Should we listen to Christian music — and if so, how?

Just because it's Christian music, doesn't mean that it isn't kosher.

I like to think that I have a voice. I mean, sure, that impression is magnified when I'm singing in the shower, where I can cover everything from a thunderous basso profundo to a limpid Schubert tenor (even - if I'm honest and making my way methodically through an opera scene while cleansing - the odd soprano moment).

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Must we always 'choose life'?

"Who shall live and who shall die; who by fire and who by water?" These frightening words at the heart of the High Holy Days remind us that our life and fate are not within our control.

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Cowboys and killers: Cinema’s New Jews

Last month, as we remembered and commemorated the 40th anniversary of the murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, two films came to mind. The first was Munich, Steven Spielberg's 2005 reconstruction of the Israeli government's response to the massacre.

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End this dangerous distinction

In March 2012, at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference, Benjamin Netanyahu asked, of Iran's nuclear programme: "If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then what is it?"

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Remember me? I'm your dad

A few weeks ago, my daughter Lucy was given a tablet computer for her 10th birthday. Until then, if she wanted to spend all day in front of a screen she had to use my boring old laptop or watch TV. Now, wi-fi permitting, she can get online just about anywhere and anytime.

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Let’s listen to Isaiah and share our bread with the hungry

My grandparents escaped from Europe to America for a life free from persecution and poverty. Yet, after one generation, I went back, crossing the Atlantic in the opposite direction for a year of study that became a lifetime.

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On yer bike, it's time to atone

As someone who falls somewhere between the Israeli labels of secular and traditional, my US Jewish roots are steeped in synagogue attendance. Growing up in America, I had to attend shul to be an affiliated Jew, especially on the High Holy Days. Chanting prayers in a language that I didn't understand, I may not have loved it but that's the way it was.

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Ordinary people in extraordinary times

What makes two people with identical backgrounds turn in completely opposite directions at critical moments? I have just finished an intriguing book called The Horror of Love, by Lisa Hilton, about the relationship between the socialite Nancy Mitford and her French lover, Gaston Palewski.

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How New York blew me away

Last Saturday, I flew to New York.

At 6pm I was in a cab from JFK into Manhattan, when the driver said: "The tornado is due at 9pm." He said it like a waiter saying, "your eggs will be with you in five minutes."

"What!!?" I shouted, sticking my face into the little gap in the glass partition. "Are you kidding me! What is this? The Wizard of Oz!?" 

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The wrongs of human rights

Using human-rights principles to attempt to ban circumcision in Germany is a grotesque insult to the memory of Holocaust victims.

The Jewish jurists who helped inspire the human-rights movement must be spinning in their graves at the intellectual violence that their legacy has spawned.

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