This is a tale of censorship. In 2019, Roman Polanski’s film about the Dreyfus Affair, An Officer and a Spy, was nominated for 12 César awards and won the Grand Jury prize at Venice. But, due to #MeToo, it was …
America is tortured by demons
The United States is the land of conspiracy theories, not least when it’s busy electing a president. Such theories are a secular version of the idea of a malevolent God, for which the world is a sinister place but at …
The Dutch are facing their Holocaust demons
There is no tram line 8 in Amsterdam. You could see this as a silent admission of guilt — during the Second World War, it transported tens of thousands of Dutch Jewish people to the Westerbork transit camp, and then …
The genius of the World at War
In one of the opening scenes of Evelyn Waugh’s Men at Arms, the central character Guy Crouchback vacates his Italian castle in 1939 once the approaching conflagration can no longer be ignored. “He expected his country to go to war …
Israel is trapped by Western guilt
“Great wars in history eventually became great wars about history,” wrote the Israeli-American historian Michael Oren in 1999. It’s hard to think of a country for which this is more obviously true than Israel, though Ireland, Ukraine or even today’s …
Can Jewish Catholics escape their roots?
Just before Christmas, the Pope met with a Jewish comedian. This may sound like the set-up of a Woody Allen joke, but it is not. On December 23, Pope Francis received Gad Elmaleh — nicknamed the “Seinfeld of France” — …
Maus and the repressive power of Jewish trauma
There was a great three-panel comic that the artist Art Spiegelman did for The Virginia Quarterly Review a while back that neatly encapsulates the dubious if nearly universal centrality of the Holocaust in American Jewish life. In the strip, the …
The good news from Gaza
Once the sirens start wailing, we have 90 seconds to make it to the bomb shelter in the public park 500 yards behind the house. If the boys are asleep in bed, that means we have 90 seconds to get …
What Zelenskyy got wrong about Israel
In Israel, one of the most-shared videos in recent weeks shows a Ukrainian soldier named Alex revealing the contents of his military backpack. After waving his night-vision goggles at the camera, he pulls out a Ukrainian-language translation of Golda, a …
Putin is perverting Jewish history
I never met my wife’s grandmother, Luba, but she is apparently her double. Born just outside Lviv into a wealthy family, she was 18 when the Nazis invaded in 1941. Within months, both of Luba’s parents had been rounded up …
Who betrayed Anne Frank?
Embedded in the cobbled pavements of the Netherlands are thousands of brass memorial plaques dedicated to victims of the Nazi genocide: stumbling stones, or Stolplersteine. “As you stumble over them, you stumble over the past,” writes Rosemary Sullivan. “It is …
Why comedians stopped being funny
The most exciting stand-up comedy show I’ve ever seen was Bill Hicks in a student union in the autumn of 1992. Being a comedy naïf probably helped. I had seen Hicks’ sensational Channel 4 special Relentless earlier that year but …