Blogerim

An Obituary

Lionel Blue, rabbi, writer and broadcaster, was born on 6 February 1930 and died on 19 December 2016 in London.

Rabbi Lionel Blue was one of the last of a generation of liberal rabbis in Britain that included Rabbis John Rayner, Hugo Gryn and Albert H. Friedlander. They were all children of the Second World War who carried stories of loss and displacement with them. Each of them was singularly brilliant and charismatic in his own way, helping loosely affiliated Jews to find a way back to a liberal, inclusive form of Judaism. Unlike the others, Lionel Blue was not a refugee, but grew up as the son of a tailor and secretary in London’s then predominantly Jewish East End, experiencing the Blitz and the local violence of Oswald Mosley’s anti-Semitic blackshirts.

Born in 1930, Blue documented his struggles with his homosexuality as well as his path to the rabbinate in his book “Godly and Gay,” published in 1981. Blue was private, but non-secretive about his long-term partnerships and as the first rabbi in Britain to publicly declare his homosexuality, he became an important role model for gay Jews. → continue reading

Dr. Karen Körber, the first scholar ever to benefit from the Fellowship Program of the Jewish Museum Berlin © JMB, Photo: Ernst Fesseler

The Jewish community in Germany has undergone a profound change in recent years—and the protagonists behind that change are the primary focus of research undertaken by Dr. Karen Körber, the first scholar of the Fellowship Program of the Jewish Museum Berlin. For the last two years Dr. Körber has been investigating “Daily Realities: Jewish Life in Germany Today” and she recently spoke to me about her findings.

Karen, the Fellowship Program of the JMB supports research into Jewish history and culture as well as into broader-ranging aspects of migration and diversity in Germany. You are the first person ever to complete the two-year Fellowship Program—a pioneer, so to speak—and I’d be interested to hear about that experience.

I found myself in a very open situation and was able to do much as I liked. All fellowship programs are fundamentally privileged set-ups but this particular one has the advantage of being attached to a well-endowed institution of international renown. → continue reading

Tomorrow evening, 9 September 2014, the cultural anthropologist Alina Gromova will present her book “Generation ‘kosher light’” (transcript Verlag 2013) in the Academy of the Jewish Museum Berlin. As in the case of the many other authors whose “New German Stories” we recently discussed, we put three questions to Ms. Gromova prior to her reading:

Alina Gromova © Judith Metze

Alina, for your study of an international group of young Jews in Berlin you took the city itself as your springboard. Exploring the locations where your subjects live, hang out, mingle and party enabled you to chart their diverse notions of identity, tradition and religion. Why did you opt for such an explicitly spatial focus?

Identity and tradition are terms often difficult to grasp, because they are interwoven with symbols, values, wishful thinking or memories. A space, however, has not only a symbolic but also a physical dimension and is therefore more palpable. Personally, I don’t see a space as a 3-D void waiting to be filled by people or things. On the contrary, people and things are what create a space in the first place. And urban space is especially fascinating, I find, because a broad cultural and religious spectrum often occupies one and the same spot, however tiny; and different elements simultaneously give rise there to their own spaces, so the result is a palimpsest of spaces that then interconnect.

→ continue reading