Poulet sofrito, a braised chicken dish with lemon, cardamom and turmeric, was the Sabbath dish at my parents’ home in London after they left Egypt in 1956 following the Suez crisis. In Egypt it had been our cook Awad who prepared it. Without the distractions of life in Cairo within a large extended family, my…
During a script reading at the Jewish Museum London on October 24, two writers with mortality on their minds came face to face: the bushy-eyebrowed 83-year-old East End poet and kitchen sink dramatist Bernard Kops, and the eternally 45-year-old journalist and playwright Isaac Babel. “Some things grab you; you know what makes a play,” explained…
Crossposted from Haaretz This year marks the 80th birthday of Stephen Sondheim, the American lyricist and composer who with his own two hands changed the face of the stage musical in the second half of the 20th century. During his more than 50 years of activity he has created a huge variety of works, in…
‘Sustainable food’ might still have the freshly-peeled glow of a newly enlightened movement sweeping the supermarkets, but to our recidivist shame and the torah’s green credentials, it’s as old fangled as they come. Deuteronomy forbids us to cut down fruit trees when in battle, requiring us to focus on sustainability even in the midst of…
When I arrived at the East London Sukkah this blustery Saturday, the afternoon’s schedule of programs was running behind to accommodate a late entry: “A Guide to Squatting” by the North East London Squatters Network. It was an appropriate event for the festival of Sukkot, which asks us to recall our nomadic history and move…
The great French journalist Albert Londres (1884-1932), whose subjects ranged from prison conditions to mental hospitals to the Sino-Japanese War, chose one of his most fascinating themes in “The Wandering Jew Has Arrived” (“Le juif errant est arrivé”), an on-the-spot account of a 1929 trip through Jewish neighborhoods in England, Eastern Europe, and Tel Aviv….
An article in today’s New York Times reports that the newly-unveiled — and wildly unpopular — logo for the 2012 London Olympics has, among other things, been compared to a swastika. But not all have seen grounds for charging antisemitism. Daniel Finkelstein of the London Times sees embedded in the design the word “zion.”
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