Latest Articles

Labor Pains

May 16, 2012  •  Jewish Ideas Daily

If Ed Miliband, leader of Britain's Labor Party, emerges victorious from the country's next general election, he will become the first Jewish Prime Minister to inhabit Number 10 Downing Street since Benjamin Disraeli renovated the innards of that venerable residence in 1877. But the comparison with Disraeli doesn't reach far. Though Disraeli was baptized into the Anglican Church as a child, his Jewish origins were an enduring presence throughout his literary and political career. Miliband, by contrast, has treated his Jewish heritage with seeming indifference. He was raised by Jewish Marxist parents in the vibrant, multicultural surroundings of Camden Town in north London. Indeed, his late father, Ralph Miliband, was one of Britain's foremost Marxist professors—a "non-Jewish Jew," Marxist historian Isaac Deutscher's term for Jews who had transcended their Jewish parochialism to attain universalist revolutionary consciousness.

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U.S. academic controversy could shed light on future of anti-Semitism studies

May 14, 2012  •  Ha'aretz

How should the study of prejudice, including anti-Semitism, be approached in an academic setting? American universities have traditionally shed more heat than light on this knotty question, as an ongoing and bitter controversy involving the field of black studies demonstrates.

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Vidal Sassoon, Streetfighter

May 10, 2012  •  Tablet

Rabbi Israel Elia, head of the venerable Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue in London's Maida Vale district, remembers the day when he met Vidal Sassoon, one of the congregation's most celebrated sons. Elia had been quietly working in his office on a spring morning two years ago when an anxious colleague relayed the news that a film crew had gathered outside the building. The rabbi went to investigate.

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South Sudan is a Jewish Cause

April 25, 2012  •  JNS/The Algemeiner

The great Jewish historian, Salo W. Baron, famously criticized the "lachrymose" conception of Jewish history, by which he meant the reduction of the Jewish experience to a series of gory persecutions. This view of the Jewish past often colors our sense of the Jewish present, with the result that we see ourselves as having few friends, or even none at all, in a hostile world which resents the re-establishment of Jewish sovereignty after centuries when Jews were at the mercy of others.

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'Boycott Israel,' the Movie—Starring Emma Thompson

April 10, 2012  •  The Algemeiner

If Hollywood ever makes a movie about the movement to boycott Israel, I can think of no one better suited to the starring role than Emma Thompson.

I imagine Thompson's character as a schoolteacher or a librarian, dowdy looking with just a hint of prettiness. She lives alone in a cozy apartment filled with potted plants and books on personal growth, third-world politics and vegetarian cookery. Her significant other is a fluffy cat that nestles in her lap every night as she sits in front of her computer reading the latest dispatches from occupied "Palestine," her face etched with righteous disbelief. She doesn't have time for a boyfriend, but that won't stop her would-be suitor, an equally self-righteous, mildly kooky Jewish writer—think Peter Beinart—from trying to win her heart.

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