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The JDOV talks no.3 - David Aaronovitch: Choosing a faith.

The journalist, broadcaster, and author talks about constructing his own identity from a wide selection of options. Jewish? British? Irish? Marxist? Is the way we define ourselves the way that others see us?

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David Aaronovitch’s family were atheists. Their faith was Marxism. At the same time, he knew he was “half Jewish”, but he didn’t know what this meant.

All in all, he imagined his Jewishness to be like his Irishness - a story of the past, exotic but irrelevant. But in fact, it hasn’t been irrelevant, far from it.

In this talk, David explains how, whilst he was happy to cherry-pick from this identity - if there was anything he particularly liked about Jewishness, he would lay claim to it - there was one major problem: he could cherry-pick the Jewishness, but the antisemitism picked him.

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