The British novelist Thomas Peermohamed Lambert agrees that the polarisation of modern politics needs to be resisted. His debut novel Shibboleth, completed before October 7 but published last year, is a satirical campus novel in which an Oxford student is considered Muslim by his peers because he has a Zanzibarian grandfather, despite the fact he doesn’t identify as such. Those friends attempt to co-opt him into an antisemitic purity spiral, despite his growing closeness to Rachel, who is German-Jewish. Peermohamed Lambert, who isn’t Jewish, wrote the novel partly because he was frustrated by our current culture’s inability to recognise multiple varieties of victimhood. “We’ve got to a stage where people just wield grievances to counteract the other side’s grievances,” he says. “[This kind of rhetorical move] is perhaps the dominant one of our time, and yes, it makes people reluctant to do things like talk about antisemitism.”
Yet other Jewish novelists resist what they see as a cultural expectation to write about certain subjects just because of their ethnic and cultural affiliation. The modern demand that anyone appearing in public is expected to have a quick and simplistic take weighs especially heavy on Jews, who are regularly tested and found wanting. Toby Lloyd’s debut novel Fervour – about a prominent modern Orthodox columnist who becomes convinced her daughter is possessed – was written before October 7 but published afterwards. Inevitably, says Lloyd, some readers brought their own agendas to the book. “One crowd was looking for books with two barrels aimed at the state of Israel, another crowd was desperate for an apologia,” he says. “My book is neither. Debates around Israel and Zionism do crop up in Fervour but the real energy of the narrative is elsewhere.” He dislikes the pressure to be bounced into an instant response. “The novel is the place to take your time to think and write about things properly. No easy truths.”
Other works of contemporary Jewish fiction are even less explicitly about identity and antisemitism but still feel recognisably Jewish in their preoccupations. In Sean Gilbert’s I’ll Be The Monster, published earlier this year, a married couple with a dark secret encounter their former classmate Benny Berkowitz while on holiday in Istanbul. Benny is a familiar Jewish type, a good boy who is trying to appear rebellious, an outsider struggling to keep up – and the narrator and his wife are far from certain what Benny truly knows about them. “Humour is where I establish the strongest link to Judaic culture,” says Gilbert. “For my characters, it’s a first principle, ordering their relationship to the world.” Gilbert does not particularly feel the need to politicise the Jewish experience in his work. “I tend to be drawn towards more universal themes. I start with mapping the character’s psychological landscape before locating them anywhere else. That said, writing from any minority perspective is always, to some extent, a political act.”
Meanwhile, Michael Arditti’s recent celebrated novel, The Tribe, reimagines the story of his Sephardic ancestors through an epic tale about the once-gilded Carrache family, expelled from Thessaloniki and scattered across continents, leading very varied lives as they find their ways back to one another. “One early leading character is a teenage Zionist in 1912. Another visits a Galilean moshav in 1962. I found it heartbreaking to contemplate how their ideals had soured in recent years,’” says Arditti, a Christian author of Jewish heritage. “My personal gripe is the received wisdom that fiction readers are not interested in religion. I hope I’ve done my bit to prove that wrong.”
Certainly, many share the hope that novels create empathy and understanding where discourse and prescriptiveness fail. Last year Francesca Simon, whose Horrid Henry books are international bestsellers, published her first novel for adults, Salka, a retelling of the Welsh legend about a lake faerie who marries a human shepherd on one condition: if he strikes her three times she will return to the lake forever. “What better way than a novel to live in another person’s shoes and see the world from many different points of view?” she says. She points out that her writing is more influenced by factors beyond her Jewishness such as “my being a woman, an immigrant, a feminist, a parent, and a lover of myth and folktale. I don’t believe in drawing morals or being heavy-handed."
Undeniably fiction, with its capacity for polyphony, internal discord and the long view, is a more satisfying place to explore the overwhelming nature of modern politics than polemic. What’s striking is the number of contemporary Jewish novelists who have found ways to represent the Jewish experience without touching on contemporary debates around Jewish identity. Many recent novels look at Jewishness through a more nuanced, domestic lens, shrugging off any need to place such vexed questions at their centre. Madeleine Dunnigan’s debut Jean is set in a 1970s all-male boarding school, where rebellious Jewish teenager Jean is teetering on the brink of expulsion when he falls in love with another pupil. Tom Lamont’s tender, humorous debut Going Home introduces two hapless male friends in Enfield who must suddenly take care of a toddler after his mother’s suicide. Roisin Dunnett’s A Line You Have Traced is a time travelling adventure hopping between the Battle of Cable Street, the present day and a dystopian future. The sheer diversity of these novels reflects a confidence in Jewish identity that appears to transcend current events.
Madeleine Dunnigan[Missing Credit]
I myself was keen to open up conversations around Jewish experience with my own debut The Decadence, which uses a haunted house tale to draw connections between British antisemitism past and present. But it’s also significant that my six living characters seldom agree on anything, be it dinner options or the Israel-Palestine conflict. By celebrating the extremely varied range of perspectives offered by these very different novels, I hope readers will be able to understand the dizzying multifaceted breadth of Jewishness in ways that go far beyond labels.
Leon Craig’s debut novel The Decadence, published by Sceptre Books, is out in paperback August 2026
