Truman show’s real star

As ome of my best friends are Jews. It is a boast so thin and irrelevant that it has become an in-joke. So it was a surprise to discover, when reading the other day, that one of the most important and positive events in the modern history of the Jewish people took place because someone's best friend was Jewish. And I thought it was a story worth telling.

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One small step, not a giant leap

The election of Mrs Karen Appleby as the first female chair of a United Synagogue shul (St Albans) is certainly a landmark. The question is, precisely what sort of a landmark is it?

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A damaging document

'All men," wrote Reinhold Niebuhr, the great Protestant ethicist, "are naturally inclined to obscure the
morally ambiguous element in their political cause by investing it with religious sanctity. This is why religion is more frequently a source of confusion than of light in the political realm."

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It’s not necessarily good to talk

In 1906 a portentous meeting took place between Chaim Weizmann and the Conservative leader Arthur Balfour. Weizmann expounded to a shocked Balfour the broad principles of Zionism. Balfour was shocked because these unashamed nationalistic aspirations did not reflect the views he was accustomed to hearing from the highly assimilated Anglo-Jewish establishment whose company he enjoyed.

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Wrong arm (and wrist) of the law

The editor has had quite a week. He tweeted: "I've had car vandalised, been pick-pocketed and had pram stolen from locked car. In leafy suburbia." And "the police don't give a damn".

I am of course hugely sympathetic but it could have been worse. It did at least ebb and flow over the whole week and didn't erupt in one great, cataclysmic, criminal episode.

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End this personality cult

It has been a bad year so far for Orthodox rabbis. Across the channel, French chief rabbi Gilles Bernheim quit after admitting plagiarising texts and faking his academic credentials while, last weekend, similar charges were levelled by Maariv against the Israeli chief rabbi, Yonah Metzger.

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When segregation is acceptable

Recent media reports have focused on instances of gender segregation at events arranged by Islamic societies at British universities.

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Plan could end in blame game

The long-ago BBC Jerusalem correspondent, Michael Elkins, once lamented that too many war reporters had not served a journalistic apprenticeship by working on a local newspaper.

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Fit for a king, but not for a rabbi?

The tragedy of Gilles Bernheim is symptomatic of a wider hypocrisy where issues of intellectual dishonesty are concerned.

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Pogroms that we cannot ignore

The Holocaust, as we know, was not a sudden event and nor is it - as some well-meaning (mostly) religious people often suggest - incomprehensible. Its scale, its ambition was what was remarkable about it. How it came about is not amazing at all.

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