Description

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Celebrating the twentieth anniversary of Jewish Renaissance, five new essays look at Jewish culture of the past two decades. Covering music, art, literature, theatre and film, these essays explore the role of confidence in minority culture, and ponder whether the trends identified look set to continue over the coming years. Each of the essays offer an authoritative, accessible and entertaining overview of contemporary Jewish artistic and cultural life. The essays are also interspersed with a selection of the best articles and images from the Jewish Renaissance archive.

About the Author

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David Benmayer is the former Executive Director of Renaissance Publishing and now a Trustee.

Rebecca Taylor is Editor of Jewish Renaissance and a former news editor at Time Out London.

 
Nathan Abrams co-founded the journal Jewish Film and New Media and is the author of The Bloomsbury Companion to Stanley Kubrick (with IQ Hunter, 2021), Eyes Wide Shut: Stanley Kubrick and the Making of His Final Film (with Robert Kolker, 2019), Stanley Kubrick: New York Jewish Intellectual (2018), Hidden in Plain Sight: Jews and Jewishness in British Film, Television, and Popular Culture (2016), and The New Jew in Film: Exploring Jewishness and Judaism in Contemporary Cinema (2012).
 
Monica Bohm-Duchen has worked for Birkbeck, University of London, the Courtauld Institute of Art, Sotheby’s Institute of Art, Tate, the National Gallery and the Royal Academy of Arts. Her publications includeanAfter Auschwitz: Responses to the Holocaust in Contemporary Art, Rubies and Rebels: Jewish Female Identity in Contemporary British Art and Art and the Second World War. She is the initiator and Creative Director of Insiders/Outsiders, an ongoing arts festival celebrating the contribution of refugees from Nazi Europe to British culture and is on the editorial board of Jewish Renaissance.
 
Bryan Cheyette is Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Reading. His early publications were influential accounts of literary antisemitism and include Constructions of ‘the Jew’ in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations 1875-1945 (Cambridge University Press, 1995). He has also published extensively on British-Jewish literature, including an anthology, Contemporary Jewish Writing in Britain and Ireland (Nebraska University Press, 1998). His recent work includes Diasporas of the Mind: Jewish/Postcolonial Writing and the Nightmare of History (Yale University Press, 2014) and Ghetto: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2020).
 
Judi Herman is a freelance writer and broadcaster. She is JR’s arts and podcast editor, as well as a regular contributor of reviews and features to JR’s magazine and blog. Judi also freelances for the BBC and whatsonstage.com. She has an MA in Performing Arts from Middlesex University, and has written several stage-shows, including How the West End Was Won, celebrating Jewish life in London’s West End, and Stones of Kolin, a musical play charting 600 years of Jewish life in a small Czech town, performed in London and the Czech Republic. Judi also has a background in public relations, including PR for theatre.
 
Vanessa Paloma-Elbaz is a research associate at the Faculty of Music of the University of Cambridge and Peterhouse. She received her Ph.D. from the Research Center for Middle Eastern and Mediterranean Studies of Sorbonne Paris Cité University, with félicitations du jury. Her research has been funded by the Fulbright, Marie Curie H2020 Actions, the Posen Foundation and American Institute for Maghrib Studies, amongst others. She has written for Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Tablet, the Forward and numerous academic and mainstream journals. She founded KHOYA: Jewish Morocco Sound Archive in 2012 in Casablanca.