Kosher Controversy at the Olympics
McDonalds is expected to provide about 20% of the food at the London Olympics. Yet the restaurant giant has refused to offer kosher options.
UK's Lone Kosher Pub Loses Certification
“It’s not actually a Jewish pub,” explained Robert Greene, business partner at [The Castle][1] in North London, which has a dance floor, garden patio, real ale menu and a halachic twist: it’s the only kosher pub in the country.
Mishkin's Brings a Taste of Deli to London
New York made “Seinfeld”; London got the reruns on late night cable TV. It’s a generalization worth risking that, outside of the Golders Green and Stamford Hill epicenters, Judaism on this side of the ocean doesn’t stake its cultural and culinary claim loudly. So it’s fun to sit down in Mishkin’s, Russel Norman’s “kind of Jewish deli with cocktails” spot which opened last December in Covent Garden, and feel the familiar so earnestly and stylishly played with: a little kitsch, without the shtick.
Ethical Jewish Food Dominates the Conversation at 2nd Gefiltefest
The Garden of Eden was a milchig, or dairy paradise, and so it was that Gefiltefest, the second annual Jewish food festival, followed suit. At the festival on Sunday, a dog woke up from a quick schluff in the sunny patch beside his rabbi’s chair to find that he might have summarily been made a vegetarian.
Friday Film: Behind Friendly Lines
It takes a midnight downpour to force a mutiny and forge a temporary unit from the misfits on Israel Defence Force Training Base 4, nearly three-quarters of the way through Georgian-Israeli director Dover Kosashvili’s new film.
Isaac Babel's Last Days in Lubyanka
During a script reading at the Jewish Museum London on October 24, two writers with mortality on their minds came face to face: the bushy-eyebrowed 83-year-old East End poet and kitchen sink dramatist Bernard Kops, and the eternally 45-year-old journalist and playwright Isaac Babel.
A Festival of Bites: The London Jewish Food Festival
‘Sustainable food’ might still have the freshly-peeled glow of a newly enlightened movement sweeping the supermarkets, but to our recidivist shame and the torah’s green credentials, it’s as old fangled as they come. Deuteronomy forbids us to cut down fruit trees when in battle, requiring us to focus on sustainability even in the midst of destruction. As Jews, we are commanded to respect what we eat, and to know how and why it reaches our table.
From Lord of the Manor to Sleeping on the Park Bench
When I arrived at the East London Sukkah this blustery Saturday, the afternoon’s schedule of programs was running behind to accommodate a late entry: “A Guide to Squatting” by the North East London Squatters Network.
Our Crowd
In Dori Carter’s luxurious and leafy Southern California town of Rancho Esperanza, the setting for her second book, everyone knows the neighbor’s social status, but nobody knows each other — or, it seems, themselves.
Describing a Scribe
On an immediate level, illustrator Arthur Szyk’s (1894–1951) “The Scribe,” painted during his late twenties in Paris, is a confident display of technical mastery. Here’s a young artist who can do ornate, Renaissance illuminations; he can also give you Picasso’s abstraction. Actually, he can give you both at once. This painting, as it turns out, is the only one in which a Picasso appears in Szyk’s entire body of work — merely as though to prove he’s capable of it if he cares to show it.
