On Monday, 28 October, six small book collectives, including the Palestine Festival of Literature (PalFest), published an open letter signed by a thousand writers (I am one of them) pledging to boycott Israeli cultural institutions that are ‘complicit in violating Palestinian rights’ and have ‘never publicly recognised the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people as enshrined in international law’. This is the boycott that Palestinian civil society began calling for twenty years ago.
Analogies with 20th-century fascism are not particularly helpful for understanding our times, but one parallel is instructive: it is not ‘ordinary people’ who decide they’ve had enough of democracy; it is elites, and economic elites in particular. Blackshirts marched on Rome, but Mussolini arrived by sleeper car from Milan because the leading strata of the Italian state had invited him to govern. People today also often take their cues from business leaders, in particular a pop culture figure like Musk. All the self-serving talk of ‘disruption’ can be adapted to make Trump acceptable, as can the studied neutrality of oligarchs who not only own their own rockets, but their own newspapers: refusing to endorse Harris sends a signal that it’s rational to be intimidated by Trump.
Over a million people have protested in London this year and a majority of the British population think the Israeli prime minister should be arrested for war crimes, yet the UK government continues to prostrate itself before Israel.
Anna Netrebko as Abigaille, ensemble and choir in the Berlin Staatsoper’s new production of Verdi’s ‘Nabucco’. Photo © Bernd Uhlig
When Verdi’s Nabucco was first performed in 1842, Milanese audiences were quick to see their own situation under Austrian occupation reflected in the plot, a loose adaptation of the Biblical story of the madness of Nebuchadnezzar and the plight of the exiled Judeans in Babylon.
Trojan Unicorn by Becky Minto (designer), Scott Bisset (build and design) and Kate Bonney (Lighting designer). Photo by Bart Masiukiewicz
The first person to grasp the marketing potential of the unicorn seems to have been King James I of Scotland. Kidnapped by the English as an 11-year-old in 1406, he wasn’t released for eighteen years. When he assumed the throne, he placed a pair of rampant unicorns on his new coat of arms.
Jilly Cooper makes an all too fleeting appearance in the TV adaption of her novel ‘Rivals’.
It’s always a shock when imagined characters from novels are given a kind of reality by TV actors. Everybody has their own idea of Mr Darcy or Leopold Bloom, Mrs Dalloway or Emma Bovary, and most incarnations will upset somebody. It does seem perverse, though, to change as much about the characters’ appearance as Disney’s adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s best novel, Rivals, has done.
Many Jews today feel torn. On the one hand, they feel loyalty to Israel, the land of their fellow Jews, many of whom were driven to that country by persecution. On the other hand, they recognise that Israel has been committing crimes against humanity, which are essentially racially driven. They want to oppose Israel’s wars, but they want to do it as Jews. Is there a specifically Jewish way to address this conflict? I believe there is.