When Alfred Ezra Sassoon, father of World War I poet Siegfried Sassoon, became the first member of his family to marry outside his faith, relatives were appalled. Alfred’s mother was disconsolate, his grandmother visited a…
For those who have lived in a bedsit, Michael Hastings’ semi-autobiographical drama will bring back memories. The late Jewish playwright was only 18 when the play premiered in 1956, so it is perhaps his identification with his troubled 15-year-old hero Sammy that makes the boy's tense…
“I am an ordinary person,” declares Nicholas Winton, the man who saved 669 Czech children from the Nazis. The young Winton (Johnny Flynn) defines himself as a European and a socialist, but hesitates to declare his Jewish background. Similarly coy, in advertising this film…
If ever there was a drama that delivered what it says on the tin, this is it. Rock ’n’ Roll suffuses the action and not just as background musical motif. The Tom Stoppard show premiered in 2006 at London’s Royal Court Theatre, predating his award-winning 2020 Leopoldstadt, which…
When Japan famously featured in Puccini’s opera Madam Butterfly in 1904, the Treaty of Kanagawa – which opened up Japan to the West – was 50 years in the past. Fast forward to 1976 and the events took centre stage once again in Stephen Sondheim’s musical Pacific Overtures. The…
Panto has long been a staple of the Christmas season, but what of Hanukkah? JW3 has just the ticket! The north London Jewish cultural centre has not only put on a cracker of a show (running until early January, including…
Much of the film Maestro is shot in black and white, but it opens in full colour. “I miss her terribly,” the older Leonard Bernstein says, of his late wife Felicia. At the piano he plays 'Postlude' (adeptly performed by Bradley Cooper), from his opera A Quiet Place, where the son mourns the loss…
"There are, of course, other stereotypes in all ethnic groups that warrant consideration," said Will Eisner in a 2003 interview on his graphic novel, Fagin the Jew. "The Jewish ones have been used to hurt, so there is an emergency to…
In Berlin in 1933, seven-year-old Mara stands outside a shop once owned by a Jew. Now it sells instruments to gauge the shape of a skull, issuing certificates of 'Aryanism' if deemed appropriate. The photographer recording this moment was also a Jew; if apprehended by Nazi forces…
The trials of Pierre Goldman are little known in the UK, but infamous in France and inevitably draw comparisons with the Dreyfus Affair. Goldman was imprisoned for life in 1974 for the murder of two women in a Paris pharmacy…
Daniel AM Rosenberg’s musical comedy Less Than Kosher follows self-proclaimed “bad Jew” Viv, a washed-up singer at 30. She finds herself deliriously hungover after Yom Kippur, but after a trip to her family’s synagogue manages to fall “ass-first” into a job as a substitute cantor. What…
When someone speaks of the American Dream, the image is usually of a well-to-do white-collared individual returning to their picket-fenced home where a doting spouse tends to two pristine children. Not, heaven forbid, a chain-smoking elderly Greek Jewish immigrant holding court with…
Escapologist Harry Houdini was a legend in his own lifetime. His headline-grabbing stunts, involving mystifying, often lurid escapes from chains, padlocks, water tanks and suspension from skyscrapers, ensured that his reputation would live on long after his death. He boasted that he…
In light of the current tension in the Middle East and an increase in antisemitic activity around the world, it would seem there's little to laugh about right now. Cue the musical with idiosyncratic punctuation in its title, a UK debut from Israeli playwright and composer Uri Agnon that's not…
The expansive, stunning Philip Guston exhibition at Tate Modern enables us to follow the development of this prolific and important artist. Born in Canada in 1913 to refugee parents who had fled persecution in Ukraine, Guston (then Goldstein) was the youngest of seven…