Praise be for the chicken-free celebration of cheesecake

Jews, eh. We like to think that we're a tolerant bunch, but when it comes to behaviour that is deemed to veer from the norm, we can be surprisingly judgmental.

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The JNF must go back to its roots

As with so many diaspora Jews for more than 100 years, a Jewish National Fund blue collection box stood in my home as I was growing up, and I have one still.

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Frum but fair about Facebook

Did you hear the one about the gathering of 40,000 Charedim in New York to protest against the immorality of the internet? They heard about it online.

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Kiddush can't keep our community alive

I was in Carluccio's in St John's Wood having breakfast, planning a fundraiser. It was for the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies but it might have been for any one of the plethora of Jewish organisations. The restaurant was full of women ready for the gym - dynamic, educated, powerful women.

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Hitler didn't stop. Why will Sudan be a different story?

Churchill described appeasement as feeding a crocodile, hoping it chooses to eat you last. If humans learned anything from the 20th century, it should have been that if you keep averting your eyes to genocide elsewhere, eventually you will have to fight to save your own neighbourhood, and you will do so at enormous cost.

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We deserve more from Amnesty

Once upon a time, the image of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) was positive. They were seen as groups that wanted to make the world a better place by working to cure disease and end poverty and hunger, or by taking on political battles against tyrannies and dictatorships. In many cases, this was, and still is, true.

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We need a courtroom drama

The circus is coming to town. And I don't mean circuses the way we know them now. No, I mean the bad old days when circuses included animals and oddly-shaped people and spectators would come to howl with derision and enjoy the torment of both freaks and beasts. That's what is headed to London's South Bank. It's called the Habima Theatre.

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Shmoozing with Jews on a cruise

I am no stranger to the maariv service. For several years it was one of my three-a-day but the maariv I've enjoyed most was only a few days ago. I was on a cruise with the Silversea line, the epitome of luxury. I even had my own tailcoated butler. On this boat there is nothing where service isn't on tap. With only one exception.

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The non-Jewish Jews who became the scholars of an ideological dreamworld

During Jewish Book Week in February 1958, the great Marxist historian, Isaac Deutscher, gave a talk entitled "The Non-Jewish Jew". It was later published and became required reading for the student revolutionaries of the 1960s.

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Why must I choose an identity?

'So where are you from," she asked. "London," I responded.

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A modern face on an old hatred

There was a time when it was socially acceptable, even rewarding, to spread hateful invective about Jews being directly responsible for the deaths of infants in order to observe their archaic, bloodthirsty rituals.

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Signed and sealed. But delivered?

Call me paranoid, but I have become convinced that there is a game of stealth being played out between me and my local postmen. Witness the evidence:

I am waiting for a number of important parcels. I am too scared to leave the house because past experience has shown that they will arrive the second I desert my post.

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Can my heart go on for screen idols who single Israel out?

It felt as if we were struggling through the waterlogged ship with them. The iceberg loomed frighteningly close to our seats. And magnified on the IMAX screen, with all the benefits of 3D technology bestowed upon it, Rose's "Heart of the Ocean" diamond was still a tacky and unconvincing piece of costume jewellery.

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Poison of Dreyfus Affair remains potent

As a young student in Paris in the 1930s, Madeleine - the favourite granddaughter of Alfred Dreyfus - jumped to her feet when her history teacher referred to her grandfather as "the Jewish officer Dreyfus". "No, Monsieur," she protested, "the French officer." It echoed the sentiments professed by her grandfather 40 years earlier.

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Grab the baton of repentance

And they're off.

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A game of lulavs and lucky socks

Someone very famous, it might have been Bill Shankly, or perhaps Albert Camus, once described football as a religion. Of course it's not actually a religion. It's more of a ball game. What cannot be denied is that football fans behave in a very similar fashion to Orthodox Jews.

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Speak up for IDF's missing Druze

Watching the build-up to Gilad Shalit's release, I am not ashamed to say that I found it difficult to hold back the tears. Millions of people around the world celebrated his return.

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Dangerous lies that spread from Auschwitz to Srebrenica

The words "I was wrong" rarely appear under journalists' bylines. But in the Observer this week, John Simpson, the veteran BBC correspondent, acknowledged that he had been mistaken about a libel trial arising from the Bosnian war.

The 20th anniversary of the most destructive conflict in postwar Europe fell this month.

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Two states, two routes to peace

Despite the wishes of those who wish to see an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the negotiations in their current form are well and truly dead.

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On May 3, I'll be voting kosher

I'm not at all Jewish, in general. In fact I'd go so far as to say that I've never been Jewish at all.

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