The Blogs

The marketplace of ideas
Apply for a Blog
Latest posts
Amy Williams
Amy Williams
Jun 25, 2025, 10:27 PM
Discoveries beyond the Kindertransport lists: The journeys on the ferries
When Jeremy Frankel reached out to me to ask if I had discovered his cousin’s Kindertransport list I did not know that we would soon be joining the dots of the Kinder’s train journeys with those of their ferry journeys and their arrival documents. Shortly...
Jan Shure
Jan Shure
Jun 19, 2025, 11:23 PM
How bad must bias at the BBC (and elsewhere) get before someone wakes up
Last Sunday evening, on a British news channel, Abbas Araghchi, the Foreign Minister of the Islamic Republic of Iran declared that self-defense was a “recognized principle in international relations.” Mr Araghchi then stated it was “the legitimate right of every country to defend itself.” He...
Lyn Julius
Lyn Julius
Jun 16, 2025, 12:01 AM
How Iranian Jews failed to placate the Ayatollahs
With the war raging between Iran and Israel, fears grow for the safety of  the Jewish community in Iran, which numbers between 5 – 8,000. At the time of the Iranian revolution there were 100,000 Jews thriving under the rule of the Shah. After 1979,...
Jan Shure
Jan Shure
Jun 15, 2025, 1:14 AM
Oct 7, Dawn French and the dark arts of amnesia and illusion
Who – apart from Jews and Israelis – is still talking about October 7 (or who was talking about – again apart from Jews and Israelis – before Israel’s air-strikes knocked Gaza into the long-grass of news? And who is (or was before those Iran...
Amy Williams
Amy Williams
Jun 13, 2025, 11:40 PM
A visiting scholar in an Israel at war
Screenshot
On 6th October 2024 I landed in Israel. I flew on the eve of the first anniversary of 7th October 2023. For months I had experienced the protests in America as I was previously a fellow at a university in New York and I was there on...
Nessya Kamhi
Nessya Kamhi
May 26, 2025, 11:08 PM
Behar-Bechukotai: A Temporal Utopia
'Green Covered Land Under Blue Sky' by Sitraka (2019) via Unsplash
Behar-Bechoukotai begins with the first mention of shemitah, the sabbatical year, G-d telling the Jewish people via Moshe that ‘שבתה הארץ שבת לה, ‘the land [He assigns to them will] keep a Shabbat for HaShem’ (Lev.25:2), paralleling Shabbat as we have seen it in previous...
Jan Shure
Jan Shure
May 26, 2025, 7:56 AM
Time to nail the ‘coloniser’ myth: if there is colonising, it’s not by Israel
The allegation that Israel is a “colonizer” has really taken root among the ignorant and indoctrinated, so it’s time to nail the myth  – and not just because the idea of Jews as colonisers is utterly false, offensive to justice and cruelly ironic, but because...
David Levenson
David Levenson
May 21, 2025, 1:16 PM
An Act of Love: Remembering Inbar ‘The Pink Raven’
Dateline: April 2025 – Modiin, Central Israel On Route 443, near a junction which turns you off the Lod-Jerusalem highway towards the town of Modiin, there is a poster of a young woman’s image with the following legend in Hebrew: ‘Ani Gam Isha. Gam Hachziru...
Amy Williams
Amy Williams
May 20, 2025, 7:06 AM
A Kindertransport to Ethiopia? A Kindertransport from Croatia?
Screenshot
There are so many myths which still surround the Kindertransport. This might be because of a sense of “ownership”, of misunderstandings, and a lack of awareness of the extent of archival material now available to us. Britain’s “ownership” over the Kindertransport (i.e. the assumption that...
Nessya Kamhi
Nessya Kamhi
May 16, 2025, 5:25 PM
Emor: Holy Days
'Above the Clouds' by Taylor Van Riper (2017)
Within the passages of Emor, the Jewish calendar takes shape, G-d laying out a yearly cycle constructed around pillars of holiness, the ’מועדי ה, ‘the fixed times of G-d’ (Leviticus 23:2). These fixed times consist of the festivals of Rosh HaShana, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, Pesach...
Load more