There was an article in one of yesterday’s papers about how more men are following the actor George Clooney and allowing their hair to go grey, which greatly relieved me because mine has been going grey for years. Then I noticed a news item about how a lady from Hampshire had just set a [...]
Tonight we begin Shavuot, the Jewish festival in which we recall the revelation at Mount Sinai in the days of Moses, thirty three centuries ago, when our ancestors made a covenant with God. And tomorrow a book is published, called Permanent Present Tense, about a man with no memory. Henry Molaison, an American born [...]
As the funeral service for Margaret Thatcher takes place today, I will be thinking not of the public person but of the private one. I knew her when I was a child at school. She was my local MP, and when I had an essay to write about politics, I used to go and [...]
While much of the world’s attention has been focussed on one famous person who died this week, I’d like to reflect on another, Professor Sir Robert Edwards, who died two days ago. Edwards was the pioneer of in vitro fertilisation, of what, slightly inaccurately, came to be called “test tube babies.” It took immense dedication: [...]
This coming Sunday is Yom Hashoah, the day we in the Jewish community observe our Holocaust Remembrance Day. And this year it will coincide with the seventieth anniversary of one of the most remarkable moments of that long dark night: the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The Nazis deliberately timed some of their worst programmes of [...]
When people talk about religion in Britain, they tend to speak about beliefs. Which, for Jews, is very odd. Yes, belief is important, but for us religion is fundamentally about rituals, the things we do together as an expression of collective memory and shared ideals. Ritual is the poetry of deed, the choreography of [...]
If you’re driving through a Jewish area this Saturday night or Sunday, don’t be surprised if you see lots of children in the streets wearing fancy dress and masks, or people going from house to house delivering presents of food and drink. The reason is that we’ll be celebrating Purim, the most boisterous and [...]
On national Holocaust Memorial Day, we remember the victims: the Roma, the Sinti, gays, the mentally and physically disabled. And we remember the victims of other assaults against our shared humanity, in Bosnia, Cambodia, Rwanda, and in many parts of the world today. I, as a Jew, cannot forget what the Holocaust meant for [...]