Recently, ITV’s “First Tuesday” showed Barry Cockcroft’s film about the attempt of the Hungarian dissident Laszlo Rajk to discover and indeed understand his father. The latter, the first Laszlo Rajk, was a leader of the underground Communist Party during the Horthy regime. How was it, the son asked, that a man who courageously struggled against … Read more
The Museum of the Jewish East End at the Sternberg Centre in Finchley has aroused a great deal of interest during the short period of its existence. Its central task has been to convey the rich heritage of the East End to the large number of Jewish people who live in North West London. Although … Read more
This year marks the centenary of the birth of Oscar Kokoschka, one of the great figurative painters of this century. He is perhaps best known for his portraits, painted between 1909 and 1914 in Vienna and Berlin, of actors, musicians, artists and intellectuals—such as the satirist Karl Kraus, the architect Adolf Loos and Herwarth Walden, … Read more
Last summer, Boris Bennett, a successful businessman, passed away at the age of eighty-five. Toan older generation, he was known simply as “Boris the Photographer”. For, in his younger days, Boris was the doyen of Jewish portrait photographers. Many Jewish families who originated from London’s East End possess at least one “Boris” masterpiece. Boris’s technique … Read more
A few months ago, in London, Alexander Bernfes—a pitiful and tragic figure, known to any as a collector and archivist of photographic cords of the Holocaust, died at the age of seventy-six. His body was found, weeks after his death, in a state of decomposition, on a pile of papers in the room which served … Read more
The Dulwich Picture Gallery in London will be playing host to an exhibition of the work of the little-known artist Sam Rabin. Born in Manchester in 1908 of Russian-Jewish immigrant parents (his father had been a cap-maker in Vitebsk), Rabin won a scholarship to Manchester School of Art and later studied at the Slade. Returning … Read more
MOST READERS will already know that Tony Lerman has relinquished the editorship of the Jewish Quarterly—especially since his decision to do so was followed by a long exchange of letters in the correspondence columns of the Jewish Chronicle. Whilst this is neither the time nor the place to delve into the minutiae of the controversy, … Read more
EARLIER this year, Harvard University hosted the first conference on the American-Jewish Press. It was attended by over one hundred journalists, editors and publishers from the East coast, the deep South and the mid-West. Since 1823, when the first Jewish newspaper, The Jew, was published, there has been a tremendous proliferation of English language Jewish … Read more
SINCE our last issue, THE JEWISH QUARTERLY has had more words written and spoken about it than could possibly have been anticipated, Amidst a pot-pourri of truth and invention, only a handful saw fit to pay tribute to Tony Lerman for the tremendous contribution that he has made to THE JEWISH QUARTERLY during the last … Read more
The recent death of Fred Uhlman at the age or eighty-four is of more far-reaching significance than it might appear; for, quite apart from the sadness felt by those who knew him personally, it reminds one that a whole generation of central European emigres who came to this country in the 1930s and contributed so … Read more