Jews
The dirty war of Sefton Delmer
Anything to break German morale was allowable in Delmer’s broadcasts from Wavendon Towers – which purported to come from a disgruntled character within Nazi Germany
Prejudice in Pennsylvania: The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, by James McBride, reviewed
Inspired by his own family history, McBride explores the problems faced by a Jewish shopkeeper and her black neighbours in the small town of Chicken Hill in the 1930s
Why the kids hate Jews
The surest way to work up a crusade in favour of some good cause is to promise people they will…
Passports out of hell
Roger Moorhouse describes how various diplomats stationed in Europe risked their positions to issue as many forged ‘tickets to safety’ to Jews as possible
The Anne Frank story continues
Hannah Pick-Goslar, a survivor of the Holocaust and Anne’s friend in Amsterdam, movingly describes their snatched conversations in Belsen before Anne disappeared forever
The Osnabrück witch trials echo down the centuries
Absent mothers resonate in the latest offerings from two heavyweights of French literature. Getting Lost is the diary kept by…
Is T.S. Eliot’s great aura fading?
Cracks are beginning to appear in T.S. Eliot’s once unassailable reputation, says Philip Hensher
Why Jews don’t count to the ‘anti-racists’
Suppose you explain to someone spouting racist, sexist, or otherwise discriminatory ideas that they are prejudiced. You may begin by…
The journalists who scripted the golden age of Hollywood
Tanya Gold on the journalists who scripted the golden age of Hollywood
Heavy-handed satire and schmaltz: American Pickle reviewed
American Pickle is a comedy based on a short story by Simon Rich, originally published in the New Yorker, and…
For Jews in Occupied France, survival was a matter of luck
Late in his life, I asked my uncle René about his exploits in wartime France. What I knew was that…
A brilliant, unrevivable undertaking: Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt reviewed
History will record Leopoldstadt as Tom Stoppard’s Schindler’s List. His brilliant tragic-comic play opens in the Jewish quarter of Vienna…
‘Utterly betrayed’: Britain’s Jews are now politically homeless
We Jews have evolved to be neurotic; so neurotic that, in certain circumstances, the Syrian border feels slightly safer than…
Do Jews think differently?
Sixteen years into a stop-go production saga, I got a call from the director of The Song of Names with…
Why did the Soviets not want us to know about the pianist Maria Grinberg?
Only four women pianists have recorded complete cycles of the Beethoven piano sonatas: Maria Grinberg, Annie Fischer, H. J. Lim…
A major missed opportunity: Disobedience reviewed
Disobedience is an adaptation of Naomi Alderman’s novel about forbidden, lesbian love in orthodox Jewish north London, starring Rachel Weisz…
The polite anti-Semitism of 20th-century Britain
Though it seems to begin as an affectionate memorial to his maternal grandparents, a testimonial to a rare and perfectly…
Why are children in Guernsey extolling Islam to their parents?
I have never been to the island of Guernsey. This is a large world and we have a finite amount…
David Cesarani's final, fascinating, wrong-headed book
David Cesarani, Research Professor of History at Royal Holloway University of London, died at the age of 58 on 25…
If you believe the internet, I was Israel’s answer to Jason Bourne
One of the strangest and, in a weird way, best things to have happened to me in the past year…
What’s it like to have a Nazi for a father?
This is a documentary in which three men travel across Europe together, but they’re not pleasurably interrailing, even though there…
A moving tribute to Janusz Korczak, hero of the Warsaw ghetto
‘My mother and father named me Aron, but my father said they should have named me What Have You Done,…
What happened to the children who survived the Holocaust?
‘I call Zelma Cacik who may be living in London,’ says the announcer, in the clipped RP accent of the…
Bad Jews at the Arts Theatre reviewed: strange, raw, obsessive and brilliant
Bad Jews has completed its long trek from a smallish out-of-town venue to a full-scale West End berth. Billed as…
