The issue of clerical homosexuality is currently splitting the Anglican Church, with both camps adducing arguments which are too well-known to bear repetition. Judaism's inbuilt emphasis on family cohesion has so far insulated the Anglo-Jewish community from the full force of the controversy, although Rabbi Blue has been a high-profile taboo-breaker in the public sphere. [more...]

Children of the Kindertransport who, as predominantly Jewish refugee children, travelled by train to London's Liverpool Street Station in 1938 and 1939, gathered once again at this main railway terminus to unveil a statue dedicated to perpetuating the memory of their first arrival. [more...]

Only a generation ago a novel entitled Brick Lane - Monica Ali's entry for this year's Booker Prize - would have been about the Jewish East End. However, in the twenty-first century, with E1 'rebranded' as Bangla Town to reflect the current inhabitants, the memory of what was once Anglo-Jewry's heartland is rapidly fading. That phenomenon only lives on in folklore, or in schmaltzy artefacts like the Wolf Mankowitz-scripted film A Kid for Two Farthings. [more...]

My family had to flee from Berlin at the very beginning of the Hitler regime, not only because we were Jews, but also because my father was the political editor of Vorwärts, the Social Democrat Party newspaper. The newspaper was banned immediately in March 1933, which caused most of its editors to leave Germany, a number of them for Prague. There they remained in the hope that the Nazi regime would not endure too long. [more...]

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