Pink Peacock faces criminal charges over “F*** the police” tote bag
Britain’s police power trip continues apace as the co-owner of the Glasgow café is charged with a breach of the peace.
Yiddish for the 21st century
A new Duolingo course is training a small army to demand babka, can it also heal communal divides?
Four antisemites won’t stop me supporting Palestine
If Jewish solidarity withers in the face of the few bigots who drove down Finchley Road on Sunday, it is no solidarity at all.
Israel is an apartheid state – and South Africans agree
Using Black oppression to exonerate Israel isn’t just immoral, it’s ahistorical.
If I am only for myself, who am I? Professor David Feldman on the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism
A new document attempts to put right what the IHRA got wrong. Rivkah Brown interviews one of its authors.
Why is the Jewish Chronicle whitewashing Britain’s antisemitic history?
Vernon Bogdanor’s recent op-ed is consistent with the paper’s long history of placating the British establishment, even in its anti-Jewish prejudice.
Access to puberty blockers is a Jewish issue
The UK’s ban is transphobic, unscientific, and in opposition to core Jewish values.
Antisemitism isn’t a set of tropes – and thinking about it that way helps nobody
The outrage over Michael Che’s SNL joke is everything that’s wrong with our fight against antisemitism.
Meet Yuval Gal, the anti-Zionist Israeli running in the Dutch elections
Gal left Israel aged thirty, appalled by the country’s trajectory. Now he’s continuing the fight against injustice from the Netherlands.
Homos, Houmous and Hamantaschen: Vashti Meets Chanukah Lewinsky
On the eve of Purim, we speak to drag artist and queer cabaret creator Dex Grodner about Judaism and genderfuckery.
The romance of American Jewish anarchism
A nostalgic portrait of America’s oldest Yiddish anarchist newspaper, and the community that coalesced around it, is recounted in a recently restored documentary.
Why are anticolonial academics being accused of antisemitism?
Because we’ve uncoupled antisemitism from the coloniality of race – something Israel’s advocates are only too pleased about.
Leading British academics and Israeli citizens call on universities to reject the IHRA definition of antisemitism
The 66 scholars join a broadening coalition of left-to-moderate Jews across the world who oppose the controversial definition.
We 66 British academics and Israeli citizens reject the government’s imposition of the IHRA
The flawed definition threatens not only the fight against antisemitism, but Palestinian self-determination, academic freedom and our right to criticise the Israeli government.
We must resist Netanyahu’s cynical right-washing of the Holocaust
The Israeli PM’s plans to appoint an anti-Palestinian racist to lead Yad Vashem conveys the danger of particularising the Shoah.
Strangers in a Strange Land: Jewish sci-fi, Afrofuturism and visions from Palestine
Jewish, Black and Palestinian writers imagine persecution and liberation across the universe.
The IHRA censors Palestinians by design, not by accident
What constitutes ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ criticism of Israel is determined by individuals who believe BDS and discussion of Israeli apartheid to be beyond the pale.
Israel is using the IHRA to silence its critics
A network of government-funded NGOs are pushing the definition in an effort to redefine antisemitism and quash Palestinian dissent.
The queer surrealist lovers who took on the Nazis
The Queer, Anti-Nazi Art of Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore.
Palestinians come home for Christmas
69 years after their village was razed on Christmas Eve, these Palestinians are determined not to let the pandemic prevent them from celebrating and mourning on their ancestral land.
Jewish care home workers are striking. Will the community stand with them?
At Sage in Golders Green, staff are demanding fair wages and working conditions. British Jews could view this as a threat to our elders – or as fundamentally in our interests.
Can film unteach Hasbara?
A new documentary, screened at the UK Jewish Film Festival this week, considers whether exposure to video footage of the plight of Palestinians can change the hearts and minds of Israel’s fiercest advocates.
An audience with Talia Lavin, American Nazi-hunter
Like a schlubby Jewish Virgil, the American journalist leads readers of her new book through the circles of white supremacist hell.
Why I stand with Jeremy Corbyn
The former Labour leader understands far better than his successor, who suspended him this week, that racism is born of a broken world, one we must utterly transform.
Where next for the Jewish left?
Vashti launched a year ago at a more innocent time. On the eve of her 1st birthday, she asks: where next for the Jewish left?
The forgotten women’s rituals of Yom Kippur
Cemetery- and grave-measuring were part of the female clerical role in Ashkenazi Jewish life, and powerful tools of ancestral connection.
Vashti meets Pink Peacock, the world’s first queer Yiddish cafe
The founders of the Glasgow establishment, due to open later this year, share their vision of luxury for all.
“I don’t think he would have the boldness to stand up in shul and say that”
In private messages to his former congregants, a leading British rabbi sounds off on race, gender and sexuality.
Spain’s Jews gave Vox an easy ride. Now they’re regretting it
Many Jewish organisations sat idly by while the far-right stoked Islamophobia. It was only a matter of time, however, before the party and its supporters came for them, too.
How not to tackle antisemitism on the left
Zero tolerance plus zero discretion equals zero results.
“Resist”: The political street art of Jerusalem
A reading of the politics written onto the city walls.
A faustian pact between Chabad and Orbán
How Hungarian Ultra-Orthodoxy found an ally in Europe’s most notorious antisemite.
If Black lives matter to us, Palestinian lives should too
George Floyd and Eyad Hallaq were killed in the same week. The British Jewish press has spilt much ink on the former – and barely a drop on the latter.
Will the last Jew to leave Europe please turn out the lights?
Joann Sfar has been called France’s “messiah of the comic book”. His buoyantly optimistic early work rewrote narratives of Jewish-Muslim animosity by sketching a shared history and delineating a path forward for interfaith relations. So why is Sfar’s new novel so full of despair?
Vashti speaks to Michael Rosen
A few months ago, Aron Keller spoke to the author and broadcaster Michael Rosen about his new book, ‘The Missing’, and much else besides.
Israel is in denial about police brutality
Israeli politicians have expressed remorse at Eyad Hallaq’s killing, however it’s clear they view it as an aberration.
Jewish antiracism must start at home
#JewsForBlackLivesMatter risks reinscribing Ashkenormativity.
Stop calling Cummings a ‘svengali’ – and not just because it’s an antisemitic trope
We’re raging against the man, not the machine.
The Board of Deputies’ neutrality on annexation will doom it
The Board gained prominence through its forthright stance on Labour antisemitism. Its mealy-mouthed response to annexation will condemn it to irrelevance.
Starmer is serious about antisemitism – but not other racisms, it seems
Starmer has adopted the Board of Deputies’ Ten Pledges and with them, the Board’s disregard for forms of racism beyond Jew-hatred.
This Passover is different from all others
Three Jewish women reflect on Pesach under lockdown.
Coronavirus demands justice, not charity
The Jewish community has risen admirably to the challenge of Covid-19. We cannot now fail to let this crisis radicalise us.
Trump’s peace plan won’t just entrench the Israel-Palestine conflict – it will radically destabilise it
By mainstreaming the fantasies of the annexationist hard-right, this plan paves the way for an escalation of unforeseeable proportions.
Boris Johnson’s BDS ban must be opposed – not least by British Jews
The law would forbid even boycotts focused solely on the occupation, thereby framing opposition to the occupation as opposition to Israel as a whole.
It isn’t an easy time to be a new Jewish Labour MP – but it’s an important one
At this dark hour, the Jewish left must not shrink away. Our resolve to build an anti-racist movement must be hardened.
Young Jews are reviving the Jewish left – will they succeed?
The seeds are being sown for a Jewish left whose desire for a better world might be enacted in a way that has a chance of breaking free from the tendency towards obdurate self-ghettoisation that has dominated the far left.
Don’t be fooled, Brexit is a Jewish issue
Brexit is a Conservative attempt to overturn the internationalist legacy Jews have so heavily relied on. Why then does our communal leadership seem unbothered by it?
Left populism doesn’t create antisemitism – it’s our best hope of fighting it
Jews cannot be told that Corbyn’s programme is incompatible with the fight against antisemitism.
The climate crisis is our most urgent existential threat
While it might feel like the hounds of Brexit and antisemitism are snapping at our heels, we are in danger of letting them chase us off a cliff edge.
Labour must treat antisemitism as a human problem, not just a political one
From the back-benches to the front, Corbyn has fought for Jewish freedoms; yet it’s this fighting spirit that has latterly turned made him an intractable elder statesman who struggles to admit wrongdoing.