Fifty Shades of J: The Jewish Image in British Television from 1965 – 2015

This illustrated talk, written to mark the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Parkes Library in Southampton, will present a variety of different ways in which Jews and Jewishness have been presented on British television since 1965. It will consider predominantly moments when an on-screen character or figure is identified in some way by her/himself or by others as ‘a Jew’ or Jewish. The aim will be not to suggest a reductive essentialist reading of Jewishness with connotations of Sartre – one is a Jew is one says one is a Jew – but to consider how Jewishness has been suggested, recognised and read over the past half century, and the implications this has for our understanding of Jewish/non-Jewish relations. It will draw on comedies, dramas and documentaries,m asking if there is a difference engagement and relationship depending on the context.

Dr James Jordan is based at the University of Southampton where he holds the position of Karten Lecturer at the Parkes Institute for Jewish/non-Jewish Relations.

Comparing Nuremberg and ‘Nuremberg’: History & the Imagination at the IMT in Fact & Fiction

The International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg was always going to be a highly visible media trial. Perhaps tellingly, The Times’s correspondent Robert Cooper had cause to note ahead of the trial that “[b]y dint of much American ingenuity the small courtroom …[had been] completely transformed […]. There was far more of Hollywood about the [new] lay-out than of a British court.”

The IMT was certainly partly cinematic spectacle and yet it would not be until the US/Canadian miniseries in 2000, entitled simply Nuremberg, that the IMT was put on the screen. In this talk Dr Jordan considers the relationship between the IMT and its screen counterpart, examining some of the (many) inaccuracies in the recreation, and in particular how it re-interprets the trials’ evidence and purpose so as to position the attempted extermination of the Jews in Europe at the heart of the proceedings.

Dr James Jordan is based at the University of Southampton where he holds the position of Karten Lecturer at the Parkes Institute for Jewish/non-Jewish Relations.

Across seventy years, most famously with the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, the courtroom has been the forum for an increasingly nuanced, often intentionally pedagogic, examination of the Holocaust’s history and its legacy for an American audience. Analogous to this sequence of trials, Hollywood and American film more generally have also consistently turned to the law and the dialectic of the courtroom in order to represent and engage with the Holocaust and its memory.

In this talk, Dr Jordan will provide a cultural history of these films and how they have confronted the challenges of representation which beset all Holocaust films. In particular, he will consider how the films in question present and represent evidence, focussing on key scenes to discuss not only what is depicted but also how. In so doing, this brings together the law, the Holocaust and the cinema, asking questions of the act of ‘witnessing’ and our relationship to an event which is now in the final stages of its transition from being an event in living memory to one beyond it.

Dr James Jordan is based at the University of Southampton where he holds the position of Karten Lecturer in the Parkes Institute for Jewish/non-Jewish Relations.

It has recently been suggested that the Doctor, the central character of the BBC’s Doctor Who, is in fact the most compelling Jewish character ever seen on British television. This talk will consider this statement though a consideration of the show’s history both off-screen and on. It will explore the (real and imagined) displays of Jewish identity seen across 50 years through a discussion of such features as the Doctor’s changing appearance his rivalry with the Master and the long-standing enmity towards the Daleks.

Dr James Jordan is based at the University of Southampton where he holds the position of Karten Lecturer at the Parkes Institute for Jewish/non-Jewish Relations.

God: Who, What, Where & When? Answers to intriguing questions with Rabbi Raymond Apple AO, RFD; and The Prayers Addressed to God: When they were written, by whom and for what purpose with Rabbi David Freedman

God: Who, What, Where & When? Answers to intriguing questions with Rabbi Raymond Apple AO, RFD; and The Prayers Addressed to God: When they were written, by whom and for what purpose with Rabbi David Freedman.