Jewish Quarterly - Contemporary writing, politics and culture

By Aharon Appelfeld Schocken Books, 2009, $23.95 In some sort of translation trompe l’oeil, this work appears longer in English and the book heavier and more substantial. The…
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By Cynthia Ozick Houghton Mifflin, 2008, $24 Four Jiggers of James, A Whiff of Woolf. I confess to having a thing for the fiction of four of my older Bronx contemporaries. For…
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‘Anglo-Jewry finds its voice’, trumpeted the front page of the Jewish Chronicle during the harrowing days of the Gaza bombardment. What voice exactly was this? What was it saying?…
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Two scenes from Michelene Wandor’s new play, ‘Three Sides of a Square’. The play is set in 1917, and deals with the overlapping fortunes of four people, towards the end of World…
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Surely we’re all multiculturists now. We accept the necessity of the pluralist democratic state, with multiple groups sharing a contested yet neutral public space. We know, as…
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What prompted you to explore a specifically Jewish family? I knew early on that I wanted to write about the child of atheist parents becoming religious and the daughter of…
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On summer evenings, Uncle Nathan used to put on shadow plays. With nothing but ten fingers and a beam of light against a plain white wall, he astounded us with lions and monkeys,…
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Fred Wander called his recollections Das gute Leben,  The Good Life — good not in either of its narrow senses of virtuous or epicurean, but rich, full, kindly, generous.  Its…
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‘Some people have ingrown toenails. This guy has an ingrown soul,’ Thomas grumbled. It was 1960, and he had just returned from an interview about his final-year project with a…
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According to those who knew him best, the artist Arnold Daghani (1909–1985) had an exceptionally retentive memory for events, names, dates and places. For him, as for other…
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