is a gut-wrenching reminder of one of history’s darkest chapters. Following the fall of Paris to Nazi Germany during World War II, brothers Maurice (Batyste Fleurial) and Joseph (Dorian Le Clech) are forced to leave their close-knit Jewish family behind for the free-zone along the French Riviera.
Despite the grim war scenes and the dark subject matter, Duguay has created a lavishly shot film that boasts stunning cinematography, lush locations and beautiful period costumes. The film beautifully balances the high stake tension with some sweet and endearing moments between the two brothers and celebrates their innocence. While the film is a dark reminder of a terrible page in our history, its heart-warming story reminds us that there are still good people in our darkest moments (modified from Daniele Foti-Cuzzola)
Share this:Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)Click to print (Opens in new window)
