European Judaism

In our autumn edition in 2014 we published articles from a conference on ‘Writing Jews in Contemporary Britain’. They were guest edited for the issue by Axel Stähler and Sue Vice, the organisers of the conference. In their joint introduction they wrote:

Contemporary British Jewish writers are being credited with an ‘attitude’ and their fiction is perceived to celebrate ‘the anarchic potential of the Jewish voice’.

It will come as no surprise, particularly given what they quoted about ‘attitude’ and ‘anarchic potential’, that the first Jewish author they mentioned, because of his recent award at the time of the Man Booker Prize, was Howard Jacobson. One of the contributors to that issue was David Brauner writing on ‘Fetishizing the Holocaust: Comedy and Transatlantic Connections in Howard Jacobson's Kalooki Nights’. When Bryan Cheyette and David Brauner approached the editor of this journal with the proposal to mark and celebrate Howard Jacobson's eightieth birthday, the editorial board readily accepted the offer. The contents are introduced by Bryan Cheyette, and David Brauner contributes a new interview with Jacobson. The issue also contains a book review by Howard Cooper of David's recent monograph on Jacobson in the Manchester University Press series Contemporary British Novelists.

Howard Jacobson (1942–) has been the leading Jewish writer in Britain for nearly four decades. He remains at the height of his powers with the recent publication of his memoir, Mother's Boy: A Writer's Beginnings (2022) which is referred to throughout this introduction. I will return to Jacobson's first novel, Coming from Behind (1983), to show how it relates to his ‘golden’ period which is the focus of the articles in this Special Issue. Novels produced during this period include: The Mighty Walzer (1999), Kalooki Nights (2006), The Finkler Question (2010), J: A Novel (2014) and Shylock Is My Name (2016). Jacobson's growing confidence – moving between the individual and the collective, between comedy and tragedy, and between realism and experimentalism – will be at the heart of the introduction.

Howard Jacobson is one of the leading Anglo-Jewish writers of the past forty years. He has received considerable acclaim but articles about Jacobson have rarely featured his career as a broadcaster, on British television and radio. Since the 1980s he has regularly appeared as a subject of TV documentaries, including Arena (BBC2) and The South Bank Show (ITV), a presenter of individual programmes such as Sorry, Judas and The South Bank Show: Why the Novel Matters to Roots Schmoots and Seriously Funny and a number of discussion programmes, including Start the Week (Radio 4), The Sundays (Channel 4) and The Late Show (BBC2).

Howard Jacobson is a British author who is proud of being labelled a Jewish writer and does not hesitate to describe himself as ‘entirely and completely Jewish’. He believes that English-Jewish writers should address directly the challenge of being Jewish, which is precisely what he does in The Mighty Walzer (1999). The novel shows once again Jacobson's greatness as a comic novelist and thus reinforces his assumption that the ingenious, joking Jew is the Jew in essence. Like many scholars, Jacobson believes that self-aimed humour has allowed Jewish people to cope with the paradoxical nature of their culture and historical situation. In The Mighty Walzer Jacobson proves to be the Jew par excellence by joking about everything from religion to food, making fun of the contradictions and incongruities of Jewish life.

Reflecting on his childhood in post-war Manchester, Howard Jacobson claimed in 2016: ‘I never met a Jew that wanted to play a sport, and the only Jew I ever met who did was me and that sport was table tennis . . . My attitude towards sport is simple – it's something that Jews just don't do’. This article explores sporting participation and interest within Manchester Jewry from the 1890s through to the modern day. It begins by mapping and analysing the strong sporting culture that developed before World War Two, a time when sport was actively promoted by communal leaders and when young Jews, in particular, took it to their heart. It moves on to show how, by the time Jacobson was growing up, it had indeed lost its centrality. Yet sport had not, as Jacobson may have claimed, disappeared from Manchester Jewry. Rather, it had changed, morphing into something which sat more comfortably with a more comfortable, middle-class community who had largely left the inner city behind. As they now occupied Manchester's margins, so too did sport move to occupy the margins of their new, changed realities.

This article parses the role of the body in Howard Jacobson's Kalooki Nights and the manner in which Jacobson satirically draws on antisemitic concepts of Jewish difference. The article explores the role of the body in Jacobson's magnum opus and how the author deconstructs the binaries that define and separate Jews and non-Jews. It offers new close readings of the novel that focus on the protagonist's failed marriages, and – following from David Brauner's recent monograph-length study – brings into focus new ways in which Jacobson's novel engages and departs from Philip Roth.

This article analyses Howard Jacobson's 2014 novel J, which depicts the aftermath of an imagined genocide of the Jews in Britain, and explores its connections to other examples of British-set counterfactual Holocaust fiction. The representation of mass murder on British soil in Jacobson's novel is achieved despite its omission of such crucial words as ‘Jew’, making the task of identifying these events and their victims into one shared by the novel's protagonists and the reader. This article identifies the varied targets of J's satire, which include that of increasing British insularity and its basis in assumptions of moral superiority in relation to the commission of wartime atrocities in Europe. Yet the novel also critiques in more general terms those aspects of contemporary life's dependence on conformity-inducing technologies, to suggest that the figure of the Jew, and responses to the Jewish presence, offer a more vital alternative.

This is a detailed, wide-ranging interview with the Booker-Prize-winning novelist, broadcaster and public intellectual Howard Jacobson, conducted by the author of the only monograph on his work. On the eve of the publication of his memoir, Mother's Boy, Jacobson discusses that work, his relationship with his parents, his attitude towards other novelists, and his views on, among other things, Jewishness, antisemitism, poetry, art, television and Trump.

This article discusses key existential concepts, and Jewish principles within the context of the experience of the 2020/21 COVID pandemic. The premise of the article is that existential concepts, ‘existentials’, while always underpinning our lives, have been highlighted during this period of crisis, with significant potential resultant learning. This kind of process, learning about ourselves in response to the circumstances of our lives, the circumstances in which we find ourselves, is at the heart of the enterprise of existential psychotherapy. Do we find the roots of these concepts within Jewish thought and theology? How do fundamental Jewish principles and contemporary existential ideas sit side by side?

As a result of the pandemic, I am a fugitive from my Marylebone consulting rooms. I have had to adapt my ‘technique’ to both the limitations and extended possibilities of Zoom. To mirror back a patient's psyche in an accelerating emotional climate of existential anxiety and increased irritability. I refer to the ‘democratisation’ of therapy brought about by the increased autonomy of the patient to control their environment and access to intimacy during Zoom sessions.

One of the most painful realities of being controlled by technology is its crudity, its totalitarianism in comparison to mediated physical contact engaged in face-to-face work. Clinical vignettes (always with the patient's written consent) are provided to demonstrate clinical phenomena unique to the Zoom setting.

This article explores the impact of the first year of lockdown on the UK nations. It highlights the impact of the social determinants of health before exploring other areas where the virus affected large numbers of the population. Discussion of economic and psycho-social phenomena indicates that there are no obvious conclusions and that it may be many years before we understand the true consequences of lockdown. Particular attention is given to the experience of the Jewish community.

Former Rabbi of the Mouvement Juif Liberal de France (MJLF), Rabbi Daniel Édouard Farhi was born in Nazi-occupied Paris on 18 November 1941 to Sephardic parents who originated from Izmir, Turkey. Ordained in February 1966 by Rabbi Solomon B. Freehof at the Institut International des Études Hébraïques in Paris, he commenced his career as Rabbi of Union Libérale Israélite (1967–1977), commonly known as ‘Rue Copernic’ and the country's first Liberal synagogue (1907). It was there where he received his formal Jewish education and where he later succeeded his mentor Rabbi Andre Chalom Zaoui when the latter made aliyah in 1969 to become spiritual leader rabbi of Har-El Synagogue in Jerusalem.

Born Heinz Georg Brandt in Munich, at the age of eleven his family escaped from Germany in 1939 to England and later settled in Tel Aviv. He served as an officer in the Palmach during the War of Independence and became an officer in the navy. From 1951 he studied economics at Queens University in Belfast, then worked as a market analyst for the Ford Motor company in the UK, while doing volunteer work in the Ilford Jewish community. In 1957 he began rabbinic studies as one of the first students at the recently opened Leo Baeck College, obtaining rabbinic ordination in 1961. His first rabbinic post was in Leeds, following which he served an international community in Geneva, and in 1978 was the founding rabbi of the Liberal Jewish congregation ‘Or Chadash’ in Zurich and later served as the community rabbi in Gothenburg.

David Brauner, Contemporary British Novelists: Howard Jacobson, Manchester University Press, 2020.