You know when restaurants close for refurbishments so they can re-open bigger and better? That.
In the meantime, why not follow me on Twitter and enjoy this video, which I find so sweet.
See you in due course!
The Homeland series came to an end on Channel 4 last night. Having watched the entire gripping series in one sitting a few months back, I can imagine that some Homeland fans are feeling a little sad it’s over.
Well, fear not. Firstly, Channel 4 has announced it will be showing series two. But, more immediately, the Israeli series Hatufim , which Homeland was based on, will start showing on Sky Arts this Thursday. If anyone who has seen Hatufim can tell us what to expect from it – without plot spoilers please! – that would be lovely.
Meanwhile, I’m loving this season’s Britain’s Got Talent. My favourite finalists are Loveable Rogues and Pudsey the dog, though I really enjoyed the now eliminated ‘Humptay Dumptay’ Geisha. I’m going to see one of the live shows later this week. Looking forward to seeing Simon Cowell.
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First, a confession: I have bought Tom Watson and Martin Hickman’s book Dial M For Murdoch. This constitutes a confession on my part because, while recognising he has faults, I admire Rupert Murdoch. Still, plenty of people who say they hate Murdoch and his newspapers secretly rejoice when they find an abandoned copy of The Sun on the train. So let’s call my purchase of Watson’s anti-Murdoch book my inversion of that.
I first noticed Labour MP Watson when he conspired against Tony Blair towards the end of the latter’s reign. More recently, he has been an obsessive campaigner against Murdoch’s News International. Given that he has targeted two men I admire, and the fact his anti-press obsession followed his exposure during the expenses scandal, I am no fan of Watson. In February, he complained on Twitter about how former Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie had shouted at him on Radio 4′s Today Programme. The audio of the interview establishes that MacKenzie had scarcely raised his voice. As Watson shows in his book, he has a tendency to over-dramatise.
So, what is his much-anticipated book actually like? In the Preface he explains that, ‘I come into the book myself from time to time’, as does his co-author. ‘But…we didn’t want to overemphasise our roles, and for that reason it is written in third person: I am not “me” or “Tom” but “Tom Watson”.’ Ah yes, referring to yourself in third person – a monument of authorial humility.
This device allows Watson to interrupt the true narrative of the book with such moments of meekness as: ‘By this stage, friends had been telling Watson: “You’ve done a good job, it’s time to move on.’” That comes just three pages after Watson writes about a ‘clear-sighted’ letter an admirer had sent him, before quoting the letter in its full, sycophantic – and narratively unnecessary – glory. Even when recounting incidents involving him that are pertinent, Watson needlessly throws in what he had eaten for lunch that day, or which band he had seen live in concert that night.
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I thought I would start an occasional series of posts in which I write about memories of various places in Israel. It will be lovely if you want to some of your own experiences of each place in the comments.
I’ll start with Masada, partly because it was the first landmark of significance I visited in Israel. It was the beginning of September 2006, the Hezbollah war had just ended and I was in Israel for the first time.
The itinerary for our tour had, strangely, scheduled a crack-of-dawn visit to Masada the morning after a late-night, open-air party that included a free bar and a dance-floor. It’s fair to say that I took enthusiastic, thirsty advantage of the free drinks. How lashed did I get? Put it this way, I attempted to dance at one point – always a bad sign.
I was already well lubricated at this point:
When we staggered back to the hotel just after midnight, a tour guide reminded me that she would be knocking on my door around 4am so we could get to Masada before sun-rise. Brimful of drunken optimism, I told her this would not be a problem. I fell asleep the moment my head hit the pillow.
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Regular readers will know that Begin is one of my favourite historical figures. Here are just some of the things that fascinate me about him…
The ‘Haftorah’ read the week of his birth begins with the words: “Be comforted, be comforted, my people.”
He made his first speech standing on a picnic table in Poland. He was nine years of age.
He believed: “It is terribly important for an educated man, if he wants to know things, to read a minimum of 150 pages a day.”
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Mazal tov, Israel. Mazal tov, Israelis.
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If a blog can make me laugh, I love it. If a blog has a snappy title and an original theme, I love it. If it can open my eyes about a topic I don’t know a lot about, I love it.
Ergo, I love my friend Charley’s blog, which is entitled Chaz The Spazz.
It is her hilarious and not-for-prude’s take on life in a wheelchair. From sex to answering the call of nature, it takes a witty and informative look at disability.
While making you laugh out loud she also informs you. It is, in both senses of the phrase, seriously funny. Go and have a look.
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Someone wrote to me earlier to say that when I don’t post for a week she assumes I’ve died. I can report that, unless I’ve grossly misread the situation, I am alive and well.
I have been busy, though. We went to Longleat Safari Park the other day and had a wonderful time looking at the tigers, cheetahs and other animals. I’ve also been writing as I have a lot of work on.
Other than that I’ve been reading some superb books. The first is called Here Comes Everybody, and is written by James Fearnley of The Pogues. His beautifully written and vivid account of life in the band has gripped me. I’ve also been devouring Tom Bower’s much-discussed biography of Simon Cowell. I was chuffed to see a nice mention of my own biography of Simon Cowell in Bower’s acknowledgements.
Finally, I’ve been reading The Wisdom of Sikhism. I’d always had an instinctive feeling that Sikhism would be a fascinating religion. Everything I’ve read about it thus far has indeed fascinated me. I’ll probably write more seriously about it in the coming days, but in the meantime I must say that I smiled when I learned that the creator of the faith is called Guru Nanak, that he wrote Shabads and that his sister was called Bibi.
Finally for now, I wanted to mention a marvellous initiative to raise money for Holocaust charities that has been launched by three pupils at Yavneh College. Jessica Tray, Talia Album and Rachel Kass are aiming to collect six million pennies to commemorate those who died.
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I have an op-ed on the Israeli news website Ynet today. You can read it here.
Welcome to those who are visiting this blog for the first time. You can read the background to why I post about Israel here (and there’s a kind of postscript to that here.)
Happy week, everyone.
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I’m sure many of you know about the British diver Tom Daley, whose father Rob died last year after battling brain cancer. It was such a tragic loss. Rob and Tom – who I met while researching my biography of Tom – were so very close. Tom has been inspirationally strong since he lost his father.
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This is my latest column for the Jewish Chronicle
I never told you the one about how a Christian/Hindu cult helped me love Israel and Judaism, did I? As a non-Jew who proudly supports Zionism and is fascinated by Judaism, particularly the mystical and Hasidic traditions, I am often asked how I came to feel this way. To me, the real question is why someone would not support Israel and admire Judaism, but of course I understand the curiosity.
The short answer – which I’ve blogged about and mentioned during speeches – is that I became fascinated by the Middle East after the September 11 attacks. To my surprise, having previously had a lazy, hazy perception that Israel were the villains of the conflict, I became more and more pro-Israel the more I learned about the issue. So I started visiting Israel and quickly fell in love with the place.
However, I’ve never written or spoken publicly about a challenging childhood experience that had a part to play in this. When I was nine, I joined a new school in London. I was so excited to be leaving primary school and joining a new, ‘grown-up’ establishment. What I didn’t realise until I got there was that 99 percent of the pupils and their families were members of bizarre religious cult, as were all the staff.
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I’ve been muchly informed, inspired and entertained by the blog of Alex Samuels, a student who has compellingly documented his battle with cancer.
Alex seems a brave guy and a witty writer. His posts about his treatment include witty asides like “Thank God for radiation!” and “Superman, watch out!” Even some headlines for his posts are moments of dry humour, including: “More cancer fun”.
Various amusing characters he has encountered during his treatment are introduced, including an old man he saw during chemo who was “watching American Pie on DVD and enjoying it a bit too much…” Ooh blimey.
I hope Alex makes a full and speedy recovery, and I hope as many people as possible will go and read his blog and follow him on Twitter. Good luck, Alex!
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This is my latest column for the Jewish Chronicle
Perceptions of Israel’s supporters are often negative. We are thought to hold tremulous politicians in a vice-like grip, to be brainlessly unquestioning in our support of any Israeli policy, and to be guilty of other horrors, including Islamophobia.
In my opinion it is some of my fellow gentile supporters of Israel that have earned us these bad names. Throughout history, the flow of recriminatory traffic has generally seen gentiles unfairly blaming Jews for various ills. In this case, Jews could justifiably blame the goyim for tainting the name of a fine cause.
Take America, where a “Jewish lobby” is said to “run foreign policy” – an accusation that has been aired afresh in the wake of Obama’s friendly Aipac conference speech. The perception of this imperious “lobby” dominating election years provokes resentment across the world.
Unfortunately, there is no such lobby: Jewish people constitute just 2.1 per cent of the American population and research shows Israel is seldom a key factor in their voting habits. The American Jewish Committee found that just three percent of respondents in a major survey named Israel as the most important factor in deciding how they vote.
Research conducted by a range of organisations keeps delivering approximately the same results. A 2010 survey that found that just seven percent of America’s Jews listed Israel as one of the top two factors deciding their vote for congress. So much for the “Jewish lobby”.
However, there is no question that Israel is considered an important issue by many American politicians. Why so? Because of a genuinely powerful electoral force – America’s 70 million-odd Christian Zionists. It is they who wield noteworthy influence in key states, and they who mobilise mass fury at any politician or broadcaster who fails to live-up to their crazy, entirely self-centred wishes on the disputed territories.
So it is not that a Jewish lobby has a grip on congress – it’s more that a Christian lobby has a grip on America’s Israel movement. A state of affairs in which Jewish people are taking the rap for something that gentiles are guilty of – where have we heard that before? No, where have we not heard that before?
Here in Europe a vocal minority of non-Jewish Israel “supporters” give the Zionist movement a bad name, from the thugs of the English Defence League who wave the Israeli flag purely to infuriate Muslims, to the hideous Geert Wilders, who so inaccurately but successfully co-brands Israel advocacy with Islamophobia. In England we have our own Wilders equivalents among the commentariat who muddy our name by linking their obsessive hate-mongering against Muslims with support for Israel.
The issue becomes clearer than ever on the Iranian nuclear question. Almost all the Jewish people I know, believe, as I do, that Israel has not just a right but a duty to do what she must to defend herself against the threat of nuclear aggression from the hideous Iranian regime. But, a few robotic activists aside, they are mindful of the sensitive complexities of the issue.
Quite a contrast to the many Western gentiles who are noisily chomping at the bit for Israel to unleash the dogs of war, safe in the knowledge that no relative of theirs would be in the crossfire of any immediate Iranian or Iranian-proxy response.
I suppose it’s easy to cry for a war to be launched by a country that in truth you consider not a friend but the enemy of your enemy. Indeed, some of these folk slam Israel’s enemies in one breath only to then damn Israel for not being hardline enough to satisfy their safely-distant bloodlust.
Well, they might just have to continue their armchair damnations a bit longer, as a recent poll showed that Israeli public opinion is more nuanced than theirs. The poll showed that 19 per cent of Israelis support an attack on Iran without American backing, 42 per cent endorse an attack only with American support, while 32 per cent oppose an attack under any circumstances. Not what some Western armchair generals wanted to hear.
Of course, many non-Jewish supporters of Israel are sincere. I suppose we just need to keep reminding ourselves that, as Israel and the Jewish people do not lack for tireless enemies, those of us who support from outside the community must be extra vigilant not to damage the name of this beautiful cause.
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One of my friends, Ben Kaye, is running the London Marathon to raise funds for a good Jewish charity. Well, I say he is one of my friends – I’ve actually only met him three times. But of all the people I have met only three times – a that group includes David Beckham, Tom from McFly, Rachel Stevens, Ron Prossor and countless Israelis! – Ben is my clear favourite. (Probably Tom second.)
Ben has always dreamt of running a marathon and next month his dream will come true. He is raising funds for Nightingale. Based in London, Nightingale is a care home for older Jewish people, where physical, emotional, intellectual, cultural, religious, spiritual, social and creative needs are catered for with sensitivity on an individual basis.
As Ben writes: ‘Nightingale holds a very special place in my heart. It is where my two beautiful grandmas lived the last days of their lives. Nightingale gave them so much happiness, love, warmth and a sense of being. Don’t be mistaken, Nightingale is not a sad or depressing place. It is a happy, fun, wonderful place to visit, and I feel blessed that it came in to my life. My grandmothers would have ended their days in sadness if it wouldn’t have been for Nightingale.’
Sounds wonderful. Good on you, Ben. I remember when we stood together at a pro-Israel demonstration. As you waved your Israel flag you also sang, absolutely belting out the words to Am Yisrael Chai. I wrote this post about the two Marathons I’ve run, but some better advice would be that if you approach your Marathon with the same gusto as you did your singing you’ll romp through it!
You can support Nightingale’s work by sponsoring Ben here.