The stalemate over the status of circumcision in Germany has pulled a lot of voices out of the woodwork to stick their oars in – and aside from anodyne rights-based debates about choice, the most pernicious ‘defence’ of circumcision comes in the form of ‘Commandment 614’. Giles Fraser invoked it in his article in today’s [...]
Last week the historian Martin Gilbert brought attention to an article published a couple of months back by the Independent on Sunday. He expressed a certain amount of reasonable outrage over piece in which former ambassador Oliver Miles had questioned the impartiality of the enquiry panel. It is an article that starts off reasonably. Miles [...]
Guest Post by David Rosenberg “To be a Jew means always being with the oppressed and never the oppressors”. The author of these words was the Bundist Marek Edelman who has just died aged 90. He was one of the commanders of the ZOB – the Jewish Fighting Organisation that led the Warsaw Ghetto uprising [...]
The Anthem of the Jewish Partisans: Zog Nit Keyn Mol The news has just come through that Marek Edelman, leader of the Warsaw ghetto uprising has passed away. Edelman cut his political teeth as a leader of the Jewish Workers Bund – a mass Jewish Marxist organisation – in prewar Poland – fighting against an [...]
The proms don’t normally get much in the way of political coverage. In fact the last time they did was about a year and a half ago when Margaret Hodge decided to make some stupid announcement about them not being inclusive enough, so it was a real joy to have such a politically charged concert [...]
The rabbi of Britain’s oldest synagogue, Bevis Marks in the East End of London, has been suspended over his participation in a protest against banks charging high interest rates.
There is a trend these days for picking out funny bits of news and sending them around the globe, and in this week’s selection was a story from Florida. Parents have been complaining about a sculpture called Journey to the New, by Itzik Asher, which depicts an “anatomically correct man” and is situated 100 yards [...]
How much should we memorialise tragic events? Poland is home to many of the landmarks of horror associated with the Nazis. But of these arguably the two most notorious are memorialised in very different ways. Auschwitz-Birkenau is the concentration and extermination camps where over a million Jews, gypsies, communists, trade unionists and lesbians and gays [...]
There was an interesting judgment relating to faith schools today. The Jewish Free School was told by three senior judges that its admissions procedures were illegal, as the test of ethnicity amounted to racial discrimination. Now, I’ll start by saying that I think all state-funded faith schools are a fucking terrible idea. There’s absolutely no [...]
Twenty people gathered in London’s East End on April 19th for a typically low key but poignant memorial ceremony. The Friends of Yiddish were marking the 66th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising – the vastly unequal battle that began on that day in 1943. Led by the youth, Jewish resistance forces in the ghetto [...]
