Mardean Isaac

Mardean Isaac is a writer and editor based in London. Educated at Cambridge and Oxford, he has written for publications including the Financial Times, Lapham’s Quarterly and New Lines magazine.

Edward Said’s Jews
The Palestinian intellectual had Jewish influences at every stage in his life, but the exposure yielded only incurious and unsubtle positions
byMardean Isaac
My Favorite Antisemite: Hans-Jürgen Syberberg
The director’s films tackled the grandest questions in German culture and politics, before he turned his critical eye to the Jews
byMardean Isaac
A Charmed British Life
A recent biography of Tom Stoppard shows the playwright coming to terms with the Jewishness buried beneath his proud English identity
byMardean Isaac
The Ghost Landmarks of the East End
Strolling through London’s once-thriving Jewish quarter with the British novelist Will Self
byMardean Isaac
Max Jacob and the Angel on the Wall
A new biography treats the anguished life of the writer and painter, who was so often overshadowed by accomplished friends like Pablo Picasso, with exemplary consideration
byMardean Isaac
Gay, Muslim, and Jewish in Berlin
A new biography explores the life of Hugo Marcus, a gay Jew who played a key role in the establishment of Islam in Germany before fleeing from Hitler
byMardean Isaac
My War Criminal
Twenty-five years after the end of the Bosnian War, Jessica Stern’s psychologizing approach to imprisoned Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić muddies historical understanding. But the calls to boycott her new book undermine open, intelligent discussion.
byMardean Isaac
Will Self
The half-Jewish English writer’s new drug memoir, ‘Will,’ dives from Hampstead Garden Suburb into an underworld
byMardean Isaac
The Wolf of Baghdad
A new graphic novel about the Iraqi Jewish experience
byMardean Isaac
Obama’s Genocides
Five years after the Islamic State’s massacre of Yazidis in Sinjar, Iraq, it seems harder than ever to get Western leaders to live up to protecting minority ethnic or religious groups from extinction in the Middle East
byMardean Isaac
Master of the Double Exile
The late Iraqi Israeli novelist Samir Naqqash was forever torn between competing loyalties. An English translation of ‘Tenants and Cobwebs,’ his portrait of 1940s Baghdad, shows him to be the tragic chronicler of the uprooting of Iraqi Jews.
byMardean Isaac
Kurdistan and Israel
Kurdistani Jews are caught between the Jewish state and the ethnonationalist ambitions of its Middle Eastern neighbors
byMardean Isaac
Is the Lost Language of Iraqi Jews Really Lost?
On the anniversary of the Farhud of 1941, when Iraqi Jews’ violent dispossession began, a look at how the Baghdadi diaspora’s eventual return to Israel fostered scholarly interest in a rich Babylonian heritage
byMardean Isaac
Turkey’s Genocide of the Assyrians Was an Islamist Crime
A century after the start of a bloody persecution, will a genocide come to be recognized for what it was?
byMardean Isaac