Jewish history, jokes and contemporary identity. Michael Longley
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 11 October 2017
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Simon Schama and Devorah Baum join Philip Dodd for a conversation ranging from the expulsion of Jewish people from Spain in 1492 to Jewish jokes today. Plus, poet Michael Longley considers his preoccupations with The Great War, The Troubles and the natural world.
Belonging: The Story of the Jews 1492-1900 is the title of Simon Schama's latest book.
Devorah Baum teaches at the University of Southampton and has written Feeling Jewish (A Book for Just About Anyone) and The Jewish Joke.
Michael Longley is the recipient of the 2017 PEN Pinter Prize. His latest collection is called Angel Hill. The Pen Pinter prize is awarded annually to a writer from Britain, the Republic of Ireland or the Commonwealth who, in the words of Harold Pinter's Nobel Literature Prize speech, casts an 'unflinching, unswerving gaze upon the world' and shows a 'fierce intellectual determination...to define the real truth of our lives and our societies.'
Producer: Craig Templeton Smith
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right? |
| 0:23.3 | It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream. |
| 0:28.8 | Listen to Evil Genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:32.1 | This is the BBC. |
| 0:35.8 | Hello and welcome to the arts and ideas download Download from the Free Thinking Team at the BBC. |
| 0:42.7 | A French writer once asked a poet from Northern Ireland, which side are the poets on? |
| 0:50.3 | Later I'll ask that same poet Michael Longley, winner of this year's Penn Pinter Prize for his answer, |
| 0:56.6 | and talk with him about his poems in which he has been with other poets, and I quote, |
| 1:01.4 | Out in the Fields, Head Down, looking on the ground for lark's nests. |
| 1:06.6 | And we'll also be talking Jewish jokes with the filmmaker and academic Devera Bown. |
| 1:12.6 | Is it always laughter in the dark? |
| 1:14.6 | You know, the Jews got all, you know, they didn't want, when that Jesus movie came out, you know, |
| 1:19.6 | no, the Jews didn't want people to see it because, you know, they felt, you know, everybody |
| 1:24.6 | blames the Jews for killing Christ and then the Jews try to pass it off on the Romans. |
| 1:29.6 | You know, I'm one of the few people that believes it was the blacks. |
| 1:34.0 | That was the Jewish comedian Sarah Silverman, and we'll be talking about Jewish jokes later. |
| 1:38.8 | But we begin with the historian Simon Sharma, whose second volume of his history of the Jews belonging |
| 1:45.0 | the story of the Jews 1492 to 1900 is just published and it's been shortlisted for this |
| 1:51.5 | year's Bailey Gifford Prize for non-fiction. 1492 it marks the year when practising Jews |
| 1:58.3 | were expelled from Spain. But Simon Sharma's way of dealing with this long and complex 500-year global history, |
| 2:06.4 | the geography includes China as well as California and ends in France with the Dreyfus affair, |
| 2:12.6 | is to tell stories. |
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