Ec chajim is a new Progressive community, mostly made up of families with children, although our oldest regular is 95. I think it’s very important to create connections between generations. I myself want to listen to stories and…
The historic Bevis Marks synagogue at Aldgate in the City of London has unveiled plans for a new culture centre, which it hopes will give the site a new lease of life when it opens in 2022. At an online presentation on 18 March…
The death has been announced of actor Paul Ritter, who succumbed to a brain tumour this week aged just 54. Ritter was the brilliantly versatile actor who played eccentric dad, Martin Goodman, in the most perfect of sitcoms, Robert Popper’s Friday Night Dinner. The setup is that every…
As a child growing up, I was aware from an early age of the impact of the Holocaust on our post-war Jewish family. My mother would talk of her Belgian cousins, captured by the Vichy government after fleeing to France, and of the fate…
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…