Michael Benjamin's Blog, page 2

Ask A Lawyer– How To Make A Problem Unsolvable

In Leeds, we Jews were brought up to be Doctors. Any other professional aspiration was pathognomonic of lousy parenting. The legal calling is foremost in the list of professions equated with perverse deviation. Be an accountant, if need be; what better way is there to...

Fritz Turner and Bibi Netanyahu

The exiled proud Polish princess from Praszka, our Mum, lived in a permanent ambivalence. How would she bring up her three boys to be genteel and not gentile? How would she set up a cultural heritage where norms of the West Riding and West Poland...

Tailor Made Solution

Mum always said Jews should either be tailors or doctors. ‘When it’s time to run, you have nothing to pack. You can start anew with little problem.’ Back in Leeds, the second-generation Jews were ebbing out of the slums of the Leylands;  their children were...

The Pluperfect Storm

My Mother idolized her father. By edict, environment and desire, so did I. I adopted and accepted the gospel according to the Warshowskis. His creed was to respect and tolerate; his countenance was beatific. The only time Zeideh was not smiling was when he was...

Psychiatric Passover || Four Questions

My mother was a very clever lady. She met E. more than once. ‘He’s more than a good friend; he is a good person and a very smart boy.’ E. is a lawyer; Mum would call him the Judge; she took great vicarious pride as...

He who dares

Back in Yorkshire we Jews had a common word with our non-Jewish Yorkshiremen. We shared the word dare, but it had different connotations. Jews would use ‘dare ‘, in the context of ‘how dare you?’ That meant that you had been caught out, usually in...

The nouveau plague and nov nouveau Israeli politics

Unashamedly this blog is a letter to Yair Lapid. Yair now is your moment- everything has changed, and everything must change. The change includes you. Two things have changed- our health and our politics. The causes and consequences are nigh on identical. The Corona is...

Corona and me

I struggled to understand how to survive the nouveau-plague. My survival was complicated when it the height of the close-down my wife broke her hip. And here came a blessing. Within minutes a nurse appeared in the ER. She explained what had happened, what is...

Clowns to the right of me

The differences between us and erstwhile Palestine are stark. Even though Palestine does not exist, only a minority denies its right to exist. With Israel, the mirror image is a correct assessment. We have one similarity, we are both involved in internecine struggles that are...

The Week Ahead

Sometimes you must speak plain. Let’s do that. I am dreading next week. On Sunday we are to see the opening scenes in an overrated melodrama. We have had a few promos in the past, but now comes the real thing. The Prime Minister of...