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 … Continue reading A Call to Spy
“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 … Continue reading The Ghetto: Travelling through history
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 … Continue reading Everything is Illuminated
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 … Continue reading Ernest Bloch: more than a Jewish composer
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 … Continue reading Yentl
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 … Continue reading A Land of Milk and Mufletta: what Israeli food says about Israeli culture
Director Woody Allen, featuring Diane Keaton, Mia Farrow, Jeff Daniels Radio Days is an American comedy-drama film written and directed by Woody Allen, who also narrates. The film looks back on an American family's life during the Golden Age of Radio using both music and memories to tell the story. It stars an ensemble cast. The film's soundtrack, which features songs from … Continue reading Radio Days
Izzy Posen • London Following the extermination of Europe’s Yiddish speaking Jewry in the holocaust and the assimilation of the remaining Yiddish speaking American Jews, many have considered Yiddish a dying language. But in fact, an estimated half a million native speakers of Yiddish currently live in Israel, North America, Europe and Australia and … Continue reading The state of Yiddish in the 21st Century
Click here for film trailer Over a decade in the making, the film raises questions about authority, conformity, complicity and perpetration, national identity, and responsibility, as men and women ranging from former SS members to civilians in never-before-seen interviews reckon with – in very different ways – their memories, perceptions and personal appraisals of their … Continue reading Final Account
England’s first known Jewish inhabitants came from Normandy soon after the Norman Conquest and by the end of the twelfth century the community in England had been granted a right of residence and a right of free movement plus a substantial degree of autonomy in intra-communal disputes by king Henry II and his sons Richard … Continue reading Jews and the Law in Medieval England
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