189: Tanya Gold: "Shameless: Exploiting the Holocaust". How the brutality of the Shoah is being whitewashed
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Tanya Gold’s provocative article, Shameless: Exploiting the Holocaust is in the Autumn 2025 edition of the Jewish Quarterly, the magazine of stories, ideas, and debates shaping Jewish culture and history.
Tanya takes aim at the state of Holocaust fiction — think Schindler’s List, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and The Tattooist of Auschwitz.
She passionately argues these stories push Jewish victims to the margins all too often, centering on non-Jewish heroes or romanticized narratives that soften the Shoah’s brutal reality.
Why do these polished, mainstream tales dominate the raw, firsthand accounts of survivors like Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, or Zalmen Gradowski?
And with antisemitism surging and Holocaust
education under revisionist pressure from social media, what does it mean when these works are staples in UK classrooms?
Let’s explore the ethics of Holocaust storytelling, and ask: are we remembering the past—or rewriting it?
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Jonny Gould's Jewish State is supported by Dangoor Education and UK Toremet.
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188: Sharon Hodgson MP and Joani Reid MP: There IS decency on Labour's backbenches. Let's meet two women of valour
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The Labour government has a super majority in Britain’s House of Commons, the sixth biggest of all time, similar to Tony Blair’s in 1997 - but that makes it prone to backbench rebellion.
Even within its first year of government. As we’ve seen.
And as Sir Keir Starmer failed to win support to get his original welfare bill over the line, with big U turns on an inquiry into grooming gangs and winter fuel payments to the elderly, there’s also that queasy feeling when it comes to his government and Israel.
When Bob Vylan’s murderous chanting live on stage at Glastonbury was transmitted on the BBC, Wes Streeting’s shock reaction was that Israel’s embassy should get its house in order.
And now the Prime Minister has declared that Britain will recognise a Palestinian State unless Israel ceases its war on terror in Gaza.
That Starmer is trying to use recognition as a blackmail tool is not just monstrous - but from a parallel world to reality.
Hamas are delighted, they describe it as the fruits of their October 7th pogrom, no less.
So the PM's actions only serve to prolong the war, for generations, using Israel as a geopolitical football, just to head off a backbench rebellion and appease leading cabinet members who’d usurp him as leader if given the chance.
How do you feel about Labour? Did you vote for them?
Here are two Labour MPs who hold strong views which go against the prevailing winds.
I met Sharon Hodgson and Joani Reid at The Actions Matter Summit held in Vienna in December 2024, working for ELNET UK, the European Leadership Network. Their European arm organised it in partnership with the Combat Antisemitism Movement.
These interviews were recorded in the fraught weeks before British Israeli hostage Emily Damari was released from Gazan hell, a desperate crisis which really struck a deep chord with Sharon.
And Joani is the ultimate conviction politician. Her consituency in East Kilbride has no Jewish community and she has no Jewish family. She's a former councillor in Lewisham, so why is she so vocal in support of Jewish people?
Jonny Gould's Jewish State is supported by Dangoor Education and UK Toremet.
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187: 🎗️Keith and Aviva Siegel, Hamas hostage survivors: "This is the worst thing that can happen to a human being".
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Today, we’re honoured to share the agonising recollections of Keith and Aviva Siegel, survivors of Hamas captivity in Gaza.
They came to London and addressed the media at the Israeli Embassy in Kensington.
Abducted from their Kibbutz Kfar Aza home on October 7, 2023, Aviva endured 51 days, Keith 484, facing starvation, abuse, and torture, even attempts to force conversion to Islam.
Now reunited, they talk tirelessly for hostages still held.
I won’t sugar coat or redact any of what they said.
It’s most distressing in places. It brought me to tears when they talked about the Bibas family.
But please don’t turn off, don’t look away. Share with as many as you can because as Aviva says, if Hamas are allowed to do this, a worldwide tyranny becomes allowed and tolerated.
This is their mission to bring every hostage home.
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186: Mandy Yachad: I played international cricket wearing tzitzis and a yarmulke
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It's the third year of Jonny Gould's Jewish State Schools Podcaster of the Year, presented with Dangoor Education.
Our winner from Year 6 is 10-year-old Meira Masher from Independent Jewish Day School in Hendon, London and she secured time for us with an international cricketer with an extraordinary story.
Mandy Yachad wore tzitzit at the crease while batting for South Africa. They’re on display at Lords, the Home of Cricket, in a permanent exhibition. Of course he played at Lord’s - wearing them!
And Mandy was no ordinary player.
He was an opening batsman who scored 14 centuries and 32 fifties in his 16-year first class career, spanning 109 matches - mostly during the apartheid era.
With much of his career falling during the international sporting boycott of South Africa in the 1980s and early 1990s, Mandy was denied the opportunity during the prime of his career.
Mandy was named among the South African Cricket Annual five Players of the Year both in 1985 and 1991. He also played 21 times for his country at hockey too.
He eventually quit because he became religious and found it too difficult to observe shabbat.
Now at 64 with a lifetime of special memories, how does he reflect on his career? What's South Africa like these days and what was it like to grow up in an apartheid state?
This is Mandy Yachad in conversation with our winner, Meira Masher.
Find all of Jonny's podcasts, recorded since 2018 and his writing by following his Substack. You can help support him with a coffee here!
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BONUS EPISODE: Trump attacks Iran's nuclear sites. How it started. How it finished.
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The United States struck three Iranian nuclear sites - with President Donald Trump hailing it a 'spectacular military success'.
In this episode, listen to announcements by President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on a momentous night of aerial attacks over Iran.
And coming up a fascinating listen in hindsight as Mr Trump speculated over the original two weeks he had given Tehran - with an abrupt and stinging dismissal of his European allies over the Iran crisis.
Mr Trump says the facilities were 'totally obliterated' and warned Tehran it 'must now make peace’.
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