Despite superb acting and Patrick Marber’s nimble direction, Marius von Mayenburg’s unsettling drama about the legacy of the Holocaust proves problematic…
Jonathan Glazer's new historical drama about the Holocaust won big at the Baftas last week and looks set to do the same at the Oscars, but does it do the horrific period justice from a Jewish perspective? Irene Wise reports…
After the smash-hit success of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer comes Einstein and the Bomb. Netflix’s new film is an obvious attempt to capitalise on the current public interest in the Atomic Age and the scientists who brought it about. Unfortunately, it offers very little…
In his latest novel, Jacobson’s authoritative wit is at its best as he follows his protagonists through years spent together, through old age and eventual decline, in what his publisher describes as ‘a funny, passionate, lyrical and provocative exploration of a love affair through time’…
This new offering by British director Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave, Hunger) veers from his usual dramatic storytelling to documentary territory, but calling it that is a misnomer. Occupation City is closer to a piece of visual art. Informed by the book, Atlas of an Occupied City…
Lex Lesgever was born on 1 May 1929 in the historic heart of Amsterdam, where Jews had thrived for centuries. He was barely 11 when the Germans occupied the Netherlands in May 1940. By May 1945, approximately 107,000 of the 140,500 of the country’s Jewish population were wiped…
There is something extraordinarily powerful about simple storytelling. Although Samantha Spiro, the narrator of this story is actually addressing a packed theatre, it felt like she spoke directly to me as she began ‘Once upon a time…’. The tale she tells is not a fairy story, although…
Despite a long history of living in relative peace with their neighbours, I have to admit that my first recollections of hearing about the Jews of Baghdad was when I read about the shocking fate of nine of them, hanged in public, along with three Muslims and two Christians, all accused…
When Alfred Ezra Sassoon, father of World War I poet Siegfried Sassoon, became the first member of his family to marry outside his faith, relatives were appalled. Alfred’s mother was disconsolate, his grandmother visited a…