Was any part of you embarrassed by last week’s front page JC story about a worried Jewish father who flew 360 miles by helicopter to evacuate his teenage daughter from a Jewish summer camp after complaints of “filthy conditions”, “safety concerns” and general Lord of the Flies goings-on at the Norfolk premises?
I’m talking about the helicopter bit of the rescue operation as well as the more familiar “helicopter parenting”.
Did you shrink at the ostentation of the exercise? Recoil at the figure of the anxious Jewish parent, the time-honoured subject of antisemitic ridicule? Cringe at the thought of how much it must cost to fly a helicopter from the south coast, where the concerned father was staying, and land it in a field in Norfolk?
If you did — and it’s a sheepish hands up from me — I’m afraid you’ve internalised some antisemitism.
Rationally, there is no reason why the Jewish bit of us should feel ashamed by the actions of other Jews, though I’ll wager that we’ve all tasted that shame, the shame of knowing exactly what others will be thinking.
But the only reason we feel the shame is because of the negative stereotypes that abound around Jews. We are triggered (yeah, an overused word, but apposite here) because nasty ways of thinking about us are sunk so deep in the soil of our civilisation, we have absorbed some of them ourselves. Even as we see it and fight it, we are not immune to the effects of antisemitism. Two millennia of Jew-hate has schooled us too.
Dave Rich, whose brilliant book Everyday Hate: how antisemitism is built into our world and how you can change it should be required reading for anyone who professes progressive politics, cites French philosopher Sartre: “Jews who are antisemitic are only borrowing their antisemitism from wider society, it’s not really them.”
I have a related and rather personal experience of the phenomenon. When I was a little girl, my mum, born in Warsaw two weeks before Hitler marched into Poland, would tell me to make sure people liked me before I told them I was Jewish.
Of course I don’t blame mum: her advice was the entirely understandable emotional response of someone who’d grown up in post-Holocaust Poland, a country of which one Israeli prime minister pointedly said its children suck up antisemitism with their mothers’ milk. When she found out she was Jewish in her mid teens (complicated Shoah story) it was, says mum, a punch to the stomach.
Jewish shame has been a subject of fascination for many novelists, but for me its most satisfying treatment is to be found in Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question, which won him the 2010 Booker. The Finkler of the novel’s title is an anti-Zionist Jew who is proud to be ashamed of the Jews’ nation state. So ashamed he joins a group called “Ashamed Jews”, and tweaks its typography to: ASHamed Jews. You know, the Jews whose gassed bodies were burned in the ovens of Auschwitz, they are (were) the good Jews. (People love dead Jews, as the author Dora Horn has reminded us).
The ones who survived the mass murder of Europe’s Jews and whose descendants now live in Israel, they are not. They are bad Jews who induce feelings of shame. When Finkler’s wife asks him to leave ASHamed Jews, Jacobson pokes delicious fun: “That far he couldn’t go. The movement needed him. The Palestinians needed him. The Groucho needed him.”
Sometimes, though, things get complicated in another direction. We hold other people’s shame for them, try to protect them from feeling it. Who has listened to a friend, a stranger, say something ignorant about Jews and said nothing? It’s another sheepish hands up from me. We know when someone doesn’t understand the significance of what they’ve said and, rather than embarrass them by explaining things, we let it slide, we avoid an awkward conversation. After all, it’s not very British to correct people and we are British Jews.
Not that British Jews are a monolith, I hasten to add. If last week’s helicopter story caused you some discomfort, turn to this week’s JC2 for your antidote. Our cover star Gregg Sulkin, hero of BBC drama World on Fire, is the proudest Jew you could hope to meet.
As our showbiz columnist Nicole Lampert writes in her piece, there’s usually a bit of umming and ahhing when Judaism, Jewishness and Israel come up in her interviews with Jewish actors. London-born Gregg is the antithesis. “I love being Jewish and I love Israel!” he proclaims. “I had my bar mitzvah in Jerusalem and I’d still count it as the most special day of my life.”
What a cheering thing to read and what a useful reminder that we haven’t all internalised the abuse that is antisemitism.
