My children are still too young for teenage rebellions, but watching the increasingly vocal irritation among British Jews, generally a pretty placid crew, has given me a feeling of something akin to maternal pride. Look at you, I thought, as they crossly complained about Angela Rayner’s tweet last month, in which she described the Scottish Labour Leader Anas Sarwar as the “first ever ethnic minority leader of a political party anywhere in the UK” – oh Ed Miliband (to say nothing of Michael Howard and arguably, Benjamin Disraeli) how soon you are forgotten. You’re properly kvetching now.
Growing up in New York, I took two things for granted: being Jewish was great, and it should be mentioned as often as possible. This is what happens when your cultural diet is Woody Allen and Mel Brooks movies, and your apartment is opposite a bagel shop. My favourite movie quote was “May the Schwartz be with you” (Spaceballs – still a classic). My Hebrew lessons on Wednesday afternoons were seen by my friends as no weirder than their Saturday morning tennis class.
Then we moved to Britain. Being Jewish in the UK felt very different than in the US. Most obviously, there were no other Jews in my class at school. This wasn’t really an issue, until I sent them all invites to my batmitzvah, and then had to explain what that was. I knew there were Jews in London, but they seemed to live in certain pockets; in New York they were spread across the city like a schmear of cream cheese.
Then there were the British Jews themselves, who were far quieter and more self-effacing than the New York ones I knew. Among the kids, there were no shared cultural references: there weren’t big British Jewish films, and while there were British Jewish comedians – Ben Elton, Alexei Sayle, Stephen Fry – they didn’t really lead with their Jewishness. The few prominent British Jews – Alan Sugar, Philip Green – weren’t exactly aspirational role models in the mould of Philip Roth and Nora Ephron. There were British Jewish jokes, but we told them among ourselves, not in the mainstream. New York might not reflect the US, but even the most mainstream of American TV shows, Friends, had Ross and Monica Geller, and the Hanukkah armadillo.
Jewish guilt, I knew: that cliched (and true) Jewish characteristic of feeling guilty about everything, from masturbation to not calling your mother. But it wasn’t until I moved to Britain that I encountered Jewish shame – people who were actually ashamed of being Jewish. A possible reason for this came up when I recently interviewed one of my favourite English authors, Edward St Aubyn, and asked why he made the character Saul in his new novel Jewish. Was it, I asked, to emphasise his status as an outsider? “I was operating on intuition, it wasn’t that schematic,” he said. “I just thought that Saul and [the very glamorous character] Hunter would not have been best friends at Princeton, so that may be a part of making him more an outsider.”
The intuition that thinks of Jews as outsiders is a reflection of St Aubyn’s (upper) class, but also a reflection of Britain more broadly. Last week, the host of the BBC’s Politics Live show suggested that “many Jews have succeeded in reaching high political office [so perhaps they] don’t need to be seen as a group needing recognition in the same way as others?” Given that this question was asked during a segment in which four non-Jews debated whether Jewishness counts as an ethnicity, it’s pretty clear we at least need recognition from lazy TV commissioners.
I also recently interviewed David Baddiel – possibly the most famously Jewish person in this country – for Jewish Book Week, in which he was promoting his new book, Jews Don’t Count, which argues that antisemitism isn’t taken seriously as a kind of racism. He talked about how Jewishness in the US has an aura of cool about it, whereas in the UK it “smacks of the suburbs” – Brooklyn versus Stanmore, in other words. This embarrassment, coupled with that very British (and very un-American) fear of making a fuss, has led to British-Jewish reticence and, consequently, a lack of cultural identity.
But that is changing. British writers and performers who have foregrounded their Jewishness – Baddiel, but also Howard Jacobson, Simon Amstell, Rachel Riley and Tracy-Ann Oberman – have played a part here. Back in the 80s and 90s, when Maureen Lipman played the “you’ve got an ology!” grandmother in the BT adverts, it felt to me that most Brits didn’t pick up on her Jewishness; 20 years later, that was not a problem with Robert Popper’s delightful C4 sitcom, Friday Night Dinner, which had an identity that felt equal parts British and Jewish.
Jeremy Corbyn also deserves credit here. When 85% of British Jews said they believed him to be antisemitic in a survey for the Jewish Chronicle, it was clear that here was a cause that had united the demographic like no other. The Corbyn era, coupled with the rise of identity politics, has encouraged British Jews to speak up in a new way, kvetching about the whole fakakta and showing our chutzpah – not just among ourselves, but in public, on social media, to everyone. Oy vey, Britain, brace yourself. The party’s getting started now.
