Judaism
Bill de Blasio isn’t an anti-Semite but…
Bumbling Bill de Blasio is all thumbs, and not just on Twitter. Slow to respond when Orthodox Jews suffered an…
A Rabbi’s Notebook
Last Monday night and Tuesday were our Jewish festival of Purim, when we recall the events described in the Book…
Sanders and Bloomberg take the American Jewish feud public
You wait decades for a Jewish candidate for the White House, and then two come along at once — like…
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…
AOC: ignorant or anti-Semitic?
When my grandmother Masha was liberated by the British Army from the Nazi concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen, she was 19…
Angels through the ages
A good question for your upcoming Lent quiz: where are angels mentioned in the Nicene Creed? I asked this at…
The ‘other’ life of Harvey Milk
This is the story of the ‘other’ Harvey Milk. We all know about Harvey the San Francisco politician who was…
The origins of Labour’s racism
Another word which has gained a new meaning in the present decade, along with ‘vulnerable’ and ‘diverse’: survivor. Once it…
Is Prince Charles so fond of Islam because he distrusts Jews?
It has long been my belief that whereas the quality of gentiles drawn to Judaism is very high (Marilyn Monroe,…
Reza Aslan doesn’t fear God. But should he fear his fellow Muslims?
Eating human brains, burying one’s face in dead people’s ashes and publicly deriding the president of the United States as…
Brass tacks
The last time I reviewed a restaurant in Selfridges, a PR man rang up to ask what he could do…
The wandering Jew
It’s been a long time coming for György Spiró. However much Hungarian writers complain about the isolation forced upon them…
If you believe the internet, I was the Israeli army’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…
Of gods and men
Tom Holland on Egypt, where the deities were born and history itself began
Character assassination
Here are three truths about play-writing. A script without an interval will be structurally flawed. A vague, whimsical title means…
Barometer
Gesture politics A royal home movie from 1933 apparently showed the future Queen, aged seven, and her mother giving a…
Vespasian vs Islamic State
As Ahmed Rashid argued last week, it is hard to see what the West is doing in the Middle East,…
Censoring Jews
The attempt to ban Jewish men from seeing ‘The Gift of Fire’ sets a very dangerous precedent
A family at war
Bad Jews has completed its long trek from a smallish out-of-town venue to a full-scale West End berth. Billed as…
A heterodox understanding of Jesus
When James Carroll was a boy, lying on the floor watching television, he would glance up at his mother and…
O Jerusalem!
Unchosen is the journalist Julie Burchill’s account of how she — a bright and bratty working-class girl from Bristol —…
Arguments with God
Former chief rabbi Jonathan Sacks on the return of religion to public life and the civil war that Islam needs
Invading the womb of gods
The fighters of the Islamic State are bringing a deadly new intolerance to a territory rich in ancient sects
Letter from Tel Aviv
‘There’s a dark cloud rising from the desert floor/ I packed my bags and I’m heading straight into the storm/…
No dumb waiter
Comedians always like to claim that they started making jokes after childhoods made harsh by poverty; that at a formative…
