European Judaism

There is an ongoing political debate as to whether or to what extent the United Kingdom is a part of ‘Europe’. Clearly a journal published in the UK that seeks to explore the dimensions of Jewish life throughout Europe has, from its inception, celebrated this broader aspect of British Jewish identity. But by focusing on continental Europe we have sometimes neglected aspects of Jewish life in Britain itself. This was brought home to the editor when he attended a conference in London organized by Sue Vice and Axel Stähler called: ‘Writing Jews in Contemporary Britain’. When invited to publish the proceedings in the journal the organizers readily agreed and expanded the initial list of contributors. So it is with gratitude and pleasure that I hand over the editorial task to them for the bulk of this issue.

Several of the articles gathered in this special issue are based on papers presented at the symposium on ‘Writing Jews in Contemporary Britain’ held at and generously funded by the Pears Institute for the Study of Antisemitism on 11 September 2013, and co-convened by the editors together with the Institute’s director, David Feldman. Others have been especially commissioned for the issue. Thanks are also due to Jan Davison, Jonathan Magonet and Jenny Pizer.

Adam Thirlwell's contention that 'Jewish is always half-Jewish' is provocative. Whilst themes of not belonging are central to much Jewish writing, Thirlwell's claim effectively dismisses the idea that there could ever be a wholly Jewish identity. To the extent that all identities are arguably provisional, constructed and contingent, this might be the case. However, there is a danger that Thirlwell's contention is not entirely playful. The implications of such a manoeuvre are explored in Andrew Sanger's novel, The J-Word (2009) and Mark Glanville's memoir, The Goldberg Variations (2004), which, in different ways, both reflect on the challenges of inchoate identities. This article looks at the ways in which these texts problematize a sense of blurred boundaries in terms of (half-)Jewishness. It will go on to argue, however, that whereas some contemporary British Jewish writers demonstrate a rather fraught sense of identification, others are less attached to a singular or even dual sense of defining identity. As the twenty-first century unfolds, British Jewishness is increasingly figured as a matrix of connections that form ever more imbricated ways of belonging.

The British Jewish novelist Howard Jacobson has, from the start of his career, found himself saddled with the unenviable label of 'the English Philip Roth'. For many years, Jacobson bristled at the Roth comparisons, offering the alternative label 'the Jewish Jane Austen' and insisting that he had not read Roth at all, though more recently he has put on record his admiration for Roth's comic masterpiece, Sabbath's Theater.If Jacobson's early work was certainly imbued with a Rothian Jewish humour, its cultural reference points were almost invariably English. In contrast, Kalooki Nights is saturated with allusions to American culture, in particular Jewish American culture. This article traces some of the ways in which Kalooki Nights explores and exploits these transatlantic connections in a comic novel that both participates in and satirizes what will be called here the fetishization of the Holocaust. It is concluded that Kalooki Nights is Jacobson's audacious attempt to produce a piece of Holocaust literature that exploits the tension between the desire of some Jews of his generation to know all the 'gory details', and the necessity of recognizing that their own historical situation prevents them from ever doing so. The result is to make people laugh not at the events of the Holocaust itself but at the attempt to fetishize them.

This article discusses a corpus of work which constitutes British Jewish poetry and stands as a paradigm of diasporic poetry. It focuses in particular on the work of Isaac Rosenberg and Jon Silkin, but also introduces my anthology of British Jewish poetry, Passionate Renewal: Jewish Poetry in Britain since 1945 (2001). Further, the article theorizes the components of diasporic poetry, comprising in effect a diasporic poetics. It shows how British Jewish diasporic poetry and diasporic poetics together suggest a diasporic poetic praxis. A poem entitled 'Another Expulsion of European Jews', which appeared in my collection Senseless Hours (2009), concludes the article as an example of such synthesizing praxis.

The character of Goldberg in Harold Pinter's earliest major play, The Birthday Party, presents an important challenge to us to question his claim to represent 'Jewishness' and instead to understand him as a destructive stereotype of the Jew and Jewishness. This is a challenge which has by and large not been taken up by critics. Goldberg, like Shylock and Fagin and others in the canon of English literature, is a complex, intentionally villainous, but colourful and memorable figure, who, against the relative paucity of other images of Jews and Jewishness, comes to stand for the Jew and reinforce essentially antisemitic stereotypes, even among those who explicitly reject the prejudice. The undefined sense of threat and violence, which from the outset of Pinter's oeuvre has remained a dominant feature, in this play finds some measure of definition through an examination of the character Goldberg, and we can see how destructive stereotypes of our identity held by others, and sustained often by the inattention of the majority, are the fertile soil of violent persecution and cruelty. Created just over a decade after the opening of the death camps, Pinter's Goldberg shows the spectre did not perish with the people.

This article discusses four different representations of Jews and Jewishness as seen on British television since 1960. The first three – Victor Gollancz's appearance on Face to Face (1960), an episode of the situation comedy Please Sir! (1968), and Simon Schama's The Story of the Jews (2013) all feature individuals who consciously articulate their identity as 'a Jew' in different ways. The final section argues for the subconscious presence of Jewishness in the central character of the BBC's long-running series Doctor Who.

Snatch (Guy Ritchie, 2000) is a comic-book gangster film that can be seen to represent the backlash against perceived notions of political correctness in what is effectively a public-schoolboy fantasy of working-class life in East London. However, the film also delineates the limits of this backlash in its depiction of minorities as either contained or excess. This is highlighted through the comic-book genre itself as well as the characterization. Thus, this article explores the tension between the genre, representation and Jewish identity.

This article considers the Jewishness of Stanley Kubrick (1928–1999), one of the most important filmmakers of the twentieth century. It argues, first, that Kubrick's origins and ethnicity had a significant impact on his work. Second, it locates Kubrick in the intellectual milieu of New York City to show that Kubrick's films engaged with the same dilemmas and explored the same paradoxes as the New York Intellectuals did. Third, it suggests that Kubrick can also be productively considered as a European director. Finally, a brief case study of his 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), using a 'Midrashic' approach, is provided.

In 1983, Clive Sinclair (b. 1948) was named one of Granta's twenty 'Best of Young British Novelists'. He is the author of four collections of short stories: Hearts of Gold (1979), Bedbugs (1982) and The Lady with the Laptop and Other Stories (1996), which have won – or been short-listed for – literary prizes, including the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, the Dylan Thomas Award and the PEN Silver Pen. His latest collection, Death & Texas, was published by Peter Halban in February 2014 and long-listed for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. As well as those books he has produced ten others, among them the novels Bibliosexuality (1973), Blood Libels (1985), Cosmetic Effects (1989), Augustus Rex (1992) and Meet the Wife (2002), as well as a biography of The Brothers Singer (1983) and a travel book, Diaspora Blues: A View of Israel (1987). Sinclair's idiosyncratic work largely defies easy categorization, yet it is suffused with Jewish concerns; it is arresting, provocative and unapologetic as well as tragically farcical. His is an important voice in British Jewish literature which has always resisted the lure of cheap conformity.

Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, one of the outstanding figures of modern Orthodox Judaism in the twentieth century, was opposed to interfaith dialogue and more particularly, to theological dialogue with the Catholic Church. In guidelines laid down in his paper 'Confrontation' in 1964 he proposed that Jews and Christians should discuss social and ethical problems together, but not matters theological. Since he was personally well acquainted with non-Jewish secular learning and had a philosophically sophisticated understanding of the role of halakhah, there has been much speculation as to why he sought to restrict dialogue in this way. Fifty years after 'Confrontation' was issued, it may be useful to re-examine his reasons and motivation in this matter and consider what relevance it has for contemporary interfaith relations.

Over the last 130 years attendance by Jewish children at Jewish day schools in Britain has waxed and waned, until now, in the twenty-first century, attendance figures are similar to those of the 1880s, with almost 60 per cent of Jewish children attending a Jewish primary or secondary school. Recent research has examined this trend within the Jewish population as a whole, mainly concentrating on Jewish secondary schooling. Because of the impact this phenomenon has had on chederim and because of the fundamental differences between the different branches of Judaism, it is important for Jewish educators and leaders to understand what factors lie behind the choices that parents make when deciding on their children's schooling. This study investigates the reasons why parents who are affiliated to Progressive synagogues choose to send their children to Orthodox Jewish primary schools, concentrating on one Progressive community in the north of England in particular, and contrasting the data with that from two larger and older communities. The data was collected through the use of interviews and questionnaires, then analysed in relation to the history and size of the three communities and contrasted with the conclusions of previous studies. The findings suggest that the size and relative age and history of the principal community have had a significant influence on the attitudes of the parents toward the city's Jewish community and the importance of the role of the Orthodox Jewish primary school in maintaining that community, to the extent that the parents' social identity as 'Jews' is more important to them than their synagogue affiliation.

This interview with the Sephardic novelist and translator Esther Bendahan provides unique insights into the historical events that surrounded the collapse of Jewish communities in Morocco during the second half of the twentieth century. Bendahan's knowledge of the social and political realities that informed Sephardic cultural production in Morocco, her ability as a scholar to interpret their significance in the wider context of Sephardism in the Maghreb, and her priceless insights as a first-hand witness of the diasporas triggered by the independence of European colonies throughout North Africa make her account and interpretation of these events extremely valuable. This interview pays special attention to the many ways in which Sephardic cultural production was, and remains, different from European traditions while simultaneously presenting itself as an intermediary between the East and the West.

If books could tell their story . . . Some actually can, because we are able to trace some phases of their history. The above-mentioned Sulzbach Bible has right from its origins the most interesting story to tell: partly because of its very specific function during three particular years and the fact that it contains the only known signature of Israel Jacobson, the founder of Progressive Judaism, further because of its journeys from Westphalia via Brazil to London, and also because of some of its owners, one being the rabbi who initiated the first of the famous three rabbinical conferences that mark the ‘Classical Reform’ period in Judaism.

Levie Bernfeld, Tirtsah, Poverty and Welfare among the Portuguese Jews in Early Modern Amsterdam, Oxford, Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2012, xvii + 590 pp., ISBN 978-1-904113-57-7 (hb).

Batnitsky, Leora, How Judaism Became a Religion: An Introduction to Modern Jewish Thought, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2011, x + 211 pp. (cloth).

Lainer-Vos, Dan, Sinews of the Nation: Constructing Irish and Zionist Bonds in the United States, Cambridge, Polity, 2013, 240 pp., ISBN 13-978-0- 7456-6265-7 (pb).

Ofer, Dalia, Francoise S. Ouzan and Judy Tydor Baumel-Schwartz, Holocaust Survivors: Resettlement, Memories, Identities, New York, Berghahn Books, 2012, 345 pp., ISBN 978-0-85745-247-4 (hb).

Baumel-Schwartz, Judith Tydor, Never Look Back: The Jewish Refugee Children in Great Britain 1938–1945, West Lafayette, IN, Purdue University Press (Shofar Supplements in Jewish Studies), 2012, 286 pp., ISBN 978-1- 55753-612-9 (pb).

Bernard, Philippa, A Beacon of Light: The History of West London Synagogue, West London Synagogue, 2013, 229 pp., ISBN 978-0-9576672-0-4.

Pinto, Diana, Israel Has Moved, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2013, 215 pp., ISBN 978-0-674-07342-5 (hb).

The Name (1901)

David Child survivor’s testimony

The Life of a Word Blood Work

I am a Fact, not a Fiction