Column for Jewish News August 6 2021 I’ve commented in this space before about people choosing their battles in the Jewish world, and how sometimes, it seems to me, people get aerated over complete nonsense. Let us, for the sake of all our sanity, draw a veil over the latest ice-cream farrago, sufficing it only […]
Column JN July 22 2021 I was going to write this week about one more high-flown, portentous issue to which we all ought to be paying more attention, but the truth is it’s too hot, and I am just putting off the evil hour when I have to go and do something towards tidying and […]
Column for Jewish News July 9 2021 It’s been a long old week. First, Health Secretary Matt Hancock (remember him?) was obliged to resign for…well, hypocrisy. It wasn’t so much a matter of having an affair – as certainly the prime minister would be the last one with any sort of moral authority on that […]
Column JN June 25 2021 issue by Jenni Frazer A long time ago, O best beloved, I lived around the corner from Balfour Street, the official residence of the Israeli prime minister. In my day that was Yitzhak Rabin, who had beaten Yitzhak Shamir in the election. Now you could say many things about Shamir […]
Column for Jewish News June 8 2021 Most people will remember the nuns’ song from The Sound of Music: “How do you solve a problem like Maria? How do you catch a cloud and pin it down? How do you find a word that means Maria? A flibbertijibbet! A will-o’-the wisp! A clown!” Inexorably, it […]
Column JN issue April 1/2 2021 Israel has just held elections and the president has made up his mind to ask the leader of the party with the most seats to form the next government. And she — no, that is not a typo — has accepted. Fifty-two years ago, Israel welcomed its fourth prime […]
Column for Jewish News March 5 2021 It has long been my belief that, all too often, people – particularly on social media — get aerated about paltry issues, raising them to the level of screaming hysteria. Sometimes, I think, ignoring the perpetrators is a better proposition, or even laughing at them. We know from […]
For the Jewish News February 18 2021 This week, with Pesach thundering towards us at a rate of knots (I know, I know, we haven’t done Purim yet but Pesach is definitely on the horizon), I got to thinking about food. Well, the truth is that, like everyone in lockdown, I rarely stop thinking about […]
For Jewish News February 1 2021 David Baddiel, as is well known, is a prodigiously clever man who has used his deserved public profile as a writer and comedian to challenge antisemitism and hateful stereotyping. His Twitter biography, famously, uses the blunt describer, “Jew” — no more, no less. What you see is what you […]
Column for Jewish News January 8 2021 In all the flurry of articles celebrating the end of 2020, one news story perhaps did not get the attention it may have sought. That was the arrival at Ben-Gurion Airport on December 30 of a heavily bearded and be-kippah-ed man and his wife. The couple’s arrival was […]