In the late 1930s, Australia sought to restrict the flow of refugees, ruling that musicians were ‘unsuitable’ as migrants. Yet some talented Jewish musicians did arrive here and their work has enriched our cultural life.
Around 65,000 Jews lived in Krakow before the Second World War. Now, perhaps a hundred Jews regularly attend synagogue, and antisemitic figurines are sold in markets. What’s wrong with this picture?
Award-winning documentary film On the Banks of the Tigris explores the influence of Iraqi Jewish musicians in the cultural life of Iraq and paints a portrait of a country that was once a thriving multicultural centre.
As we approach the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz on January 27, the victims of the Holocaust stand, with a good reason, at the centre of our attention. It is survivors’ memoirs that shaped…
Eight hundred years ago, a monk named Thomas of Monmouth wrote a bogus account of the life of St. William, a Christian boy supposedly abducted by “the Jews” of Norwich. A boy – “like an innocent lamb…
The Spanish government has approved a draft law that grants citizenship to Jews whose ancestors were expelled over 500 years ago. This follows the approval of a similar law in Portugal last year. In 1492…
In nearly 40 years of teaching Jewish Studies at university the course I found hardest to deliver was my first-year “Introduction to Judaism”. It didn’t get any easier: the more I learned, the more I agonised…