I grew up in Syrian Kurdistan and loved going to the cinema as a boy but never had enough money to see all the films I wanted. I developed a strategy to get into the cinema: I’d wait outside until the queue had gone in…
From judges being denounced as ‘Enemies of the People’, to speculation on the symbolism of Supreme Court Judge Lady Hale’s spider brooch, the UK’s justice system has been a surprising subject of recent media attention. A former Supreme Court Judge himself, John Dyson is no…
Since the Israeli-Canadian violist Rivka Golani first became aware of the Blackfoot – the First People of Canada – she has been inspired by their history. She has performed several concerts in their honour in Canada and has composed pieces, with their permission, that reference Blackfoot…
“I consider myself a Jewish writer, like all my heroes: Tom Stoppard, David Mamet, Philip Roth, Arthur Miller, Woody Allen,” said director Patrick Marber in an interview in 2015. Now he is directing a play from one of those “heroes”, Tom Stoppard – a play which might be…
It is the biggest heritage project in the world today”, says Uri Bar-Ner from the Kiriaty Foundation, referring to the plan to restore Jewish heritage in Turkey’s coastal city of Izmir. The initiative, led by the Foundation, aims to restore a cluster of synagogues in the city and has attracted…
When Jeremy Arden began researching the sounds of klezmer music he found that the genre drew on a scale that stretched back to use in ancient religious services. Now he is using this distinctive sound for his own composition, Im…
“I loved The Cosmo, which I got to know in the mid-50s. This was the time when not much English could be heard in Finchley Road, and the bus conductor would call out “Jerusalem” or ‘Vienna”! The German accent in the streets was predominantly Austrian, as was the conversation in…
The German composer Kurt Weill is best known for his edgy collaborations with Bertolt Brecht, but his work with the playwright Georg Kaiser, with whom he shared deep social convictions, also inspired serious compositions. Their last collaboration was Der Silbersee (The Silver Lake)…
Who has power over you and what do you want to say to them?” Jeremy Goldstein asks the audience during an evening at Truth to Power Café, the interactive theatrical forum he started in 2016 and which is touring the UK over the next year. In a new twist on agit-prop theatre…
WINNING THE MILLENNIUM AWARD In the year 2000, [JMI founder] Geraldine Auerbach and I applied to the National Lottery Millennium Awards Scheme and we got funding for the Jewish Music Institute, which changed the whole scene in Britain. It allowed us to fund different…