Jew[ish]

by Matt Greene

And besides, wasn’t Jewishness less about being a part of something than apart from it? Wasn’t the lesson of the Talmud to think for yourself and, by extension, to be wary of doctrine and groupthink and the identities they forged? Apparently not.

There was no part of being Jewish that struck me as beneficial. And that was before I’d even heard the word anti-Semitism. Before I learned that Hashem was not the only H word, and certainly not the loudest.

At the Admiralty he was assigned originally to code-making and breaking but one look at him and the head of department reassigned him to something with a lower clearance where the work was mainly administrative. As Nat puts it, ‘He took one look at me and he must’ve thought, “Fucking Jew, I don’t want him on my team.”’

FFS, surely a mathematically talented Jew would be a highly motivated member of staff in a job explicitly about figuring out what Hitler was up to? Discrimination leads inevitably to stupidity.

At the Admiralty, Nat had been working alongside other working-class kids, but here were the higher classes, more educated and cosmopolitan. He expected better and got worse.

Not the first time the working class have been accused of the crimes of the upper class.

Much of Britain’s self-image as a defender of liberalism and bastion of multiculturalism comes from winning the Second World War; because we defeated the Nazis, we’re the good guys. In fact, Britain has never really recovered from this.

‘These were the so-called better classes, the people who were supposed to be more tolerant. I can still remember the look on one of their faces. He was so anti-Semitic it was written right across him.’

Minorities always need to be aware of those who extrapolate from an individual’s actions in order to reinforce their negative feelings towards a group. This means that all minorities must be mindful of the stories we tell, and of their potential audience, which is something non-minorities, who operate inside far wider spectrums of expected behaviour, need never consider.

never better portrayed than Alvy in Annie Hall, has a darker underside. In the same way that camp is a performance of gayness that seems at first to celebrate identity but also limits its scope, the nebbish presents a culturally acceptable form of being Jewish whose primary audience is non-Jews.

In Nanette, her miraculous 2017 stand-up special, the comedian Hannah Gadsby, who grew up gay in rural Tasmania, critiques the idea that self-deprecation is a marker of reclamation and self-empowerment. Rather, as she puts it, it’s a mode the marginalised can speak in that allows them access to the world of their oppressors;

the great power Jews and gay people share, the reason we’re feared as much as we’re hated, is that we have the potential to walk amongst you.

I've heard a few Black commentators make this point to cries of anti-semitism.

It’s not like there were Nazis in Edgware or enrolling as mature students on linguistics courses in East Sussex.

The grestest trick the devil pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist

My older brother, the Wise Child, now works as a teacher in a Jewish primary school and has this to say on the subject of security: ‘By eight or nine the kids are very aware of anti-Semitism. We do intruder drills once a term. We start at age four. When the alarm sounds the children know to move away from windows and external doors so they can’t be viewed from outside. Some schools make a game of it – they call it Sleeping Lions – but we just make them sit on the floor in silence; we don’t want them thinking it’s a game because it’s not.

"they do active shooter drills in USA, it's not like that in Britain" Not for you

We also have evacuation procedures in place in case of bomb threats – several have been made against Jewish schools in the last few years. All Jewish schools have security and the site is swept a couple of times a day.’

We’re lucky that we’ve got a secure site and we tweaked our security arrangements accordingly because after each drill there’s an assessment about what needs to change, if there are things we need to adapt . . . Jewish schools all have security guards. They all have gates. Other schools are waking up to the risks of terrorism now but we’ve been used to this for years. It’s been normalised for a very long time.’

In that climate, surely anyone would want protection. Fears like this create Israel's Iron Sky, but they also create paranoia. It's hard to convince someone they're not out to get you when the news says otherwise.

In school we explicitly foster a sense of dual identity: Jewish identity and a British identity. We’re very explicit that we’re proud British Jews: we’re proud British people and we’re proud Jewish people.

But what does it mean to assimilate to a culture? For one it’s based on an assumption that increasingly fails to hold: that we can (or should) calculate difference from some mythical, monocultural baseline.

The expectation remains on the smaller culture to assimilate to the larger, to adopt its ideals and sand down what edges don’t fit to its mould.

See the USA trend towards the majority minority. If no culture has a majority, who or what does everyone assimilate too, beyond the flags and institutions?

It makes assimilation both a failure and a requirement and asks only in return that you adopt the specifically British values of openness and tolerance, which means being open to closed-mindedness and tolerant of intolerance, even if they’re being directed towards your own community; it’s the height of bad manners to point this out.

But this all supposes assimilation is a conscious undertaking rather than what naturally happens when you’re part of a community who’ve lived uneventfully enough alongside others for more than a hundred years; that Jewish life is some alien culture that needs weaving into the fabric of British society and is not already an integral part of it. I had two great-grandfathers who fought for Britain in the First World War, so why, in 2005, was I worried about self-ghettoisation?

My main view, the one I hold most vociferously and the only one I’d be confident debating to defend, is that I resent telling you. The obligation to have an opinion (namely, the correct opinion) about Israel is a stick often used to beat Jews in the diaspora,

‘The British fucked it up for everyone.

Talking about Israel here, but a fair summary of the Empire for anyone who wasn't in the House of Lords

the one view I hold most assiduously is that Jews have no obligation to define themselves in relation to a foreign government’s policy,

Amen

As Eddo-Lodge herself explains, the evidence suggests that privileging race over class or class over race when considering the structural inequalities our society is built on is neither easy nor advisable.46 Which brings us to the tricky subject of Jews and money.

It’s obvious anti-Semites have little squeamishness in seeing Jews as a race (often another species), and defining a group in reductive terms they haven’t agreed on is another definition of racism.

Ironically, it may be that Jews are unwelcome on the right because we’re not white enough and unwelcome on the left for the opposite reason, because we’re too white, because we fail to fit some victim archetype, as if through the result of some bizarre reverse profiling.

in the quantum, infinitely mirrored hallway of the internet anti-Semitism (that most quantum of hatreds) may finally have found its natural home.

We’re assured that whatever we’ve complained about is not anti-Semitic. The suggestion here being that our experience as Jews disqualifies us from thinking rationally and objectively on the subject.

This is, of course, the same tactic used to discredit Blacks, women, LGBT+ and other groups that need DEI to dismantle systemic injustice. If you want to maintain the system, a few well worn and oft repeated lies are easier and more effective than treating any excluded group on its own terms.

people who’d never dream of asking a trans person why something was transphobic or an Asian woman why something was racist constantly ask Jews to explain anti-Semitism, with the implication that it’s down to us to convince them it’s real.

The far right, of course, use asking for evidence as an attack. The left, as in the discussion here, would never dream of such a thing…

In November 2018, with the echo tag having seeped into the mainstream,69 alt-right 8chan users suggested wishing Jews a ‘Happy Hanukkah’ as a way of tagging them online. This came with the same deniability that had initially recommended the triple brackets but also the added bonus that it appeared friendly, so that Jews reporting the tags would be made to look unreasonable and ridiculous.

Maybe it’s true that understanding anti-Semitism requires a little more nuance or historical knowledge than understanding other forms of racism, but unless the patience to acquire this can be found, Jews will continue to feel unsupported and disenfranchised – and, at the extreme end, their lives will be endangered.

For whatever reason, for any reason, for no reason at all, to be Jewish is to live with the knowledge that no matter who you are or what you do there are people who will hate you.

felt no more connected than our dial-up modem as I waited for my dad to conclude yet another work phone call.

That's a very time-specific metaphor

Then it’s into a barracks to hear the testimony of a former inmate, Renee Salt, who incredibly, in her ninetieth year, is accompanying groups on every leg of this trip.

Her testimony is available online https://www.holocaust.org.uk/renee-salt

We can and must acknowledge the individual nature of anti-Semitism while realising that never again means not ever for anyone: not the Roma of Italy, the subject of a proposed census by the coalition’s populist Interior Ministry; not the Yazidi, massacred by ISIL and dispersed across the globe; and not for Uyghur Muslims, a million of whom, at the time of writing, are believed to be interned in Chinese re-education camps. Recognising persecution and standing shoulder to shoulder with those who are oppressed and dispossessed is a key part of what it means to be Jewish.