Posts by Gerald Jacobs

Wolf Mankowitz - the man who did everything

Gerald Jacobs — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 10:50:00 +0000

“A Renaissance man.”
“A sort of East End [James] Joyce.”
“A f*** ’em Jew.”

Three assessments of the prodigious playwright, producer, scholar, poet, journalist, screenwriter, TV panellist, artist and authority on Wedgwood china, Wolf Mankowitz. The first is by actor Richard Burton, with whom Mankowitz worked on Dr Faustus (with Elizabeth Taylor as Helen of Troy) and The Fifth Offensive, in which Burton played Marshall Tito. The second is by novelist Anthony Burgess; the third is writer Frederic Raphael’s description of a man assertively proud of his roots.

All of these are quoted in a new biography — The Worlds of Wolf Mankowitz by Anthony J Dunn — of a man who, born in poverty, went on to study English literature at Cambridge, produce a stream of writing from scholarly to streetwise, and — as the sub-title of Dunn’s book puts it — form a bridge “between elite and popular cultures in post-war Britain”.

Mankowitz, who died in 1998, was even suspected of being a Soviet spy. He certainly had communist leanings as a student at Cambridge and joined the local party, where he met his future wife, Ann Seligmann. Files released in 2010 show MI5 particularly concerned when Mankowitz helped set up a British delegation to the 1957 World Festival of Youth and Students in Moscow and tried to recruit members of the Royal Court theatre cast of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger.

It was not unusual for someone of Mankowitz’s background to be drawn to communism. Born Cyril Woolf (with two o’s) Mankowitz, in 1924, he grew up in Fashion Street, between Commercial Street and Brick Lane, in the heart of London’s Jewish East End. His parents were Russian Jews and their home was a two-room flat, with one cold-water tap and an outside lavatory.

But communism was far from being the only magnet to attract the young Mankowitz. He loved the sights, sounds and smells of the local market, and sold stamps there in his youth. In commerce and communism, he found one of the contradictory links which, as Dunn’s book demonstrates, drove him throughout his life.

Mankowitz’s first major experience of starkly contrasting milieux came in 1943 when, almost uniquely for an East End Jewish boy at that time, he went up to Downing College, Cambridge, to study under the singularly demanding F R Leavis. Under Leavis, he learned the importance of literary texts, giving him a sensitivity to verbal power and standards which he retained even as he accomplished an output that stretched from academic criticism to popular entertainment.

Another factor that applied to all aspects of Mankowitz’s varied life and work was that there was normally “something Jewish” about it, whether deriving from his Russian heritage, his East End origins, or his support for Israel, galvanised by the Six-Day War of 1967. And support for Israel was not all that it inspired.

With Jewish Book Week 2013 almost upon us, it is interesting to recall Mankowitz’s words to a Jewish Book Week audience 35 years ago, when he declared that the restoration of the Western Wall had led him to “unpick the lock to a vast treasure, which is the Torah and everything that has come out of it”. An intriguing sentiment from a lifelong atheist and non-Zionist.

For many Jews of a certain age, the name of Wolf Mankowitz is most indelibly associated with the 1953 film, A Kid For Two Farthings, featuring the irresistibly Jewish actor, David Kossoff. This was a kind of shtetl tale, set in Petticoat Lane market, about a young boy who buys a pet goat. The animal has only one discernible horn and the boy is encouraged to believe that the it is a unicorn, blessed with magical powers.

The other Mankowitz film that strongly conveys the atmosphere of 1950s London is his satire on the popular music culture of the time, Expresso Bongo, starring one of his closest friends and fellow Jew, Laurence Harvey, who went on to enjoy a successful Hollywood career.

Mankowitz’s plays, The Bespoke Overcoat, and Make Me an Offer, were also set in a London Jewish ambience — and also filmed. But he ranged much more widely. Even in London, he had an antiques shop in Mayfair, where he also lived — and his other addresses included the Caribbean, Israel and Ireland.

His stage and film career saw him in the roles of producer, director and impresario but, above all, as writer, notably for the screen. He was James Bond’s movie midwife, having introduced Harry Saltzman to Cubby Broccoli. He contributed to the script of the first Bond film, Dr No — from which he insisted his name be removed from the credits — and the Bond spoof, Casino Royale, which made serious money (this time he consented to remaining credited). He considered the sci-fi epic, The Day The Earth Caught Fire, to be his best film script.

He did musicals, too, one of which, based on the life of the convicted murderer Dr Crippen, was rubbished by the doyen of theatre critics, Bernard Levin. In response, Mankowitz — described by Dunn as “a figure of formidable bulk and presence” — delivered a coffin to the much smaller and slighter Levin, with a note attached, which read: “Dear Bernie, this is your size, not mine. Signed, Wolfie”

Sadly, both Wolfie and Bernie are no more.

Vantage Point: Age is no barrier to your inner entertainer

Gerald Jacobs — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 11:35:16 +0000

I don’t know if Kay D’Arcy is Jewish. Probably not. But there are undoubtedly a great many Jews who are like her — well past retirement age, overflowing with chutzpah, and possessed of the “showbiz gene”. And many of these could, and just might, follow her example.

Twenty years ago, with a career as a midwife behind her, Ms D’Arcy applied to a London drama school — and got in. Ten years ago, she quit the UK and decided to try her luck in Los Angeles. Since then, she has played an assortment of unenviable roles — women “dying in bed or having a stroke”.

Now, however, at the age of 79, she has landed the lead part in a new online action drama called Agent 88, which has already attracted a cult following.

She plays the eponymous Agent 88, described by the producers as “the world’s most deadly assassin”. Kay herself has undertaken martial arts training and has amazed those around her with her ability in the series to switch at will from a “decrepit” old woman to “a highly skilled warrior”.

That there always exists a pool of British Jews cut from similar cloth was brought home to me in the days when Kay D’Arcy was still treading wards rather than boards. I had not been working long for the JC when I interviewed a well-known director.

At the time, he was planning a TV drama in which he wanted the opening scene — depicting young Jewish refugees from Russian pogroms arriving in Britain — to be spoken entirely in Yiddish, with English sub-titles.

It was proving difficult to cast and the director asked if I could place something in the JC to help him widen his search. So I did. On the Friday when the piece appeared, my telephone rang incessantly. Although there were a number of different callers, it was essentially the same call.

It went something like this: “Excuse me but I saw that item about the television play. Look, I’m not exactly an actor. And I’m not exactly young. But mein Yiddish… oyy! Everyone tells me I should be on the stage — or the television already!”

I did send one or two of the callers along, and I am sure that the director was charmed by them. For who among Jews does not have an uncle, aunt, cousin or other relative with a talent or taste for the performing arts, be it mime, melodrama, make-up or stand-up? And how multiple are our joke-tellers and raconteurs, their stories ripening with the years.

That Jews are great tellers of jokes is a truism. Anybody who has seen examples of the YouTube sensation, Old Jews Telling Jokes, will endorse this. The especially endearing aspect of these particular gems is that the people telling the jokes are all amateurs — retired accountants, gynaecologists, lawyers and such like.

But once these skills are seen, it is hard to keep them hidden. From its origins on the internet, Old Jews Telling Jokes has spawned a TV series, a book and an off-Broadway show.

The inherent absurdity of the process of ageing and death, so powerfully evoked by Samuel Beckett among others, has also frequently been mined by Jewish writers and performers, not only for comedy but for ironic, consoling and even uplifting effect.

The late Alan Isler’s brilliant novel, The Prince of West End Avenue, about a group of old-age-home residents putting on a production of Hamlet, ticks all those boxes.

Joseph Heller, the creator of Catch 22, modern literature’s absurdist concept par excellence, towards the end of his life used to have lunch every week with a bunch of close friends, all of them invalids. Heller himself had Guillain-Barré syndrome; one friend had cancer; another, chronic heart disease, and so on. These sessions, said Heller, were among the most joyous and hilarious of his life.

Two British Jewish women of the theatre, Sonja Linden and Sue Lefton, have recently established The Performance Ensemble, a company for older actors, the eldest of whom is 83, drawn from a range of cultural backgrounds.

Although this is a professional project, it does show that there is always a potential outlet for someone blessed with the ability to entertain and the desire to do so irrespective of age. And isn’t that a pretty good definition of a Jew? Shekoach!

Sally Becker looks back on a life in the war zone

Gerald Jacobs — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 10:13:52 +0000

When former Serb leader Radovan Karadzic recently claimed at his war crimes trial in The Hague that he should be “rewarded” for his actions in the 1990s Bosnian war, Sally Becker suggested on Twitter that an appropriate reward would be a nice “rest” at the Holiday Inn, Sarajevo.

Twenty years ago, it was from there that Serb snipers targeted defenceless civilians. A long siege and 11,000 deaths followed. Today, Karadzic’s welcome at the hotel would be more than warm; it would be infernal.

Becker’s own place in the blood-soaked modern history of the Balkans is genuinely deserving of reward. For her heroic efforts in raising money, delivering aid, rescuing injured children and alerting the world to the devastation of a historic city in Bosnia-Herzegovina, this Jewish woman from Brighton became known as the “Angel of Mostar”.

These days, Becker is a goodwill ambassador for Children of Peace, a charity dedicated to “breaking the cycle of violence between Palestinians and Israelis” by bringing together young people from both sides.

Worthwhile work, certainly, but serene in comparison with dodging bullets or being incarcerated in a Kosovo prison.

Yet, for all her encounters with violent destruction and heart-rending human damage, Becker is keen to play down her bravery. “I don’t think I’m different from other people,” she insists. “It just happened that I was there, so I did it.”

How she did it, and the horrors, frustrations and occasional bright times she experienced, is described in her book, Sunflowers and Snipers, in which she writes: “Tough I am not”. But, given that she returned to the frontline time and again, hadn’t she developed a taste for war?

“Some people do say that war can be addictive,” she concedes. “You’re living on the edge. Life is more colourful, more meaningful. But it frightened me so much, there’s no way I would call that ‘getting a taste for it’. Every time I was in danger, I was terrified. It was just that, having done it, I felt I had to go on doing it.

“I think,” she proffers, not entirely flippantly, “it’s to do with Jewish guilt. I learnt about the Holocaust as quite a young child. And I certainly felt a sense of responsibility, because people died while the general population turned a blind eye.”

She also identifies a more literary inspiration.

“I read Nevil Shute’s novel, The Pied Piper, when I was about 12. It’s about an Englishman on holiday in France in 1940 who is asked to take a child home with him because of the approaching danger of the Nazis.

"He ends up going from place to place gathering children to bring out. It was my favourite book so I’m sure that something of it lodged in my subconscious.”

It was during the first Iraq War in 1991 that Becker’s subconscious duly delivered its irresistible mix of idealism and chutzpah. She joined the Gulf Peace Team, an assembly of people intent on protesting within the very theatre of war. They met in Jordan and made their way into Saddam Hussein’s Iraq — without Becker.

“When they found out I was Jewish, it was decided that I shouldn’t go,” she explains. “I was asked to stay in Amman and take care of PR. One day, there was a telephone call to say the whole team was trapped in the El Rashid hotel in Baghdad. They had no funds and, anyway, the taxis had all been commandeered by the press, who were leaving fast.

"I thought: ‘I wonder if King Hussein of Jordan’s wife, Queen Noor, would help’, and so I sent her a fax.”

Queen Noor responded immediately and arranged for two buses and a car to take Becker to the Iraqi border and pick up the stranded volunteers.

“After that,” she says, “I felt it was time to do my bit for my own people.” So she went to Israel, where she “spent a lot of time in air-raid shelters helping children with their gas masks”.

She was already familiar with Israel — and danger — having spent several months on Kibbutz Hanita, close to the Lebanese border, after leaving school. On March 11 1978, there was a PLO rocket barrage. Becker and the other volunteers spent the night in a shelter.

The following morning, with Katyushas still falling, she volunteered to run to the kitchen to bring back food to the shelter.

Fifteen years and one Iraq war later, she was once again a volunteer, this time with an aid convoy travelling to Bosnia, for what she expected to be a single, three-week stint. The first port of call was a camp housing hundreds of Muslim refugees where Becker was introduced to a woman known as “Mama”.

In Sunflowers and Snipers, Becker describes what happened when Serbian nationalist extremists attacked Mama’s village.

“They systematically began to force out the residents at gunpoint or flush them out by setting fire to their homes. Many had been burned alive, trapped in the basements where they had sought refuge. Some of the men were arrested and taken off to camps but Mama’s husband and son had been shot in front of her.”

Hearing this and accounts of other outrages, particularly where children were involved, ensured that this period in Becker’s life would amount to a great deal more than three weeks of hand-outs.

Having not even heard of Bosnia before leaving Brighton, she soon became aware of the desperate plight of the inhabitants of Mostar in the Herzegovina region in the south-west of the country.

Upon her return home, she made an appeal on BBC Radio Sussex. It worked: “People brought blankets, feeding bottles, nappies and anything else they thought might be useful.” The International Council of Jewish Women sent aid for Mostar’s isolated Jews.

So it was back to the Balkans, where Becker received a message from Zoran Mandlebaum, president of Mostar’s Jewish community, telling her he was sending someone to meet her.

This turned out to be 15-year-old Damir Rozic, whose 83-year-old grandfather, Haim Romano, had been stuck for weeks in the basement of Mostar’s overcrowded hospital with an infected wound. Throughout this time, his daughter — Damir’s mother — had daily defied snipers and rocket-propelled grenades to visit him.

When Becker, by determined resourcefulness, found she was able to get a consignment of antibiotics through battle lines, thereby helping to save Haim Romano’s life, she resolved to build on the experience, cultivating a passionate, can-do attitude.

The ensuing months saw her driving a range of vehicles through a range of places exposed to a range of dangers. She hustled, pleaded and cajoled individuals and institutions for assistance.

Though witnessing cruelty, deprivation and bigotry, she held off despair and stiffened her resolve in the face of cold intransigence and — perhaps inevitably after the “Angel of Mostar” tag — a backlash of personal criticism.

Constantly, she and her fellow aid workers had to negotiate their way through the confused mesh of Serbs, Croats, Muslims, Jews and Catholics. All the time, the fate of the children was her overriding motivation.

This it was that took her eventually to Albania, where her apparent invincibility ran out. Along with the British government’s refusal to allow her to bring wounded children to the UK, Becker herself became a victim when she was shot in the leg.

She found herself in the care of a man with whom she had already fallen in love: Major Bill Foxton, a veteran British soldier who had lost part of his left arm in combat. Later, when Becker was having her wound checked back in Brighton and reported that she was experiencing nausea, the trauma specialist told her it was because she was pregnant.

But Foxton had a wife and two children in Britain. He did see Billie, his and Sally’s daughter born in 1999, a few times before he was off again — to Afghanistan. Then, in 2007, Becker learned Foxton was dead. Not on some remote battlefield but in England.

Having lost all his money in a Madoff scheme, his fearless resistance was at last broken. Bill Foxton was sitting on a park bench in Southampton when he put a semi-automatic pistol to his head and fired. The uplifting coda to all this is that Sally and her daughter, Bill’s widow and their children, have all now grown extremely close.

Earlier this year, Becker was included in the small, select group that carried the Olympic flag at the London 2012 opening ceremony. “As the flag was raised,” she recalls, “I said a prayer for the Israeli athletes killed in Munich. It was a very special six minutes.”

And another very special memory for this defiantly courageous woman’s collection.

Vantage Point: I was there when The Beatles played a Jew do

Gerald Jacobs — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 09:55:42 +0100

Whatever one feels about the current 50th birthday of the Beatles’ first single being celebrated somewhat more widely — and wildly — than the 90th anniversary of T S Eliot’s The Waste Land and James Joyce’s Ulysses (not to mention Aaron’s Rod by D H Lawrence and Jacob’s Room by Virginia Woolf), there is no denying the 1960s’ evocative power.

My most arresting memory of The Beatles dates not from 1962 but from the following year, when my school-friend Charles and I went to see them at a dance in a West End club. When we arrived, several other friends and acquaintances happened to be there, too. For this was a Jewish charity event — a “Jew do”.

In those days, young Jewish charity committees appeared to follow a rather shrewd strategy. In attempting to draw decent crowds, they would either book established acts past their peak, or up-and-coming outfits who might, or might not make it big.

The latter option particularly was a gamble but it could pay off handsomely, never more so than on April 21, 1963, at the Pigalle club in Piccadilly, central London. Between the well-in-advance booking of Brian Epstein’s boys, and their very-well-attended performance that night, The Beatles had progressed from a promising but middling rock group to a phenomenon.

That first, so-so single — Love Me Do — had been eclipsed. Their subsequent efforts had gone straight from recording studio to chart summit without pausing for breath. However, the group were still new enough to introduce themselves to the audience — “I’m Paul. That’s John, George, and Ringo.” Ringo?

It was quite a night at the Pigalle. If you Google it now, you will see, on the “Beatles Bible” website, the following, whimsical summary: “Although the Pigalle later became a fashionable destination for London clubbers, on this occasion the audience almost entirely consisted of Jewish people, as the concert had only been advertised — for reasons unknown — in the weekly Jewish Chronicle newspaper.”

While Eliot’s Waste Land famously opens by proclaiming that “April is the cruellest month”, that certainly wasn’t the case for young, club-going Jews in 1963. One of the other rising bands to be snapped up by a charity around that time was the Rolling Stones. I saw them at another shprauncy, West-End Jew do, where I recall the aforementioned friend Charles asking the lead singer: “Is it true that you went to the LSE?” (“Yeah” was the nonchalant answer from the young Mick Jagger as he made his way to the tiny hotel stage.)

It was a small window in time in which to be able to gyrate on a club floor to the live sounds of rock legends. And it was soon closed forever. The 1960s British bandwagon quickly rolled on. Brian Epstein showered New York with flyers announcing that “The Beatles are coming”, ensuring a 55,000 capacity crowd at the city’s Shea Stadium and, most astonishingly, the usurping of Elvis Presley’s crown.

Such was the soundtrack and thus were the Jew do’s in the hedonistic, rock’n’roll 1960s. How times have changed. Today’s youthful equivalents of Charles (nowadays a professional man of distinction) and myself are far more serious and responsible. They devote their time to one of any number of thriving youth movements. They go on Israel tour. They participate actively in charity work rather than merely pay their parents’ cash into charities’ coffers in order to have a good time.

Of course, this is not the whole ’60s picture. Some preferred table-tennis at Maccabi, or the idealism of Habonim or the Jewish Lads’ Brigade. But there was an edge, an excitement that is possibly lacking today.

Who are today’s Beatles and Stones? Well, the answer has to be… the Beatles and Stones, their pre-eminence strengthened by the new nostalgia-fest. Current 50th birthday celebrations are not confined to Beatlemania — stalwart spies and fading-but-feisty femmes fatales are being paraded in salute of the first James Bond film in 1962. Footage of 1960s psychiatric guru R D Laing has made it onto the 2012 Turner Prize shortlist.

It’s fun to look back and play games of “What’s your favourite Beatles track?” or “What do the words of Hey Jude mean?” I just wish there was at least a little attention being paid to the 1922 vintage. Because, when all’s said and done, Eliot, Joyce, Lawrence and Woolf are an even more fab four than the loveable lads from Liverpool. Yeah, yeah, yeah!

The curious case of the professor of shmooze

Gerald Jacobs — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 16:47:54 +0100

I remember my father once telling me about an occasion when he ran into somebody with whom he had been at school several decades earlier. This man had done very well in business, as he explained to my father before asking him what he did. “I’m a photographer,” my dad replied.

“A photographer?” the man mused, stroking his chin. And then, after a few seconds: “No. I’ve no use for a photographer”, and promptly took his leave.

This exchange seems to me to strip to its essence that airy commonplace of our contemporary culture — “networking”. And so skewed is this culture (even to the skewed usage of the term “culture”) that the respectable Cass Business School at City University, London recently appointed, with some fanfare, the UK’s first “Professor of Networking”. The initial incumbent is the high-profile, public-relations innovator, Julia Hobsbawm, daughter of the near-legendary Marxist historian, Eric Hobsbawm.

In her introductory lecture, Professor Hobsbawm drew somewhat upon her Jewish roots, seeing herself as a kind of shadchan, not to mention maven and even macher. Inevitably, she has already been referred to as a professor of shmooze. But these terms, and the activities they involve, are not exactly the stuff of university teaching.
I have no objection to Cass’s new recruit passing on the benefits of her experience — which after all has brought her both commercial success and a degree of fame beyond her field. Indeed, I think it is an excellent idea. She is an engaging speaker. And I would swap business cards — or even texts — with her any time.

I do, however, find it demoralising that she is doing this under the imprimatur of an academic institution. That City University has introduced this “discipline” is, I fear, symptomatic of the contemporary culture to which I referred earlier and in which the august title, “professor”, is ladled out bounteously (the University of Exeter, for example, has a professor of retail and tourism management, while professors of public relations are common in America).

It is a culture that rates rap rather than Rimbaud (though, so far as I know, the rapper Professor Green has not — yet — been given university tenure) and where a curator of one of our great art collections equates Damien Hirst with Rembrandt.

In this rapid-eye-movement world, it is as valid to chase the crowd as it is to develop one’s individual ability and character. I shmooze, therefore I am. It’s enough to make Matthew Arnold turn in his grave. Arnold defined culture as the pursuit of “total perfection” by seeking out “on all the matters that most concern us… the best which has been thought and said in the world”.

But that was 143 years ago and I suspect many of today’s opinion formers dismiss it as outdated. These are the bien pensants who defend the widespread dereliction of grammar and verbal expression throughout our universities, schools and media outlets on the misunderstood ground that “language is dynamic”.
In fact, Arnold’s definition is far from backward-looking. For him, learning “the best” of thought and language (spoken and written) was with a view to “turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits”.

There is no point anyway in simply trying to hold back or retrieve time. Not even the North Koreans can do that. And, as a result of the spread of internet technology, we do actually live in a most exciting time.
Needless to say, Professor Hobsbawm makes much of social media technology. She is certainly alive to its democratic potential. But then, the it’s-not-what-you-know-but-who-you-know ethos of networking is hardly democratic. Rather, it is the opposite; it is nepotistic.

Professor Hobsbawm also cites as an example of her brave new academic world the fact that Lady Gaga has millions of followers on Twitter. That’s terrific, but Lady Gaga is an entertainer, not an educator. Yielding up the advances in internet technology to the maw of modern popular culture sadly privileges such inane outpourings as footballers’ tweets.

The professor also revealed that her favourite Twitter topic is The X Factor. Now, how many other professors could say that? A minyan? (Don’t answer that, I’m depressed enough.)
At least Julia Hobsbawm agrees with Matthew Arnold that human curiosity is important. “Curiosity,” she says, “is very zeitgeist.”

Zeitgeist, shmeitgeist! I hate to tell you, Prof, but curiosity has been around even longer than shmooze — and is far more stimulating.

Nice warm side of stereotyping

Gerald Jacobs — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 11:11:46 +0100

Are Jews more prone to generalisation than any other people? (Think about it, it's a trick question.) Even to consider this is to enter a minefield. "Typically Jewish", we say, fondly, of the man or woman who answers a question with another question. And the question he or she answers with is also a humorously shared point of reference, whether by intonation ("What am I, a mind-reader?") or content ("Does the dinner really start at seven o'clock or is that a Jewish seven o'clock?")

But, of course, "typically Jewish" is a phrase that issues from foul and bigoted mouths, too. It is the thin end of the wedge of persecution. Consequently, many Jews are as uneasy with the positive stereotype ("Jews are clever") as they are with the negative ("Jews are mean").

This is logical and proper but it surely goes against human nature to suppress the satisfaction that inevitably flows from personal, familial or even tribal success. Isn't it a little odd to regard the high proportion of Jewish Nobel laureates as mere coincidence, or Mark Spitz as just another champion swimmer (even though his Olympic triumph nails a negative stereotype: the non-athletic Jew)?

Such questions have been brought on this week by the 75th anniversary of the death of George Gershwin, at the young age of 38. Strangely enough, this took me back to my one and only visit to Germany, in the 1990s.

It was no ordinary trip. I was one of a party of journalists of various nationalities being taken to a number of cities by the German authorities to show how the country was developing in the wake of reunification. The focus was on Berlin, where massive rebuilding was under way and our hosts were not shy of facing up to their nation's hideous 20th-century history.

The visit concluded in Munich, a short ride away from Dachau. On our last night, we were taken to see the original American cast's touring performance of George and Ira Gershwin's Crazy For You. At the close, the audience rose in a glorious, collective roar of acclamation. For me, this represented a triumphant riposte by two Jewish brothers to a place where, a few short decades earlier, the very wind had carried the smell of slaughter.

If any proof were needed, this would have convinced me that it is natural to be proud of Jews as Jews (and, concomitantly, to be ashamed of Jews as Jews - for Jews, too, are not exempt from ignorance, bigotry and other failings).

"Natural" because instinctive rather than prescriptive, derived from emotion rather than instruction. Reflective of the elemental, elusive character of Jewishness, never mind what the rabbis say. Rabbis like the American TV preacher, Daniel Lapin, who is unhappy with such definitions as "cultural" or "secular" Jew, or - especially - "a Woody Allen type of Jew".

According to Rabbi Lapin, Woody Allen "defames Jews", portraying them - rabbis included - as "loathsome liars, desperate psychotics, pathetic perverts, and ridiculously lecherous losers".

Rabbi Lapin is a naturalised American citizen, having been born in South Africa. He therefore exemplifies the great tapestry of his adopted land, a tapestry in which many Jewish threads are prominent, ranging from the dark shades of Meyer Lansky and Bernie Madoff to the bright colours of George Gershwin and Woody Allen. In that enormous melting pot, to take pride in some and shame in others is not to yield to stereotyping generalisation but to defy it.

So let me bring together the latter of the above-named pairings to rebut Rabbi Lapin. In Manhattan, Woody Allen uses Gershwin's evocative Rhapsody in Blue to create a touchingly comedic tribute to a city - New York - and its people. The film's memorable opening sequence, far from defaming Jews, irresistibly induces the sublime reminder that the two geniuses responsible for it are both Jewish. It's a good feeling. It's naches.

Review: The Sunny Side of the Street - an ambitious tribute to Dorothy Fields

Gerald Jacobs — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 13:20:16 +0100

Dorothy Fields, who died in 1974 at the age of 69, was one of the great Jewish contributors to the great American songbook. She collaborated with leading musical composers, most notably Jerome Kern on such creations as The Way You Look Tonight and A Fine Romance.

In The Sunny Side of the Street, Tim McArthur and Sarah Travis offer a generous slice of Fields’s work. However, in the first half especially, it is smothered with an excess of frenetic stage business to justify the setting — an apparently working-class London hairdressing salon.

Here, five female performers, with Travis at the piano, deliver an unbroken sequence of songs in wayward accents that dart back and forth across the Atlantic. I Won’t Dance, is sung, English- style, as “Dahnce”, but the same soloist later reverts to “can’t” rhyming with “pant”. We also get a glottal-stop version of I’m In The Mood for Love.

It is almost as if they do not trust the songs to speak for themselves. But they most certainly do: Fields wrote witty, touching material, frequently giving voice to the vulnerable woman.
It is to the production’s credit that many fine, lesser-known numbers are aired and the second half is much better balanced, with Shona White’s tender version of the haunting Make the Man Love Me, and a rousing A Lady Needs a Change by Rosemary Ashe.
Wonderful material, ambitiously staged, but they should cut the curls and keep it straighter.

Chaim Bermant: a novelist at heart

Gerald Jacobs — Fri, 15 Jun 2012 14:16:47 +0100

Fourteen years ago, on January 20 1998, Chaim Bermant — still the most celebrated of all JC writers — died suddenly, a month short of his 69th birthday. This was a death that not only brought grief to his family and close friends but one that delivered a blow to an entire community. Hundreds attended his funeral and, for all the sadness, the occasion prompted many an exchange of comical recollections. For Bermant was a big man with a very big sense of humour.

The Bermant family came to Glasgow when Chaim was nine. Those first nine years had been spent in a Yiddish-speaking household in a part of eastern Europe subject to frequent border changes. This dramatic infancy of change and upheaval helped to create the adult Bermant’s unique Polish-Lithuanian-Latvian-Yiddish-Scottish accent, made still more impenetrable by virtue of its being filtered through lips to which a smouldering, untipped cigarette was commonly attached, and around which was spread an untamed abundance of facial hair.

It is not widely known that, beyond these and other newspaper pages, Bermant wrote more than 30 books. Among them, his accounts of the British Jewish community, Troubled Eden and The Cousinhood, made a considerable impact, as did his biography of the late Chief Rabbi Immanuel Jakobovits, and his memoir of his own childhood, Genesis, was both exhilarating and moving.

But, of all his output, it was his works of fiction that Bermant most enjoyed writing. And now, courtesy of Bloomsbury publishers, these can be savoured anew, with the release, under the Bloomsbury Reader imprint, of a number of his novels as e-books, with print-on-demand editions to follow (Bloomsbury hopes to publish Bermant’s non-fiction titles in due course).

Included in the first run are Diary of an Old Man, a characteristically warm treatment of old age; Swinging in the Rain, an offbeat hymn to the 1960s; Ben Preserve Us, in which he draws heavily on his knowledge of Scottish-Jewish life; Berl make Tea, detailing the surreal wanderings of a man liberated from his marriage and his job; and Jericho Sleep Alone, in which he evokes his Scottish background in the roller-coaster love life of a denizen of Jewish Glasgow.

The novels offer not only a quirky kind of period charm, but a panoply of individuals and types that blend with the real-life characters that popped up in his columns over almost 30 years (and upon a handful of whom some of his fictional creations may well have been modelled). Though the satire in the fiction was not without bite, its main ingredient was humour, inspired by Bermant’s heroes Sholem Aleichem (“the one good reason for learning Yiddish”) and Israel Zangwill (King of the Schnorrers is one of the funniest books in the English language”).

That it was in his journalism that Bermant shone the brightest should not reduce his status as a writer. Journalism, after all, as practised by individuals of the calibre of Dickens and George Orwell is a high literary art. And it is not unreasonable to bracket Bermant with such leading 20th-century exponents as Bernard Levin and Alistair Cooke.

Journalism certainly brought him to the notice of the Jewish reading public. During the time he wrote for the JC, there could scarcely have been a single, identifying British Jew — apart from on the religiously fundamentalist fringe (ironically, a rich source of material for him) — ignorant of his name. Every week for two decades, everyone, from rabbis to rogues — and several who managed to combine both identities — devoured Bermant’s On The Other Hand column. For many, it was the indispensable accompaniment to a Friday-night meal, an aperitif to ease the reader into Shabbat. For others, the content could bring on dyspepsia, apoplexy, or worse.
The latter group would mainly consist of those who feared or felt the glancing but deadly blow of Bermant’s wit that would expose them as bigots, chumps or scoundrels. And this would be delivered by way of elegantly comic observation. His targets were generally not made to look villainous. They tended to suffer the much more humiliating fate of appearing ridiculous.

Bermant’s journalism was not confined to the JC and he contributed, among others, to the Daily Telegraph and the Observer. He wrote a food column for the Independent and, though his comments could hardly be comprehensively informative given that he was strictly kosher, he was always entertaining.

But his JC column was his soap-box. It was where he could exercise his unfailing ability to pinpoint and puncture arrogance, absurdity and hypocrisy. In this regard, the more insistently blinkered members of the Orthodox rabbinical fraternity were his frequent prey.

He was on secure ground here. As an observant, Orthodox Jew and the son of a rabbi, Bermant’s humane outlook could never be seriously faulted on doctrinal grounds. And the more he made fun of the extremist nay-sayers, the more seriously they seemed to take themselves. This at times seemed to endow him with prescient powers.

For example, shortly after he jokingly wondered why our more pathologically scrupulous lawmakers had not declared lettuce to be treif, on account of the tiny creatures that tend to cling to it, came the news that a kibbutz had started producing “kosher” lettuce grown in sealed, plastic bags under rabbinic supervision.

Even more bizarrely, he wrote in 1993: “Only last month, I raised the question of whether tap water is kosher for Pesach. I now have the answer. It is not — or, at least, it is not if it comes from Lake Kinneret (also known as the Sea of Galilee)…

“Rabbi Moshe Aryeh Freund, who is head of the strictly Orthodox Eda Charedit Beth Din in Jerusalem… has discovered that fisherman on the lake use bread as bait and has therefore forbidden its water for the purpose of drinking on Pesach… The amount of bread used is minuscule, while Lake Kinneret is fairly large. On a rough estimate, I would say that the proportion of bread to water would be in the region of 1:613,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (give or take a trillion). Rabbi Freund, however, has no sense of proportion — or, rather, he claims that the halachah has none. ‘Even a single crumb makes the Kinneret unfit for drinking’, he has said. Henceforth, no doubt, the Sea of Galilee will be known as Yam Halechem, the Bread Sea, to distinguish it from Yam Hamelach, the Dead Sea.”

So much for the day job. Thanks to Bloomsbury, you can now see what Chaim Bermant, novelist, social historian and biographer, got up to in his leisure hours.

Why we should all be more like sorry Ken

Gerald Jacobs — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 14:10:36 +0100

One of the most salutary effects of ageing is the realisation that the advancing years do not necessarily bring wisdom or emotional maturity. When something goes wrong, you still look for somebody else to blame. If you break a vase, you curse whoever left it in your way, and any motoring mishap is inevitably the other driver's fault. And, while scapegoats are handy for evading personal responsibility, the harshness of reality can be avoided by seeking comfort in self-delusion.

This is well-illustrated by the old tale of a Jewish journalist called Levy who applied for a job as a television news-reader. He didn't mention, however, that he had a serious stammer. When he auditioned and was duly rejected, he naturally put it down to anti-s-s-sssemitism

This joke is an interesting piece of Jewish comic irony, in that it exercises the celebrated humour of self-deprecation by targeting a Jew who is the exact opposite of self-deprecating. The device is not confined to Jewish humour, its most famous example being the Peter Cook and Dudley Moore sketch in which a one-legged man auditions to play Tarzan ("a role for which two legs would seem to be the minimum requirement"), with its brilliant pay-off, delivered by Cook: "I've got nothing against your right leg… the trouble is, neither have you."

Shying away from responsibility and/or reality is an all-too human trait, applicable to all people of all ages. And there certainly have been several instances of this kind of thing relating to Jews in recent times. In his new book, This Is Not The Way: Jews, Judaism and Israel, Rabbi David Goldberg berates those Zionists who, he says, rebut all criticism of Israel by dismissing it as antisemitism. This raises a number of issues, not least the clear indication that some criticism of Israel is indeed driven by a prejudice more primitive than the politically acceptable "anti-Zionism". But the point - about wilfully missing the point - remains.

The issues raised by another rabbi, Yitzchak Schochet, the minister of Mill Hill Synagogue, relate to the post of Chief Rabbi. Rabbi Schochet alleges that Chabad, the movement of which he is a loyal and prominent member, is widely discriminated against. If only it wasn't, he laments. Had it not been for that single factor, he wrote in a column in the JC, he could've been a contender. Eat your heart out, Marlon Brando.

The dramatic mea culpa of Ken Livingstone also came in the form of a recent JC article, in which he apologised for giving the impression, at a private meeting with a group of influential Jewish supporters of the Labour Party, that he believed Jews weren't voting for him because they were rich. He held no such belief, he said in his column, and recognised that "Jewish voters are not one homogeneous block". Moreover, he declared himself to be a fervent promoter of Jewish interests in London and, most astonishingly, praised Israel for its democracy, in contrast to its neighbour states. "Politicians ought to have humility," he added.

I do hope that Ken meant what he wrote. Firstly, of course, because any apology issuing from such a rigidly self-righteous individual is as welcome as it is startling (Oliver Finegold, the Jewish reporter whom Livingstone compared to a concentration-camp guard, is still awaiting one, seven years after the event). But also because Ken and I are near-contemporaries, born at the start of what is often referred to as the "baby-boomer" generation. More pertinently, we are part of what Jeremy Paxman has described as the "lucky generation".

Born to parents who had just been through the war and who wanted, and were determined to achieve, a better future for their children, we grew up in a developing welfare state of increasing prosperity, improved health-care, free education (a shining light for Jewish parents) and a rapid removal of the dangers and constraints endured by the youth of earlier generations.

In short, we were spoilt. And so, after decades of self-interest, we still find it hard not to blame others when things go wrong and we continue to delude ourselves in the face of reality (I am still awaiting the call from White Hart Lane). But, if Ken Livingstone can achieve maturity, there is hope for us all.

Five Jewish women on prestigious book prize longlist

Gerald Jacobs — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 13:23:53 +0000

Octogenarian author Cynthia Ozick is one of five American Jewish writers on this year's Orange Prize longlist, announced this week. Ozick is included for her seventh novel, Foreign Bodies.

The other four contending for the £30,000 British prize for women novelists writing in English are Jaimy Gordon (whose Lord of Misrule has already won the National Book Award in the US); Leah Hager Cohen, for The Grief of Others; Erin Morgenstern for The Night Circus and Amy Waldman, for her 9/11-themed debut, The Submission.

This year's judges for the Orange, the premier award for female fiction writers, chaired by author Joanna Trollope, include writer Lisa Appignanesi and broadcaster Natasha Kaplinsky.

The winner will be announced on May 30 in a ceremony at the Royal Festival Hall.

Book Week - electrifying, but please not electronic

Gerald Jacobs — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 11:53:58 +0000

Will there come a time when the only readily available copies of new books, including all prayer books and even the Bible, will be electronic? Are the People of the Book destined to become the People of the eBook?

For many twitterati and "kindlelach", this is a cyber consummation devoutly to be wished - certainly outside the liturgical sphere. You read a review (online) or somebody recommends (by email or text) a novel or biography, you tap the details into your iPad (shmiPad!) and, within moments, it's there in front of you. No cluttered bookshelves or bulging baggage; no messing around with ignorant bookshop assistants who have never heard of Bernard Shaw, let alone Bernard Malamud.

Such speculations occurred to me on Sunday night at the end of the nine days of literary largesse that was Jewish Book Week 2012. This having been JWB's 60th anniversary - held in a smart, new location - futurology was in the air: how would the next 60 years pan out? What form would JWB 2072 take? Would it be a "virtual" festival, with its thousands of participants - speakers and listeners, booksellers and buyers - all sat at home, staring at screens?

Surely not. For, as the glitterball was being polished in Hollywood in readiness for the 84th Oscar ceremony, the chatter was equally vigorous back in London's Kings Place, north of Kings Cross and St Pancras stations. Punters and performers alike were reflecting not on The Artist, Hugo or Meryl Streep but on The Prague Cemetery, Ulysses or Deborah Lipstadt. Maybe, by 2072, JWB will, like the Oscars, be internationally broadcast - such has been the rate of its ascent under its outgoing director, Geraldine D'Amico - but, again like the Oscars, at its heart will be a live, enthusiastic gathering. Indeed, the Book Week crowd will be even more culturally attuned (and more Jewish!) than the Hollywood horde.

That end-of-week buzz, following David Aaronovitch's closing encounter with Umberto Eco and Jay and Pat Rayner's joint-rocking finale, had been around all week. And from kvetch to kvell it was a thoroughly Jewish occasion. One of the attendants at this shining new venue, used to more sedate, classical music aficionados, was heard to remark to a colleague: "This is much more fun than the concerts".

Though it sounded as if every latecomer to the wooden-floored concert halls was wearing marching boots (maybe next year anyone arriving late should surrender their footwear at the door), the numbered seating was a new experience for JBW devotees. More familiarly, speakers still had to face that opening piece of absurdist theatre without which no Jewish audience event seems complete: "Speak up!" "Ok. [Louder:] Can you hear me now?" "No!"

But, mostly, the audiences lapped it up. From the urbane American journalist Jeffrey Goldberg's sound-bites in dialogue with the BBC's Robin Lustig - "In the 1930s, Jabotinsky said that, while Arabs had an appetite for Palestine, Jews had a hunger for it; now, it's the Palestinians who hunger for the West Bank and the Israelis who have the appetite" - and Alan Yentob prompting Claude Lanzmann to share his memories of how he once shared the favours, and flesh, of Simone de Beauvoir with Jean-Paul Sartre, to historian Bernard Wasserstein's chilling comment about the prayers of the religious Jews of pre-war Europe: "Their God betrayed them."

Perhaps even more startling utterances for the religiously observant came from an assortment of rabbis, including Progressives Elizabeth Tikvah Sarah, who powerfully suggested that Moses's sister Miriam might have been a lesbian, and David Goldberg, who argued that around 90 per cent of Jews "no longer believe in the God of the Bible".

At least as astounding to some were the statements of Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks - in a dynamic session with mathematician Marcus du Sautoy and neuroscientist Daniel Glaser - that he'd "learnt more from atheists than from theists" and that "nobody for centuries" has taken the biblical narrative literally.

But, for me, the stand-out moment came with the staggeringly haunting delivery by Irish actress Derbhle Crotty of Molly Bloom's celebrated monologue from James Joyce's Ulysses. You can view the JBW sessions now online but, for this one, you had to be there. And, for the next 60 years and beyond, faced with a live Book Week or an electronic one, if you want the best experience, do the Jewish thing: choose live.

The man still seeking justice a century after the Dreyfus Affair

Gerald Jacobs — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 11:31:40 +0000

Writer, composer, art expert, educationist - George Whyte modestly concedes, when it is put to him, that he is a man of many parts, and adds: "All of them Jewish".

Indeed. This is a man who is Jewish to a degree of intensity rare outside strictly religious circles. And, although he grew up in an Orthodox home in Budapest in the early 1930s and maintains a loving interest in the scriptures to this day, it is not religious observance that drives him. What fuels Whyte's extraordinary energy and output is a burning sense of the injustices suffered by Jews throughout the centuries.

For him, this crystallises around two historical events: the Holocaust and, half a century earlier, the Dreyfus affair in France. Whyte, who lost 37 family members in the Shoah, was a small boy when he first learned about Alfred Dreyfus - the Jewish French army officer falsely convicted of treason in 1894 and forced to endure five years of bitter imprisonment on Devil's Island before clearing his name. "It was my birthday party," Whyte recalls, "when my father told me that I should never forget the name, 'Dreyfus'."

Rarely can a father's injunction have been so expansively obeyed. Not only has Whyte written an authoritative and scholarly book on the Dreyfus affair but, among many creative endeavours, he has also composed a number of musical works about it. While the book has been twice reprinted and sits in university libraries throughout the world, the musical works have been lavishly staged across continents.

On top of all that, Whyte - who operates in Germany, Switzerland and Israel as well as the UK - is the founder and chairman of the Dreyfus Society, set up in Bonn in 1994 to mark the centenary of the affair and now opening at Birkbeck College, in the University of London.

Back in the 1990s, Whyte collaborated with Dr Barthold Witte, the German cultural secretary-general - "a Christian who had adopted a Jewish child after the war" - to create what was then called the Dreyfus Centenary Society in order to promote justice and fight persecution wherever it occurs. Its opening coincided with that of Berlin's Deutsche Oper production of Whyte's opera on the affair, which later went to Basel and New York.

"Our intention was to make the society an intellectual force, which referred back to the Dreyfus affair as an example of the mechanics of antisemitism and learn the lessons of that," Whyte recalls. "The immorality of the exclusion of a Jew like Dreyfus, who was totally innocent, applies pari passu to every persecuted minority."

Here, Whyte pauses dramatically to deliver the phrase from Deuteronomy that is a distillation of his life's work: "Tzedek! Tzedek! - Justice! Justice! What did Dreyfus do in his cell on Devil's Island, chained to his iron bed? He declared: 'Justice, justice is what I seek'. And what did his country, the country of Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, do 50 years later? Where was justice when France sent 73,000 Jews to Auschwitz? Where was justice when Britain, in the last days of the war, bombed Dresden? Where was justice when the USA dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?"

Some might view the establishment in Germany of a body dedicated to investigating the roots of antisemitism as ironic. Others might see it as singularly apt. Either way, it might be thought more appropriate to have founded the Dreyfus Society in France. The affair's repercussions rocked French society and exposed appalling discrimination within its institutions. The open letter, headed J'Accuse, written to the French president by novelist Emile Zola, that took up the entire front page of the Parisian newspaper L'Aurore on January 13 1898, is one of journalism's seminal documents.

But Whyte thought France "was not the right terrain for the society. There is this chauvinism in France. They know that a tremendous injustice occurred in 1894 but when [President Jacques] Chirac held a meeting, 100 years after Zola's J'Accuse, he said of the Dreyfus affair: 'What a victory for France! For French justice.'

"I held a poll in France about the affair. About 28 per cent said Dreyfus was innocent, 20-odd per cent said he was guilty. But the majority said: 'There is no smoke without fire'.

"Not so long ago, I took a taxi in Paris and asked the driver: 'What do you know about the Dreyfus Affair?' He said: 'Ah, Monsieur. A very strange story. All about a brilliant young officer who was accused of being Jewish'.

"In one sentence, this relatively uneducated fellow got it right. This is our problem. We are accused because we are Jewish, not because of what we do. And the state of Israel is accused very often, just because it is Jewish."

Whyte describes himself as "profoundly pessimistic about our destiny… of course, I am influenced by my own childhood, by the loss of almost all our family in Auschwitz but, whatever the nationalities were of the people who sent my cousins and my father's brothers to the gas chambers, they were all Christians.

"Christianity I have no problem with; it is malpractice by Christians that's my problem. Imagine, for all those centuries after Jesus Christ, in the pulpits the message being told week after week that the Jews murdered Jesus. And it continues: listen to Bach's oratorios. And the Jewish state must bear the stigma of the Jews. So you have the smug audacity of European nations with blood on their hands preaching to Israel about human rights."

He recalls, on the opening night of his Dreyfus opera in Berlin, seeing a gang of youths running after him. "It looked dangerous - there had been threats and rumours of neo-Nazi groups. But they called out to me: 'Herr Whyte! We are students at the university in Berlin. We want you to know that we are with you'.

"That wouldn't happen in any other country. Germany educates its people about the meaning of what happened and there is a distinct sector of the population that thinks of the past, atones for the past, lives and sleeps with the past."

Germany is, he says, one of only four countries outside Israel where he finds antisemitism is being addressed in a proper manner. The others are the United States, the Czech Republic - where he spent six months working on his hi-tech, kabbalistic drama, Golem 13 (which premiered at the National Theatre in Prague) - and China.

"I was invited the year before last to Shanghai University. The Dean said: 'If you are Jewish, you are a friend'. There are 1,000 courses in Chinese institutes of learning teaching Judaism. In Nanking, where I lectured, I went up to the seventh floor, to the Jewish department. Mezuzah on the door. 'Boker tov'. Everybody speaks Ivrit. Torah in front of you. Fantastic library…"

For all Whyte's international vistas, Britain has been his haven since he was six. "My father was a PoW in the First World War and made friends here. He was an anglophile. 'The English,' he said, 'are the only people with manners. They put their knives and forks together and they never speak loudly'.

"When my parents, my brother and I came to London, my father had £200. We lived very enjoyably on bread and onions. My father went back to Germany on September 1 1939 to reclaim $1,000 that a German in Leipzig owed him. When he arrived in the man's office, he found him wearing a swastika on his arm and a portrait of Adolf Hitler behind him. He told my father: 'We don't recognise debts to Jews'."

The young George was already quite advanced at piano when he arrived and he continued piano studies with Paul Lichternstern, and studied composition with Francesco Ticiatti. His further education included a course in French language and literature at the Sorbonne. He went on to open a successful art gallery in Bond Street, joined the board of the furniture company, Maples, as its art expert (its share price increased twelvefold during his term there), and became its chairman and that of the British National Export Council for Art. This was, he says, all at a time "when family circumstances ruled out a musical career".

And now he is "honoured" that the Dreyfus Society for Human Rights, to give it its full title, has found a home in the British capital, flanked at Birkbeck in Bloomsbury by the Wiener Library and the Pears Institute for the Study of Antisemitism. Among events planned to mark the Birkbeck launch is a lecture accompanying a performance of Whyte's play, Dreyfus Intime, based on letters exchanged between Dreyfus on Devils Island and his wife in Paris, interspersed with extracts from Zola's J'Accuse monologue; plus a series of six talks tracing the evolution of French antisemitism. In the spring of 2013, the society will co-host an international conference on the future of antisemitism, in Berlin at the Reichstag.

Alongside all this, and setting a series of mainly Hebrew poems to music, completing a musical called Captain Dreyfus, preparing for the 2013 preview in Germany of his refugee cabaret drama, Are You Listening? and writing his second volume on Dreyfus, Whyte is constantly striving to combat antisemitism.

He views the task as immense. "For too many people," he says, "the Jew is still defined by the calumnies and libels inflicted for hundreds of years by Christianity."

So what can be done? "If there is genuine atonement by Christianity for its past, let them add one sentence at the end of the Lord's Prayer or Catholic catechism: 'Justice, justice, shalt thou follow for the children of Israel, whom we have wronged'."

In other words, for Jewish Bible readers: Tzedek! Tzedek!

Farewell to 2011, a year of farewells

Gerald Jacobs — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 11:26:24 +0000

It's that time again, the candle-maker's moment, when rival faiths strike festive lights to ward off winter. When an assemblage of "old" dates in the diary gives way to a fresh "new year". A secular, inverted Yom Kippur, a stocktaking accompanied by feasting instead of fasting, replenishing rather than repentance.

On this occasion, though, for me it carries some weight. Two holes were blown into my life at opposite ends of 2011 when two men - one a decade senior to me, the other a generation older - handed in their life membership.

I hadn't known John Gross, who died in January, for more than a few years, though I had of course known of him - who could not, in my business? He was one of the great judges of literature and culture of our age, an exemplar of an endangered species: the "man of letters". And the fact that we became close friends in a relatively short time is principally a reflection of John's character. For just about any friend of his would feel a closeness, emanating from the sheer good humour of a man whose astonishing erudition was of a rare, inclusive kind.

John Gross wore his learning lighter than anybody I have met. You could come away from an engaging dinner with him knowing much more than you ever did about some author or actress, poet, politician, editor, or even waiter. And John would make you feel that you had somehow contributed equally to the conversation.

Unfailingly entertaining, witty and full of gossip, he was completely without malice. Nor did I ever see a trace of resentment when lesser lights than he bathed in brighter beams of limelight.

Attendant to - and attended by - art and knowledge to the end, he told his doctors a little of the history of their own hospital where he lay dying and where almost the last words he heard were those of his daughter Susanna reading a Shakespeare sonnet to him. Perceptive, kind and wise, John Gross has left a sadly empty place at the restaurant tables where we once dined.

A still more significant loss occurred last month, with the death of my father, Harry Jacobs. By contrast with John Gross, who seemed to have read almost every published book of worth (and the odd worthless one), the extent of my father's lifetime book-reading could be calculated on one hand with a couple of fingers to spare. His interests lay in pictures rather than words, interests that he successfully put to professional use but not before he'd exhausted a procession of other occupations after leaving school at 14. Then, in the early 1960s, he tried his hand at photography, beginning by knocking on doors in south London.

A good camera was then a luxury. My father would offer young mothers low-cost portraits of their children but, having returned with the developed photos, he'd typically receive a thanks-but-no-thanks response. However, his sales technique owed much to King Solomon. He would face the mum's rebuff with a shrug, hold up her darling's photo and go to tear it in half. This almost invariably prompted a quick change of heart. On such emotive foundations did he build a business that saw him become the unofficial photographer to the growing West Indian community of Brixton. His legendary studio felt at times as if bathed in Caribbean sunshine.

Eventually, Harry Jacobs became a snapper to be reckoned with. A solo exhibition at the Photographers' Gallery in Covent Garden was followed by a rash of media attention, a place in various archives and events such as Black History Month and, most notably, the inclusion of his work in the Tate Gallery's major How We Are show in 2007, with a couple of his images gracing the brochure. He spent his last few months in residential care, often cantankerous and confused but, memorably, pleasant and content in our final family visits to him.

Neither John Gross nor Harry Jacobs had much time for rabbis or synagogues but both fitted firmly on the spectrum of Jewishness. Both grew up in London's East End, one a doctor's son, the other the child of a cobbler. One embodied the spirit of learning, the other that of imaginative graft. And now the year that saw their departure is itself departing.

Sometimes these turning points are useful. Happy new year.

American literary heavyweights produce radical new haggadah

Gerald Jacobs — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 14:35:13 +0000

A great many Seder tables next Pesach could feature an imaginative presentation of the Passover story in the form of the New American Haggadah, which will be published in the UK in February.

The brainchild of novelist Jonathan Safran Foer, in a new translation by Foer's fellow writer Nathan Englander, the haggadah has been given a bold and colourful design - incorporating ink and ready made wine stains - by artist Oded Ezer.

An informal but challenging commentary is injected at key moments in four sections - House of Study, Nation, Library and Playground. These are written, respectively, by Nathaniel Deutsch, professor of Jewish studies and literature at the University of California; Jeffrey Goldberg, national correspondent for The Atlantic magazine; philosopher Rebecca Goldstein, author of the acclaimed novel, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God; and the renowned children's author, Lemony Snicket - real name Daniel Handler.

Running alongside the entire text is a "timeline" compiled by Mia Sara Bruch, an award-winning writer and teacher of Jewish history. This relates salient stories of the endurance of the Seder from 1250 BCE up to the present century.

Jonathan Safran Foer told the JC this week that the idea for the new haggadah came to him six years ago at his own family's Seder "which was nice, all of us gathered around a long table, but it could have been exceptional. I felt it was a missed opportunity.

"The haggadahs we used didn't meet the standards we apply to secular books. The discussion was interesting, but not interesting like Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic is interesting, not thought-provoking like Rebecca Goldstein is thought-provoking. I wanted a haggadah that would involve a richer engagement with the text and images."

At one point, Mr Safran Foer had gathered 20 or so collaborators - including several leading literary and academic names - for the project, which he expected would produce a radical departure from the normal Seder text and experience. But this early experiment was abandoned.

"I didn't want it to have the feel of an anthology," he explained. "Though no part of me believes in the literal truth of the events described in the Passover story, they are time-tested metaphors and symbols to help us think about our lives. So we ended up with something more conservative, spiritually and aesthetically."

The result is certainly a serious and substantial piece of work. Its commentators cite Kafka as well as Moses, Wittgenstein as well as Elijah. It is universal, too - it is named as American, says Foer, simply in line with the tradition of naming a haggadah after the place where it is made.

Jonathan Safran Foer will launch the haggadah with Jeffrey Goldberg at Jewish Book Week on February 25. It will be published by Hamish Hamilton.

Football's foul play is a big problem

Gerald Jacobs — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 11:49:24 +0000

It hardly needs stating in a Jewish newspaper that racism is one of the most odious aspects of so-called civilised society. And perhaps the saddest of racism's manifestations is that which occurs within sport - the activity devoted to harnessing human aggression to the concept of fair play.

Of course, racism in sport does not exist in isolation. It flows from the same primeval swamp of ignorance in which all its other forms originate. But it is more blatant than most, subsisting as it does in a climate of baying crowds and cultivated rivalry - nowhere more so than in the planet's biggest sport, football.

More blatant and yet more tolerated. In July, the Israeli footballer Yossi Benayoun was met with antisemitic chanting from an 85,000-strong crowd in Kuala Lumpur, where he was playing for Chelsea in a "friendly" match against a Malaysian XI. Other Israelis, such as Ronnie Rosenthal and Avram Grant, have suffered similar abuse, primarily from British fans. Israel itself has all too often witnessed the spectacle of Jewish supporters yelling vile invective at Arab footballers.

Such incidents are routine and are, in any event, dwarfed by the amount of racist abuse directed at black footballers, of whom there are many thousands across the world. This is currently a hot topic. And the heat is being felt by two of football's least alluring personalities.

Rarely have the nation's back-page hacks been so united in pursuit of their prey as in their chase after John Terry and Sepp Blatter - respectively the England captain and FIFA chieftain - over one's alleged racist comments and the other's clumsy apologia.

And while all of us who are whiter-than-white (so to speak) can bask in the warm glow of righteous indignation, we should remember that not only have the calls for Terry's head come even before a verdict has been delivered on his allegedly racist utterance, but that his and Blatter's apparent failure to understand racism is a mere sliver of the offensive way one of them runs the game and the other plays it.

For years, Blatter has failed to deal with, or himself sparked, a number of controversial issues including those concerning corruption, attitudes towards gay and female footballers, and technology. Terry is an unsympathetic leader, frequently to be found at the head of an arrogant herd of players surrounding and menacing the referee. So why does Blatter still run FIFA and Terry still captain England?

And why are we so shocked and surprised by racism in football? This is just one of many rotten aspects of the modern game. Defenders of violent play point out that footballers are mostly young men engaged in a high-action, high-pressure, contact sport. The forgiving phrase, "the heat of the moment", covers a multitude of sins. In which case, shouldn't this also excuse a casual, racist remark among the many extreme insults and obscenities that characterise the average professional soccer match - and which used to be reasons for dismissal?

Modern football's obscenities are not confined to the verbal kind. At a time of economic pain, when many supporters struggle to afford the price of admission to football grounds, and to secure even dead-end employment, isn't there something hideous about Manchester City laughing at losing millions of pounds every week and Premier League players earning fortunes most bankers can only dream about?

And if footballers are allowed to spit out bile (not to mention actual sputum), why not the spectators? And here lies the real racist problem. Even now, primitive "jungle" chants at black players, and "gas-chamber" hissing directed at "Jewish" clubs like Tottenham and, in Holland, Ajax, largely go unpunished.

Racism in the game is now being addressed more comprehensively by such commendable initiatives as Kick it Out. However, some efforts at combating antisemitism are simply too comprehensive, bracketing the proud, positive chants of "Yids!" by Tottenham fans and "Joden!" by Ajax supporters with their rivals' repellent Holocaust taunts.

So let's not pat ourselves on the back too eagerly for identifying single instances of racism in football. This will not automatically encourage overpaid and under-educated players to show respect and restraint.

And not just players. We have too long indulged those practising the "profession" of football at all levels. This needs tackling - not kicking into touch.

Artists shouldn't be passengers when it comes to the Holocaust

Gerald Jacobs — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 15:04:46 +0000

In recent weeks, the JC has published three columns about Mieczyslaw Weinberg's The Passenger, which has just finished its run at the English National Opera. Each of the writers was exercised by the fact that Weinberg's opera is set in Auschwitz.

Stephen Pollard found this "obscenely inappropriate", presented, as he saw it, through over-derivative music in a production whose inner purpose was mere "artistic self-aggrandisement".

Then James Inverne, editor of Gramophone magazine, confessed that he had floundered in his attempts to respond to The Passenger.

"Should I even presume to review it?" he wrote. By contrast, Norman Lebrecht described The Passenger as "a near-masterpiece" and expressed his determination to see it again and again.

Don't worry. I am not about to extend this trio into a quartet. I haven't seen The Passenger.

What I want to address is the question of mining the Shoah for artistic or entertainment material, on page or stage, for tragedy or - crucially - comedy.

James Inverne observed that plays or films about the Holocaust are invariably received with a kind of reverence. This parallels the way in which Holocaust survivors themselves tend to be regarded. This is not surprising. While many survivors have indeed shown exceptional bravery, all of them, whether or not heroes in the conventional sense, symbolise the endurance of the Jewish people.

However, the Nazi slaughtering machine made no distinction between heroes and others. The unique, genocidal horror of the Holocaust was that it was directed without discrimination, at every Jew, however ordinary.

And many of those ordinary people who survived are uncomfortable at being treated with such reverence and wish only for the respect due to them as individuals.

Works of art, too, stand or fall on their individual merits. The difficult question is, when they are based on the 20th century's darkest stain, how should artists and audiences gauge the appropriate respect?

The German philosopher Theodor Adorno famously declared that, after Auschwitz, it was no longer possible to write lyric poetry. But he came to acknowledge that, although artists and thinkers who engage with such appalling facts risk contamination, the serious-minded are bound to do so. And creative individuals are unlikely to cease striving to overcome cynicism and contribute to the betterment of life - in the case of an artist or performer, by providing pleasure.

This is especially so as the events recede in history. The artist's job - and not just the artist's - is to confront and learn from man's inhumanity to man. To carry out that stirring Jewish injunction when faced with a choice between life and death: choose life!

We may never understand the profound cruelty that characterised the Shoah. It may be - and this is perhaps what lay behind Adorno's reaction - beyond analysis. But that does not mean we should stop pushing at the barriers. This will not always be done intelligently or honestly. There will always be squalid and meretricious representations of the Holocaust, but this should not deter artists from exploring it, any more than it deters historians.

Indeed, it is incumbent upon the knowledgeable to expose malicious and flimsy output for what it is. As the 2000 David Irving case showed, the exposure of Holocaust denial by demonstrable truth is far more effective than attempting to suppress it by legislation.

Nowhere are these complex issues more sensitive than in the field of humour. While, for example, the musician Daniel Barenboim, in wanting to perform Wagner in Israel, may nonetheless respect the sensitivities of survivors who wish to ban such performances, the comedian is uneasy with the very idea of respect. He (or she) is the most subversive of artists.

Humour can expose and release the demons that inhabit the darker, primitive side of human nature. And, provided they have not been so long repressed that they have infected the brighter side, those demons are better out than in. I doubt that Hitler had a sense of humour.

The late, much despised but greatly talented comedian Bernard Manning once told an audience: "I recently discovered I lost my grandfather in Auschwitz…" Pause. "He fell out of his machine-gun tower."

If that makes you laugh, you might want to ask yourself why.

If it doesn't, perhaps you should ask yourself why not.

They call it body art but I find it tatty

Gerald Jacobs — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 16:18:21 +0000

While, to the best of my knowledge, no Jew was involved in the rioting and looting that blighted our streets and our screens last month, it seems that police inquiries may have been directed at one or two Jewish households in connection with the destination of some looted items.

Should this turn out to be true, and a Jew - or Jews - is found to have been indirectly involved in such disgraceful acts, most of us would be deeply shocked. However, in one respect it could be a salutary outcome. For it would prick, if not puncture, that complacency to which we are all prone as a result of succumbing to comfortable assumptions about Jewish life.

Even in this age of instant information and comprehensive communication, there are many who claim, for example, that there is no such person as a Jewish homosexual or alcoholic or drug addict - often thereby heaping distress and opprobrium on already vulnerable and lonely individuals. Or that Jewish homes are never darkened by domestic or sexual abuse.

Such assumptions do not relate exclusively to forbidden or sinful activities - nothing can shift the idea that Jews are hopeless at sport or DIY - but the tarnishing of Jews who defy the stereotype is often based upon prohibitive scripture, usually Leviticus.

And it is to Leviticus that I have turned in order to confront a comforting assumption of my own, one that is subject to ever-increasing challenge - from Mediterranean beaches to subterranean tube trains.

In Leviticus, chapter 19, amid the stern injunctions to refrain from placing stumbling blocks before the blind, or offering up your daughter as a prostitute, the 28th verse reads: "Ye shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor print any marks upon you…"

In other words, while I have no problem with gay Jews, can sympathise with boozy or druggy Jews, and recognise the existence of violent and predatory Jews, I do have a problem with Jews and tattoos. Until quite recently, I always imagined that the twain never met. But now, I've even heard of an American rabbi whose neck is permanently adorned with the Star of David.

There is a kind of positive defiance in wishing to assert your identity in such bold fashion. The trouble is that you are simultaneously asserting that your identity is kitsch, its symbols crude. Moreover, for as long as the shadow of the Holocaust hangs over us, the idea of tattooing Jews has the basest of associations.

Body art, they call it. But, while in theory there is potential for beauty, in my experience it is invariably, catastrophically unrealised.

Yet tattooing has become so fashionable - beyond fashionable, in fact, it has become epidemic - that Jewish lads and lasses have inevitably taken to it.

This is very different from the charming and genuinely decorative Sephardi and Oriental Jewish custom for brides to cover their hands with intricate henna patterns.

Not only is this temporary but it is a part of a defining tradition. The Song of Solomon includes the entreaty: "Come, my beloved/Let us go into the open/ Let us lodge among the henna shrubs…"

It is hard to find such lyrical associations with the - sadly permanent -body art of today. This is usually either roughly applied or, if done skilfully, carried to such serpentine excesses as to turn the wearer's body into a kind of walking circus poster.

For every discreetly applied heart or butterfly, there are hundreds of bloated frogs and dragons. For each poignant personal tribute to a loved one, there is a flood of graceless gibberish, dotted lines and scissors.

And for every professional footballer, it is de rigueur to obliterate his arms and/or other parts of his torso. David Beckham's grotesque arrangement of wings and a cross is a modern icon As, of course, was the late, much lamented Amy Winehouse, whose talent was not her only signature. She drank, she did drugs, she misbehaved - and she got tattoed. But, if her lasting image, for me, is of those random, ridiculously amateur daubings - the kind that make me despair - she has certainly torn apart a few cosy Jewish complacencies. God bless her for that.

Interview: Barbara Taylor Bradford

Gerald Jacobs — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 10:58:39 +0100

Three pm at the Dorchester. Outside, the afternoon sun burns flesh and metal the length and breadth of Park Lane. Inside, secretive businessmen and earnest tourists nibble pastries and crust-free sandwiches.

Seated at a table in the centre of the room is a comfortably elegant, blonde woman. Around her, a new kind of tea dance seems to be taking place, a waiter and a waitress performing co-ordinated, deferential steps. The woman- who looks middle-aged but is in fact in her late 70s - is clearly an important guest. A woman of substance, you might say.

Yes, this is Barbara Taylor Bradford, whose 1979 literary debut - called A Woman of Substance - is one of the biggest-selling novels of all time. It has so far sold around 30 million copies and, rather neatly, its author currently stands at around number 30 in the ranks of Britain's wealthiest women.

Since that explosive arrival three decades ago, Bradford has written 26 further novels, pushing her total sales past the 80 million mark. Every one of them sells to 90 countries and is translated into 40 languages. Ten have been turned into TV movies by Bradford's film-producer husband Bob. A Woman of Substance, with Deborah Kerr at the head of a starry cast, was a six-part blockbuster on both sides of the Atlantic, over here attracting Channel 4's highest ever audience of 13.8 million. She was awarded the OBE four years ago and, if further proof were needed of Bradford's status, she has been on Desert Island Discs three times.

No wonder the Dorchester staff dance attendance on her. Bradford is a phenomenon. Now living in America, she is in London to promote her latest book, Letter From a Stranger, a simply told story of love and hate within a family, to which she gives an increasingly Jewish flavour as the book progresses.

Bradford is not Jewish and explains that she was moved to write the novel "because my husband is a German Jew and he was taken out of Germany as a child", adding that: "I've been horrified and fascinated by Nazi Germany since before I met Bob, and we've been married 47 years". Bob Bradford eventually made it to America.

Letter From a Stranger is not the first of Barbara Taylor Bradford's books to contain Jewish material; there is a Jewish family in A Woman of Substance, she points out. "The book is set in Yorkshire and I come originally from Leeds, a very Jewish city. You couldn't write a book about Leeds at the turn of the century without including a family like the Kallinskis."

Commenting on what she sees as a disturbing increase in antisemitism - "it drives me crazy" - she approvingly recalls having once been described as "the greatest Jewish shiksah in the world". But her disgust at antisemitism is not experienced in a partial way. To make the point, she recalls another of her books with Jewish content, The Women in his Life, and being buttonholed by a reader at a signing for yet another of her titles in the 1990s:

"This woman came up to me and asked: 'Are you Jewish?' I said: 'No, why?' She told me she had tried to read The Women in his Life but could not get into it. Then, accompanying her husband on a long, rain-affected business trip to Zurich, she had decided to give it another try. Quite a back-handed compliment.

"She said she had become tremendously emotional when she got to the part where the character Maximilian West was taken out of Berlin with his mother's jewellery sewn into his clothes and she said: 'I began to weep, and I want you to know that I have not wept since I was taken out of Nazi Germany with my mother's jewellery stitched into my clothes'. It was cathartic, she said before asking: 'But if you're not Jewish, how did you understand their feelings?'

"What a question. I was gobsmacked. I replied: 'Because I am a human being!'"

Bradford had her sights set on being a writer from her early days as an only child in Leeds and became a great fan of the local literary heroes, the Brontës. In addition, "my mother force-fed me Dickens," she says. "And I was always scribbling in exercise books. When I was 10, my mother sent a story of mine to a children's magazine and one day we got a letter and a postal order for 10 shillings and sixpence and the story was published. Hemingway said that you can't call yourself a writer until you've been paid for what you write - so I've been a writer since I was 10! My destiny was sealed."

The young Barbara Taylor - Taylor is her maiden name, which she retained after she married- took her first steps towards fulfilling that destiny by joining the typing pool at the Yorkshire Evening Post when she left school at 15, quickly rising to reporter. Later, she became the fashion editor of Woman's Own - "in those days, fashion editing was how to make three dresses out of a tea-towel".

Citing her journalistic background, Bradford says she always researches her books thoroughly. Consequently, she is distressed by a small historical error in Letter From a Stranger, inserted after an adviser challenged something she had written about the Second World War.

Mutual friends introduced Barbara and Bob Bradford in 1963 and, ever since, they have formed a powerful team. They don't have children - "it's just him and a dog" - but do have energy. "Bob has always been in the movie business and represented me when I started to write books. He believes books should be sold like movies."

This formula has certainly been successful, boosted by his wife's prolific output. She has already moved on to the next book, Rendezvous in Venice, about war photographers. Even before A Woman of Substance, she had written books on interior design and published a number of biblical stories for children. And indeed, morals and manners still form an essential part of her storytelling. This is something of a mission. "I think we live in a very vulgar time," she says. "In Britain, we forget that the Elizabethans and Victorians made us what we are. Nowadays, people dismiss history."

While Bradford would not claim to be turning out great literature, she says she writes "for intelligent women - though a lot of men do read my books. My readers want something with a bit of meat on the bone." An appropriate closing image, perhaps, as the Dorchester staff begin to turn their attention from tea to dinner.

Israeli author wins prestigious Jewish literary award

Gerald Jacobs — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 14:07:02 +0100

Israeli novelist David Grossman has won the 2011 Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize, the UK's foremost Jewish literature award. Early this week, a packed audience in the Stern Pissarro Gallery, off Pall Mall, heard writer Lisa Appignanesi, this year's chair of the JQ-Wingate judges, announce the result of the most eagerly awaited contest for many years.

The short list contained Eli Amir's novel,The Dove Flier, and the charming, elegantly constructed Visitation by Jenny Erpenbeck, but was dominated by the other four titles, any of which in a normal year would have taken the prize in a canter.

Along with Mr Grossman's To The End Of The Land, the quartet comprised the 2010 Man Booker winner, The Finkler Question, by Howard Jacobson; Anthony Julius's determinedly argued Trials of the Diaspora, a massively researched chronicle of English antisemitism, ranging over centuries and ending with a condemnatory flourish at the contemporary conflation of antisemitism with anti-Zionism; and the surprise success of recent years, The Hare With Amber Eyes, Edmund De Waal's already garlanded, exquisitely traced history of his illustrious forebears, the Ephrussis.

David Grossman's huge novel, about a woman's desperate concern for the life of her soldier son caught up in the epicentre of Arab-Israeli warfare, is weighted with poignant irony: the writer's own son was killed in conflict during the writing of the book.

Accepting the award, the author revealed that he returned to writing it at the end of the shivah -- "At first, I thought: 'What am I doing?'" -- but then explained how important it was to tell the story, "how important literature is".

Why the Y word is my word

Gerald Jacobs — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 13:03:03 +0100

A couple of rows in front of where I am sitting, a large man has leapt to his feet. His entire body is quivering with rage. I expect him to lose his voice at any moment. On the surface, he seems an affable, suburban type, a family man with children whom he has quite possibly reprimanded for outbursts far milder than the poisonous invective currently issuing from his own mouth.

Yet nobody is reprimanding him, or even taking much notice of him. His screams are mere drops in a stream of opprobrium descending upon a heedless official, uniformed, like Shakespeare's Angelo, "in a little brief authority" - the referee.

For the raging hulk and I, along with about 35,000 others, are watching football at the White Hart Lane stadium in Tottenham - "the world-famous home of the Spurs". Or, if you like, the citadel of the "Yid Army".

Many, of course, do not like. Last week, a JC editorial, no less, fulminated against the very idea of the Yid Army, claiming that it helps to "mask the level of antisemitic abuse". This opinion was advanced in support of a short film, The Y Word, made by the Baddiel brothers, David and Ivor, designed to place football-terrace antisemitism on the same level of notice as the racial abuse of black footballers.

But neither the Spurs "Yid Army!" war cry, nor the approbatory "Yiddo" chant signifying that a particular player has earned his colours - his spurs - is antisemitic. Quite the opposite.

It is well-known that Spurs have a large contingent of Jewish supporters. (Though, should the ground be relocated away from North London as the club's present - Jewish - chairman appears to want, that may well not be the case in future generations.) There have also been several Jewish directors, and even the odd Jewish player.

Thus, Tottenham Hotspur has long been perceived as a "Jewish" club. And, like it or not, football is nothing if not tribal. Fans devise tribal tokens, sing tribal songs and adopt a tribal identity. In this respect, the "Yids" are no different to the Arsenal "Gooners" or Man U "Reds". All three labels are worn with pride, not shame. As a Spurs fan, I react with a kind of benign amusement when I witness hordes of young supporters forming a kosher crowd, waving Israeli flags and singing. And I know many others who feel the same.

While the Baddiels are to be admired for wanting to eradicate antisemitic abuse from the terraces, they are wrong to do so by focusing on "The Y Word" because it needs qualifying. "Yids" chanted at Tottenham by home supporters is not the same as "Yids" chanted by the Baddiels' fellow Chelsea fans known for their emetic "gas-chamber" hissing.

That particularly disgusting obscenity (from which the focus on "Yid" is a distraction) is demonstration, if any were needed, of the ugly side of the beautiful game - on and off the pitch. Indeed, you can hear plenty of chants at Tottenham, too, that are extremely unpleasant to the ear of any reasonably minded supporter, Jew or non-Jew. But none of these include the Y word.

Part of the mystery of the irrational hold that football has over otherwise rational human beings is that it affords a release of not always healthily suppressed feelings. This is not a pretty sight but, for the most part, spectators like my raging suburbanite neighbour in the White Hart Lane west stand - and even some of the ignorant purveyors of hate - return home somewhat purged.

And when your team wins, it is possible to experience a sense of fellowship so joyful that as simple a couplet as, Jermain Defoe/He's a Yiddo, performed by a rough-voiced choir of thousands, can sound almost as heart-warming as a klezmer band playing Yidl mit'n fidl.

Coming down on the Tottenham Yids is no way to quell the bigots at Chelsea and elsewhere. David Baddiel rightly says that the response to anti-Jewish hate chants on the terraces is far too muted. So why silence the love songs? The singers may be raucous, but they certainly make themselves heard.