Lend Me Your...

Historically, this has been called a 'Jew's Ear' fungus, but that smacks of anti-semitism, so it is better to use its other name 'jelly-ear'. What is interesting is that it is thought that 'Jew's Ear' is actually a contraction of 'Judas's Ear' - Judas Iscariot, the disciple of Jesus who the gospel-writers identify as his betrayer, is reputed in folk-legend to have hanged himself from an elder tree, in despair at his own actions. The fungus is said to particularly favour elder as a host, leading to the name

Some respectability in the name then? Well, possibly. Throughout the Christian era, the figure of Judas has been employed as an embodiment of the Jewish "race", symbolic of the "fact" that it was the Jewish people who murdered the incarnation of God, and are therefore undeserving of the rights assigned to non-Jews, or more specifically Christians. This thesis has been used to underpin anti-semitic teaching and practice within the Christian churches and among supposedly Christian countries

The Guardian's review of the movie Oppenheimer points out that the characters of Oppenheimer himself and Albert Einstein, both Jews, are played by non-Jews, and that the anti-semitism suffered by Oppenheimer is under-explored in the film. We might dismiss this by saying that, in performance arts, Jews can portray non-Jew's and vice-versa - it's called acting. Or we might wonder how we would react to a film in which Charles Darwin is played by a French actor or Vera Lynn by an Irish singer

I failed to check what tree the jelly-ear was growing on