Jews

Thursday

Steerpike

Clash of the Titans: Rod Liddle calls Piers Morgan a halfwit

Piers Morgan’s claim in the Daily Mail that the Prime Minister of Israel’s reaction to the  terror attacks in Denmark ‘is a disgrace’ has caught the attention of Mr S’s colleague Rod Liddle. Liddle writes in defence of Benjamin Netanyahu in this week’s Spectator, arguing that Netanyahu’s offer of Israeli sanctuary to Jews should not be ridiculed. He also finds time to level a few insults at Morgan, whose face apparently ‘resembles a puckered anus’. ‘The bien-pensant attacks on Netanyahu were epitomised by the idiotic Piers Morgan, writing in the Daily Mail. I suppose one should not be surprised about what emanates from a man with a face which so closely resembles a

Monday

Geoffrey Alderman

Israel has become a life-insurance policy for many British Jews

Weekends are quality time in the Alderman household. On Saturday evenings, following the termination of the Sabbath, my wife and I are accustomed to sit together, review the week that has just ended, and map out the week ahead. But last Saturday the conversation took a very different turn. My wife and I considered the drama that had unfolded in Copenhagen, and asked ourselves, for the very first time in over forty-one years of marriage, whether we should not make plans to leave (flee?) England – this green and hitherto pleasant land in which we had both been born and educated– and seek shelter in some foreign field. We considered

Tuesday

Douglas Murray

Adolf Eichmann hoped his ‘Arab friends’ would continue his battle against the Jews

Over Christmas I finally got around to reading Eichmann Before Jerusalem by Bettina Stangneth.  I cannot recommend this book – newly translated from the German – highly enough.  It challenges and indeed changes nearly all received wisdom about the leading figure behind the genocide of European Jews during World War II. The title of course refers to Hannah Arendt’s omnipresent and over-praised account of Adolf Eichmann’s 1961 trial, Eichmann in Jerusalem: a report on the banality of evil.  I would say that Stangneth’s book not merely surpasses but actually buries Arendt’s account.  Not least in showing how Arendt was fooled by Eichmann’s role-play in the dock in Jerusalem.  For whereas

Friday

Melanie McDonagh

French secularism is starting to feel the strain

France is to institute something called a National Secularity Day, which will happen on 9th December every year, when French schools will remind pupils how to sing the national anthem, what the tricolor stands for and generally celebrate the values of the Republic. Odd, isn’t it, that this should sound so much like the reflexive, everyday practice in the United States, where flag veneration and the separation of church and state are hardwired into the consciousness of US children, without impinging at all on the extent of religious observance? Every French school will have to go through this Secularism observance day but it’s painfully apparent which community it’s directed at:

Wednesday

Geoffrey Alderman

Here’s how politicians can convince British Jews that they have a future in the UK

A recent study has suggested that over half of Britain’s Jews feel they have no future in the UK. At first glance this might seem outrageous, indeed incredible. Arguably (one might say) we Jews are the most successfully integrated of all the UK’s ethnic minorities.  A miniscule set of communities – comprising in total 0.5 per cent of the UK’s total population –  British Jewry punches well above its weight in all walks of life: the learned professions; the arts; the entertainment industries; academia; big and not so big business; even politics. Of course (you might retort) Jews have a future in the UK! A more pertinent question might be to

Thursday

Norman Lebrecht

The Nazi origins of the Vienna Phil’s New Year’s Day concert

It may be the last water-cooler moment in world television. On the first morning of the year, at 11.15 Central European Time, in a place that considers itself the epicentre of Europe, a group of men in formal dress mount the Musikvereinssaal stage in Vienna to perform a ritual that passes for culture and tradition. It is, of course, neither. The music is strictly bar-room, written by members of the Strauss family as social foreplay for the soldiery and serving classes in low taverns. Like most forms of dirty dancing, the music rose vertically from barroom to ballroom and was soon performed as encores by symphonic orchestras to dowager purrs

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

Is London’s West End Jewish enough for David Baddiel’s musical The Infidel?

David Baddiel has turned his movie, The Infidel, into a musical. The set-up is so contrived and clumsy that it has a sweetness all its own. A golden-hearted London cabbie, named Mahmoud, discovers that he was adopted at birth and that his real parents were Jewish. This strikes him as intriguing rather than alarming, and he starts to investigate Judaism with the sort of disinterested curiosity of a man taking up astronomy after inheriting a telescope and a star-chart from an eccentric uncle. Mahmoud wants an easy life so he keeps his secret from his wife, Saamiyah, and from his son, Rasheed, who plans to marry a girl named Ji-Ji

Wednesday

James Forsyth

Ukip’s unsavoury Polish ally in the European Parliament

One of the best arguments against European political integration is the people with whom British political parties end up allied in the European Parliament. For reasons of parliamentary influence and, let’s be frank, money, British parties don’t want to sit on their own, so instead sit as part of broader European groups. Now, all of these groups contain MEPs whose views would be considered distasteful in Britain. But even by this standard, Ukip’s latest recruit to its group seems pretty extreme — Robert Iwaszkiewicz comes from a party that even Marine Le Pen refused to do business with. The leader of his party, the Polish Congress of the New Right,

Friday

Damian Thompson

‘Jews Got Money’ – challenging anti-Semitism and a Jewish taboo

The other day someone tweeted at me the words ‘J£w$ Got Mon€¥’. And I was just about to tweet back: ‘Get stuffed, you anti-Semitic scum’. But I clicked on the link and realised I’d got the wrong end of the stick. The tweet came from Sasha Andreas, who’s made a documentary about poor Jews, mostly in New York. It features leaders of Jewish charities talking about a subject so sensitive that their own community is nervous about it – understandably. The words ‘Jews’ and ‘money’ are usually joined together by anti-Semites. Also, New York Jews are the wealthiest Jewish diaspora in history. ‘Poor Jews’ is assumed to be an oxymoron.

Tuesday

James Walton

Is it really imaginable that the British people could rise up against the Jews?

Howard Jacobsen’s J has been shortlisted for the 2014 Booker Prize today: At first sight, J represents a significant departure for Howard Jacobson. It’s set in a future Britain where some sort of apocalypse — known only as ‘WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED’ — has taken place several decades ago. It also contains virtually no jokes. Yet, from within this unfamiliar framework, some familiar concerns soon emerge. In 2010, The Finkler Question was hailed as the first comic novel to win the Booker Prize since Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils. But the book darkened considerably towards the end, with Jacobson unsmilingly warning his readers — and especially any fellow Jews who regard such warnings as ‘hysterical’ — about

Wednesday

The Spectator

Watch: Douglas Murray and Ben Soffa from Palestinian Solidarity Campaign discuss anti-Semitism

In this week’s Spectator, Melanie Phillips suggests that anti-Semitism is on the rise, fueled by the events in the Middle East. Douglas Murray and Ben Soffa, Secretary of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, discuss whether this is the case in this week’s View from 22 video special. Here’s an extract from Melanie’s piece. The full article will be available tomorrow: The mask has been torn away. Supposedly anti-Israel protests over the Gaza war have convulsed Europe in the worst scenes of open Jew-hatred since the 1930s. In Paris, predominantly Muslim mobs screaming ‘death to the Jews’ have repeatedly tried to storm synagogues, torched cars and burnt Jewish-owned shops to the ground.

Wednesday

Hugo Rifkind

If Ed Miliband can’t be our first Jewish prime minister, he can still be our first atheist Jewish prime minister from Primrose Hill

Last weekend, in a small New Jersey suburb, I found myself in a liquor store. Never been anywhere like it. The walls were lined with single malts of rare and impressive varieties, and the clientele both knew their whisky and spoke of little else. Yet they were all, also, to a man (and they were all men) ultra-orthodox Jews. Properly ultra, as well. There’s a website you might have come across called ‘Amish or Hipster’ and it shows pictures of young folks in beards and hats and braces, and asks you to vote on which particular cult you reckon you are looking at. This lot were like that. The beards

Thursday

David Crane

How Denmark’s Jews escaped the Nazis

Of all the statistics generated by the Holocaust, perhaps some of the most disturbing in the questions they give rise to are the following. Of the Jews in Hungary, the Netherlands, Greece, Latvia and Poland, between 70 and 90 per cent died, while the corresponding figures for Estonia, Belgium Norway and Romania were between 40 and 50. In France and Italy somewhere around 20 per cent perished. In both Bulgaria and Denmark, however, just one. Bo Lidegaard’s Countrymen is the story of how Denmark to a great extent saved its  Jewish population from the labour and extermination camps, but it inevitably raises issues of equal relevance to the rest of

Thursday

Ed West

Denmark’s ban on ritual slaughter is not kosher

Fey metropolitan ponce that am I, I love nothing better than curling up on the sofa with my partner to watch a Scandinavian drama. Borgen, The Killing; we haven’t got around to watching The Bridge, but only because I’m so busy walking around with a baby in a Kari-me or actually lactating milk, so European and progressive am I. Part of the fun of these Scandi dramas is that the assumed leftism is so ingrained as to be almost comedic; each episode of Borgen features the statsminister having some moral dilemma because her coalition can’t sell hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of windpower to a former Soviet state because

Friday

Ed West

Who cares about Israel and Palestine?

The thing that most surprised me about Scarlett Johansson being asked to cut ties with an Israeli company she was brand ambassador for was that the company in question was Soda Stream. Soda Stream? Does she also work for Betamax and the Atari ST? I had no idea people still drank this 1980s icon, let alone that it was caught up in the world’s most interminably boring debate. For Israelis and Palestinians the quest to find a peaceful settlement in this tiny piece of land, only 1.2 Waleses in size, is a matter of life and death. For foreigners active in the conflict on one side or the other it is

Friday

Alex Massie

George Galloway blames Israel for the use of chemical weapons in Syria

Say this for George Galloway: every time you think he cannot sink any lower he finds new ways to surprise you. His latest contribution to Press TV, Iran’s propaganda station, speaks for itself. Parody is pointless. Given his history and his paymasters, we would expect him to defend the Assad regime in Syria. Even so, under-estimating his ability to sniff out the true villains is never sensible. Here’s his “analysis” of the use of chemical weapons in Syria: “If there’s been any use of nerve gas it’s the rebels that used it. […] If there has been a use of chemical weapons it was al-Qaeda who used chemical weapons. Who

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

I didn’t want to talk about my cancer. But then I got to the party…

Searching the web for information about the enigmatic Bilderberg group, I came across a website called Who Controls America? It’s a simple site to navigate: you click on ‘White House’ or ‘Wall Street’ or ‘Hollywood’ and you get a list of the main players and a big colour photo of each from the neck up. (You know where I’m going already, don’t you?) Each face is identified as belonging to a particular race or, if you prefer, heritage. At the bottom of each list is a tally of the percentage of Jewish people on that list, the percentage of Jewish people in the US population at large (2 per cent,

Thursday

Toby Young

Julie Burchill interview: ‘I don’t want to be normal’

Seeing Julie Burchill sitting at the back of the restaurant near Victoria Station, I feel a surge of affection. Chin up, sunglasses on, lips fixed in a pout, she is presenting her usual defiant face to the world. In the past, I’ve always thought of her as being like a screen goddess from Hollywood’s golden age — Marlene Dietrich, for instance. Now, she seems more like a fading Broadway diva and I half expect her to break into a rendition of ‘I’m Still Here’ by Stephen Sondheim. The one-time enfant terrible of Fleet Street is now 53 and lives in Brighton, but she is very much still here. Earlier this year,

Saturday

Martin Bright

Taking stock of politics after the conferences

Party conference season is over and it all felt very mid-term. It’s always best not to be swept away by the immediate reaction to leaders’ speeches. Miliband’s was surprisingly good, Cameron’s was not bad at all and Clegg’s was OK too. Where does that leave us? Just under three years until the next election with everything to play for. At the Jewish Chronicle we planned the usual round of political interviews. Simon Hughes was admirably frank. He has not always had the best relationship with the Jewish community, especially since his involvement with the all-party parliamentary group on Islamophobia. He said he was worried the case for a two-state solution

Friday

J P O'Malley

Howard Jacobson interview

While Howard Jacobson’s prose works are renowned for their wit, energy, and self-deprecating, priapic jokes, his latest book, Zoo Time, is perhaps his most light-hearted to date. The protagonist is a struggling novelist, Guy Ableman: a red-blooded male with a penchant for the filth-merchants of English literature. Ableman has two predicaments: the first is his inability to sell any books. The second is his wish to sleep with Poppy, his alluring and sophisticated mother-in-law. Although the book is meant to be read with the smarmy, tongue and cheek tone that Jacobson has become famous for, the novel also passes judgment on a more serious matter: the crisis that has befallen