Jew[ish]

by Matt Greene

This is the only view of prayer I’ve ever been able to countenance: a negotiation in which the goal is to remain silent for longer than your opponent (God).

I wanted to explore what it means to be defined by an identity you may have personally rejected, one I continue to struggle with, and one that increasingly struggles with me.

By contrast, the Jewish God scored low for likeability. He was cruel and capricious. He wouldn’t forgive a blind man for not polishing his shoes.

But the engine for Judaism isn’t faith. It’s doubt. What keeps the vehicle moving isn’t the belief that it will but the heat generated from a thousand simultaneous disagreements.

What Judaism essentially amounts to is a four-thousand-year-old argument.

There is a reason it’s so hard to convert to Judaism: anyone who wants to, by definition, has proven they don’t know what it means.

because we defeated the Nazis, we’re the good guys. In fact, Britain has never really recovered from this. We’re encouraged to think of ourselves as tolerant and welcoming while living in a country where the bestselling newspapers routinely compare migrants to floods and swarms, and governments left and right are lambasted for failing to deliver on their targets for restricting immigration.

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.

Judaism was less a religion than a way of life, the only one Nat and Helen had ever known. It was like a glue or an interplanetary force, a form of gravity that held the family in orbit, stopped them all from spinning out into space.

since Jews, as all Jews know, are under greater pressure to breed than pandas in captivity.

Drama requires desire but comedy can come from acceptance. It’s anger turned upside down and inside out. And a lot of it is self-directed. Some of my favourite Jewish jokes (or ‘jokes’ as we call them) rely on negative stereotypes.

Comedy can be a tool for survival not just in the sense that it brings comfort and offers a reason to endure through suffering, but in the way it can allow you to co-exist with a difficult principle, to live between incompatible positions.

but I made it a matter of pride to gorge myself on prawn curries and BLTs: not all Jews, I explained, were bound by ancient laws that might’ve made sense once when we lived in the desert, but had been obsolete since the invention of the cool box.

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. This becomes the price of entry: standing out in any way, whether through your dress or the gates round your temples, breeds resentment and sometimes hostility.

The tension isn’t between two religions but in differing attitudes on a variety of issues, from food to sex, from modes of parenting to ‘styles of emotional expressiveness . . . all of [which] are culturally embedded’.

Sometimes it takes a perceptive outsider to articulate something you’re not able to see.

‘The thing about being Jewish is you always need to be vigilant. If you think you’re safe, you’re probably being complacent. That’s why we need a Jewish state, so there’s somewhere we can go if the shit ever hits the fan again.’

the presence of Jews made the march above board. Without us, it was vulnerable to all kinds of innuendo, but with us it was kosher. The Jews, made separate from the rest of the crowd, were its insurance.

Appreciates the double irony of the validation badge, but still segregated in order to identify as different yet "included"

Personally I still find the idea that Israel would ever be a safer place for me to live than where I currently do almost impossible to imagine, but that’s not to say I don’t believe in its existence.

Something about Miliband’s face didn’t fit. And in Britain, in 2015 and again in 2020, your face not fitting is a euphemism for something that requires more thought.

Culturally, I don’t identify as white, but then who besides racists would?

Uneccessarily racist!

The reality, of course, is that there are rich Jews and poor Jews and the rich ones are more visible (what Jewish psychologist Daniel Kahneman would call an availability bias), but it is true that Jewish people are overrepresented in some high-paying professions.

In all but exceptional cases, my Jewishness is something I can choose to disclose, which brings an element of self-determination denied the victim of more traditional racial prejudice because I can control if and when to ‘out’ myself as Jewish and, therefore, the effect my Jewishness has over a given situation.

But if I did wear a kippah or have payot I’d be a different type of Jew and, statistically speaking, much more likely to view my Jewishness as a religious identity (as opposed to an ethnic one),50 and, by extension, view anti-Semitism as anti-religious.

Unlike traditional racism, which tends to be binary, relying on a few baseless stereotypes, anti-Jewish racism is quantum: Jews are at once weak beyond pity and powerful beyond belief.

gets the mindset of the cowardly bully

That Jews are white grants us certain advantages and rights, like the privilege of shopping without a security guard lurking over our shoulder, but it also denies us the protection of a united left, who are uncomfortable with the notion of white victimhood – and are equally susceptible to talk of global elites and supranational motives.

But benign or otherwise, all conspiracy theories have something significant in common: they are all inherently undisprovable. To those distrustful of deep states and professional journalists, any refutation can be dismissed as a diversion or as part of a cover-up. The refutation becomes proof itself: of how close the theorist has come to uncovering the truth, of just how deep this thing goes.

Conspiracy is self-sustaining. It’s self-generative.

because anti-Semitism is not confined to any one point on the political spectrum and because Jewish experience is not (or not entirely) defined by anti-Semitism,

Rather than apologise for his words, the effect they’ve had,72 or at the bare minimum the offence caused, Johnson chose to attack the opposition for its failure to offer Jewish voters adequate assurances that its own problems were in hand. This kind of sophistry, which may be Johnson’s one political skill, is worse than disingenuous since it converts Jewish hurt and legitimate concern to political backspin, a defensive measure employed by a government who have nothing positive to offer.

In an age of increasing partisanship (which again is attributable to the internet and its economy of attention) most things are decided along party lines.

Trump’s and Johnson’s willingness to cheapen our anguish to avoid accountability ironically proves this beyond doubt. And anti-racism is only as strong as its weakest link. You can’t oppose anti-Semitism and call Mexicans rapists, deport citizens because they’re West Indian or separate children from their parents and put them in cages.

blatant attack on Trump who has done all those things

Believe us – believe us – however tired you are of hearing about anti-Semitism, we’re more tired of talking about it. Most of all, we’re tired of trying to convince people that all of this is happening.

When people asked me why I’d chosen to spend my thirty-fourth birthday on a tour of Nazi concentration camps I told them either that I had a book to finish or I was going so I didn’t have to again. (Sometimes, if I knew them well, I told them it was Jewry duty.)

sense of humour in the pun

that day I understood that a religion was not a faith, that it need not point upwards. It could just as easily point backwards. Or sideways. It didn’t have to mean something to mean something. It wasn’t a tower, it was a bridge.

Viktor Frankl, who detailed his experiences in Auschwitz in the first half of Man’s Search for Meaning, in his future career as a pioneer of logotherapy talked a lot about hyperintention: the paradox that the more you will something (sleep, dry armpits, an erection), the more elusive it becomes.

Whereas if each Jew cultivated their own version of Jewishness, didn’t we have a better shot at plurality, which is a better word than assimilation since it understands that there is no one thing to assimilate to, and allows for the possibility that nothing is lost?

Among the Tories’ manifesto promises, along with Getting Brexit Done and introducing a ‘firmer and fairer’ Australian-style points-based immigration system, was a pledge to give police new powers to arrest and seize the property of Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities whose encampments are deemed unauthorised. State seizure of a community’s possessions and the threat of incarceration is past the point of a slippery slope. Jews understand as well as anyone that an attack on one minority is an attack on us all.

Now we are being promised an "Australian deal" as code for a no-deal Brexit

Now more than ever we must remember the value of solidarity. This solidarity must not be conditional on a group’s perceived worthiness or on who, cynically, speaks up on its behalf, and must not be coloured by ancient antipathies that are written into lore and exploited by those who seek to control us through division.

we should be all in "it" together

In an age of weaponised identity, where we’re far more interested in our differences than in what unites us and where our politics sets us against each other in ever-smaller subgroups, we’d do well to remember that most things are fluid, that there’s an ish in everything.

We’re not all Jews but we’re all Jew-ish.

great summation of the book and his arguments