I thought this was a really interesting article about the state of Jews in the UK. We share a lot of similarities with them as a community because we’re also a minority faith-based group following the Abrahamic way. This sort of liberalisation is occurring in our communities as well - people are becoming “Muslim-ish” - albeit at a different rate. Anyway…
Jonathan Margolis enjoys a decidedly non-kosher bacon bagel. Photograph: Graeme Robertson
Some people ask me if we can meet up. They know I’m Jewish. They’re wondering if I might like to write about, maybe even get a little bit involved with, something called the Jewish Community Centre for London.
And no, I wouldn’t, really. Fine, this community centre has just got planning permission, it’s costing a lot, it’ll be a beautiful building near Hampstead, it’s going to open in 2013 and it’ll have amazing activities for people to celebrate their heritage and all that. But it’s all rather earnest – a bit, I don’t know, Jewish for me. The truth is, and this is probably a bad thing, but I’d be more excited if a new Apple Store were opening in my town.
I explain that I like being a Jew, but apart from looking as if I’m playing a character role as an accountant, being unable to stop using words such as schlep and plutz and loving chopped liver, I’m so un-Jewish that I’ve only once in 20 years been to my local synagogue.
“I’ll tell you what,” I say. “You get Larry David to open it and I’m in.”
“If we could,” they reply, “he’d be perfect.”
I’ve no idea how observant a Jew the real Larry David is, but the Larry he plays in Curb Your Enthusiasm is my sort of Jew – in it but not into it, enjoying the culture, the humour, the hypochondria, the Yiddish-isms, the argumentativeness, the curious, sceptical take on the world – but weirded out by the inward-looking-ness and the religious stuff.
“You mean,” I said, “this is a centre for people who are more Jew-ish, than Jewish?”
“Precisely,” they say.
So I agree to go along to the JCC when it opens. But what I really want to write about is being Jew-ish. This is a term that I wish I’d invented rather than the veteran doctor-slash-theatre-producer, Jonathan Miller, years ago. He also referred to being “an amphibious Jew – half in and half out of the water”.
We are those cop-out, fair-weather Jews that “real” Jews despise more than they do antisemites: the secular, cultural Jews, the amoral majority, the ones who want to have their bagel and eat it. The ones who, with their marrying out, their going to the pub on Yom Kippur and to the football on Saturdays, and – God forbid – with their ambivalent view of the Middle East, are doing Hitler’s work for him and conspiring in the erosion of the already disappearing UK Jewish community – currently about 250,000 and counting, downwards.
Leaving aside what’s supposed to be wrong with having your cake and eating it (what else are you supposed to do with a cake? Frame it? Bury it?), I can’t help feeling the time has come for us race traitors, half-breeds and “apathites” to stand up for ourselves.
Apart from the not insignificant point that being a Jew is largely an inherited condition, it seems perfectly adapted to being an “–ish”. I even wonder if the etymology of the word Jewish has developed to allow my race/creed/orientation/whatever to be available in Lite. There aren’t many other things you can be born into where you can choose to live the “–ish” version rather than be an “-ist” or follow an “–ism”. All we Jew-ish Jews do is to elect for the Ultra Lite option.
For us, the cool thing about being born a Jew is you can do it as much or as little, as well or as badly, as you like. You can be professional, amateur or pro-am. This understandably pisses off the pros, who marry a fellow full-timer, know all the stuff in the manual and keep up with all the latest fads. Which is why, for the Jew-ish, this community centre thing (which exists in most American cities) is rather attractive. It’s like an Emirates Stadium where we rank amateurs will be able to come and play a little bit without being laughed off the pitch.
Jew-ish is different, you see, from lapsed. You can’t lapse from being a Jew like you can from other things. Plenty of German Jews in the 1930s thought that simply saying they were no longer interested would get them off the hook with the Nazis; it didn’t. And we, the Jew-ish, have no wish to deny our heritage. As much as the pros deride us as dilettantes, we deride Jews who pretend they’re not Jews, change their name to Featherstonehaugh and take up hunting. Apart from being ugly, it never quite works.
But being Jew-ish is just as hard as going the whole – you should excuse me – hog. Even here in lovely, tolerant multi-ethnic Britain, I’ve been persecuted plenty, both physically and verbally, for being a Jew, albeit a secular, beer-drinking, bacon-eating “-ish” rather than one of those Jews identifiable by way of hats, hairstyles and habits.
I don’t pretend any of what I’ve experienced is more than an inconvenience, an irritant in the scheme of racist things, but at school in the 60s and 70s I was still physically beaten and tormented by larger boys despite, oddly, my having a reputation as a pretty vicious rugby player. The theme of these locker room Jew-bating sessions – which didn’t abate when I squealed that I “wasn’t practising” – confused me then as now. The reason for the violence was, apparently, that we Jews were at the same time unacceptably rich and flashy and unacceptably poor and miserly. It was, I see now, a writ-small version of the confused Nazi paradigm of the Jew as both arch-capitalist and arch-communist.
One of the leading antisemites of that time is now, I see from his website, a cuddly-looking junior school head teacher in the home counties; I’d love to know more about his school’s anti-racism policies. Another enthusiastic race hate merchant became – obviously – a police officer. Another would snarl about me being a “half-caste” as he was repeatedly sitting on me and punching me in the face – which, even from my undignified position under him, I found ironic since he was half-Indian.
At university there was nothing physical, apart some snide comments from an esteemed philosophy tutor about my having a car, which I’d paid for with money earned in my gap year (”Daddy’s money, is it?”) – oh, and a snarled, spittle-flecked Holocaust denial from a leading member of the Young Liberals, who later became a publicist for Colonel Gaddafi.
At work on a regional newspaper in Yorkshire, “Jewish” as insult was replaced by the now more fashionable “Zionist”. One of our NUJ officials once came over to my desk to complain about a suit he’d bought in Manchester “from one of your Zionist brethren”. That kind of thing was common.
Even today, when anti-Zionism is so hip, I hear the odd, faint echo of the old-style, non-PC antisemitism. A dear old colleague who lives in the country mentioned bibulously at a party the other day that he had become great friends with a Jewish family that had moved into his village. “Of course, everybody else hates them,” he said. Obviously.
So don’t tell me that being Jew-ish rather than a full-on Jew is a cowardly cop-out. As far as avoiding antisemitism is concerned, being merely and meekly Jew-ish doesn’t help at all.
Anyway, being Jew-ish has less to do with forgetting your roots than trying to have as little as possible to do with the more unruly shoots. I thoroughly enjoy and celebrate my culture, but I am deeply contemptuous of the madness and hypocrisy that has sprouted up in the organised religion, as it does in most cults. And I say this even though some of my best friends are frum and I’m a completely fake agnostic, because I still quietly recite the Shema when things get awkward.
What we, the Jew-ish, find offensive, especially from people who market themselves as being intelligent and questioning, is the literal interpretation of ancient petty rules and regulations, and subsequent attempts by the ultra-competitive to out-devout their fellow Jews by coming up with new, even more arcane policies. We’re not talking about the proper Ten Commandments here, but bylaws such as the rules on kosher food, which made sense before there were fridges, but don’t any more. Following these laws to the letter and beyond is, for us, like driving a petrol car 100 years from now on some kind of principle.
With this kosher business, it gets worse. There’s a whole subsection of kosher food now called “glatt kosher” for those who don’t think the 5,000-year-old food rules go far enough. The specifics of what makes meat glatt kosher are too tedious to go into, but this, surely, is just about one-upmanship and showing off, not theology? I don’t know much about God, we’ve not met, but I am confident that if he or she exists, they wouldn’t give a toss about what I eat. Only petty bureaucratic-type people could envisage a God who is a petty rule-book-waving bureaucrat.
A far bigger issue for the Jew-ish than silly, pedantic food fad minutiae is, of course, Israel. This, we find supremely troubling. We refuse to support it uncritically. We hate some of the stuff Israel does. But we can’t help feeling uncomfortable when people who aren’t Jews criticise the country; it seems, if only very exceptionally, to be tinged with a little bit of old-fashioned Jew-hating.
I have a possibly over-optimistic, glass half-full Jew-ish take on this. The reason Israel is singled out for hatred, I like to think, is positive; it’s because the world expects better of Jews. The problem is that Israel isn’t a monolithic entity; it contains all sorts of views on what that society should be. The things I as a Jew-ish leftie love (yes, love) about the place – its intellectualism, its remaining socialist ethic, the directness of its people and so on – are the very things other, more Jewish Jews, hate. The last time I visited a kibbutz, which used to be the epitome (for both the Jew-ish and the rest of the west) of the good Israel, there were no Jews under 70 living there. What’s more, all the young volunteers were blond German and Danish idealists.
So has being merely Jew-ish rather than a proper Jew, marrying a woman who was half-Jewish, half-Methodist, and eating non-kosher food these five decades thwarted my children’s option to be Jews, and by doing so played its part in the slow decline of Britain’s Jewish population? In an odd way, it hasn’t entirely.
Our elder daughter was several months into her relationship with her long-term Cornish boyfriend when she (and he) discovered he was, through his mother’s line, more Jewish than she is. Their children, then, will be Jew-ish-ish, at least by birth. I continue to find it almost spooky that these two found each other. Our son a few weeks ago looked seriously into starting a website for the Jew-ish: working title, The Bacon Bagel. And our younger daughter has this last month been leading a campaign at Sussex University against a new campus ban on Israeli goods – theme of the campaign: it’s all very well, but why Israel alone? Shouldn’t the students also ban Chinese, American, Sri Lankan and dozens of other countries’ goods?
The last she heard from the union hierarchy on this score was that to ban American or Chinese products would be, get this, “inconvenient”. She is more enraged than I have ever known her about this frank and alarming admission that campus anti-Zionism is, at least for the students who aren’t actually Palestinian, a fashion accessory like those chainstore black-and-white keffiyeh scarves.
All this activity by our Jew-ish-ish children seems to suggest our particular Jew-ish line might limp on for a while yet, rather than collapse in an apathetic heap. The point is that in our own way, we Jew-ish people are actually proud of being Jews. The biggest thrill I’ve had in a while was discovering recently that I’m on the BNP’s Jews-in-the-media hate list. That is an unbelievable honour, although the details could use a little updating, lads.
But the thing I love best about being part – albeit a peripheral, out-of-step part – of this culture is that when this piece appears, there’ll be uproar. The Jewish Jews will say I’m a typical self-hating Jew (as Larry David says, I’ve plenty to hate about myself without being a Jew coming into it). The Jews who deny being Jews will say I’m a typical self-obsessed Jew. The antisemites will say I’m a just a typical bloody Jew.
And yet the amazing thing is, I won’t be excommunicated or fatwa-ed by frum Jews. There’s no mechanism for it, and not a lot of desire for it, even from the fundamentalists among us. The worst that might happen is I won’t be invited to a couple of Passover suppers next year. More likely, I’ll be asked on to platform debates to discuss whether the Jew-ish are really Jews.
And if I die tomorrow, my people will still bury me like a proper Jew – in the prayer shawl I got for my barmitzvah. I’ll be given a traditional farewell by my friend the rabbi, whom I’ve asked in advance to fly over from New York to officiate at my funeral.
He may not have been the most observant Jew, my friend will doubtless say. In fact, he was a very naughty boy. But at least he was Jew-ish.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/30/jewish-judaism-jonathan-margolis
It was an act of profound foolishness, nothing more, nothing less than that 
A bid by one of Osama bin Laden’s sons to visit Britain was rejected by an immigration tribunal on Thursday amid questions about his proposed marriage to a British woman and his attitude to his father.
