CULTURE
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What Will Survive of Us ★★★★ — Jewish Renaissance
It’s certainly true conversation is a vital part of their lovemaking, but there is plenty of graphically described action too, including some pretty hardcore S&M, as Sam discovers a penchant for bondage and submission and Lily realises that playing the dominatrix is a role that suits her. They seal their bond by buying a pretty – and effective – belt…
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Listening for God in Torah and Creation — Jewish Renaissance
It was important to me to embrace critical scholarship; no text can be understood without context. This applies especially to foundational religious texts, in which it’s easy to think that we have access to God’s unmediated word, when what we really have is the biblical authors’ understanding of God’s will in their place and time. The rabbinic tradition has always…
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Occupied City ★★★★ — Jewish Renaissance
As the lockdown restrictions ease, more political protests are documented. A left-wing anti-fascist rally; a commemoration of the Netherland’s role in slavery; a pro-Palestine demo. These events intermingle with footage of people going about their daily lives. Families skating on the frozen canals. Teenagers getting stoned in the park. A couple making out under a tree. All the while, the…
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A remarkable Jewish family — Jewish Renaissance
The poet dominated the show’s last room, which featured a draft of his 1917 protest letter, A Soldier’s Declaration, decrying World War I as misguided – an act that landed him in Craiglockhart, a military psychiatric hospital, where he became one of the first English patients to undergo Sigmund Freud’s ‘talking cure’. His late-in-life conversion to Catholicism would seem to…
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The Mother of Kamal ★★★★
Dina Ibrahim’s very personal family drama takes its audience on a journey to explore a history unfamiliar to many of us Despite a long history of living in relative peace with their neighbours, I have to admit that my first recollections of hearing about the Jews of Baghdad was when I read about the shocking fate of nine of them,…
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Norman Jewison 1926-2024 — Jewish Renaissance
The award-winning Canadian filmmaker has died aged 97 Norman Jewison, the Canadian movie director who died last week aged 97, was not Jewish. But he did film the musical Fiddler on the Roof, based on a story by the Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem. And with that surname…. How could we not celebrate his life and work? In school, Jewison…
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The Most Precious of Goods ★★★★★ — Jewish Renaissance
The warmth of her voice belies the horrors in the tale she tells. The cosy armchair in which she is seated, wrapped in a shawl, stands on a cheerfully colourful rug, though the monochrome backdrop and side curtains are sober, sinister, even before you realise the numbers on the curtains evoke the numbers tattooed on the arms of concentration camp…
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A century of Rhapsody in Blue — Jewish Renaissance
The premiere performance was attended by musical luminaries including Igor Stravinsky, Fritz Kreisler and Leopold Stokowski. Rhapsody in Blue was an immediate success and brought Gershwin worldwide fame. Incorporated into the Rhapsody were hallmarks of jazz, including blue notes, long passages of syncopated rhythms, and onomatopoeic musical effects. He later reflected: “There had been so much chatter about the limitations…
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Don’t Destroy Me ★★★★ — Jewish Renaissance
They may be onto something, however, for George (Timothy O’Hara), a bookie and the other lodger on the same floor as the Kirz household, is a bold example of toxic masculinity and barely hides that he’s getting it on with Shani. It’s hardly surprising then that Leo is a figure of anger, who cannot empathise with the son who needs…
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Jacqueline Nicholls — Jewish Renaissance
I am a Jew in London, watching from afar what is happening to close friends and family in Israel. Where do I stand? I am outside, trying to follow what is happening over there. I am in a city and fearful of the chants on the streets here. I am caught up in these dark times, but uncertain of my…
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