Mazel tov is in order for Duolingo! Already firmly cemented as one of the world’s foremost language-learning apps, today they released Yiddish on their platform. The Jewish language joins Hebrew, Welsh, Gaelic, Navajo, Latin and…
If the past year has taught us anything, it is to savour every kind of entertainment we can enjoy from home, be it via the TV, radio or internet. Radio holds a special place in my heart, a love affair which began in earnest when, aged just eight, I won a brand new Bush radio in a raffle (with…
In what is undoubtedly a scoop for BBC Radio 4, stellar Jewish playwright David Mamet has reimagined his new thriller. The Christopher Boy’s Communion is directed by Martin Jarvis and stars Mamet’s wife Rebecca Pidgeon…
Since my schooldays, I’ve had a thing for TS Eliot – despite overtly antisemitic lines in his poetry. “Rachel née Rabinovitch tears at the grapes with murderous paws” (Sweeney Among the Nightingales, 1920) gave me pause for thought all right. Our English teacher called him out…
Dozens of iconic Jerusalem landmarks are set to light up next week in the first tourist attraction to open in Jerusalem since the start of the pandemic. Jerusalem: Follow the Lights invites locals and global viewers alike to admire the illuminations, which are intended to bring levity and…
Last year in September, Sotheby’s announced the forthcoming sale of Botticelli’s Young Man Holding a Roundel (c.1480), prompting London artist Philippa Abrahams to spend the next few months working on a reproduction (pictured below). It is now placed in her…
Dame Fanny Waterman DBE passed away peacefully on the morning of Sunday 20 December in her residential care home in Ilkley, Yorkshire. She is survived by her two sons, Robert and Paul, and six granddaughters. Born in Leeds in 1920, Waterman studied at the Royal College of Music…
Harold Pinter’s early one-act play is a concise study in how to build an atmosphere of rising menace that accelerates to a terrifying conclusion in just under an hour. As part of Hampstead Theatre’s opening season in 1960, it was paired with his first play The Room. Here as its 60th…
Conditions in the concentration camp Terezin (German Theresienstadt), near Prague, designed by the Nazis to hold Jews en route to the death camps, were harsh enough to ensure many died right there. Yet its name also evokes the extraordinary flowering of artistic life the prisoners…
Never a Native is for every woman who has ever yearned, aspired or been driven to activism against unethical attitudes and behaviours to women. It is also for every woman who, like the author Alice Shalvi, has the courage to face her failures, doubts and guilt resulting from her…
The inopportune death of Rabbi Sacks last Saturday is a tragedy for the world. The ideas he's been communicating so engagingly and effectively since he first went into print in the 1990s have now become widely adopted, and have recently acquired a new urgency: the importance…
As we wake to a war of words transatlantic style at a possibly pivotal moment in history, Steven Carl McCasland’s war of witty women provides a timely, telling antidote. It’s June 1940, the eve of the fall of France to the Nazis. Hunkered down in the French Alps, devoted couple Alice B Toklas…
This year as the UK Jewish Film Festival goes online, enabling so many of us to watch virtually, I’ve been able to indulge in the special pleasure and stimulation of watching what UKJFF has on offer from the comfort of my sofa, munching kosher popcorn throughout. For this review…
Louise Glück, the American daughter of Russian Jews on her mother’s side and Hungarian on her father’s, rarely writes about explicitly Jewish subject matter. The statement released by the Nobel Prize Committee citied “her…