Opinion
For the first time I’m labelling myself as a Jew
Writer Sara Sheridan added 'Jew' to her Twitter profile this week
January 8, 2020 18:05
2 min read
Writer Sara Sheridan added 'Jew' to her Twitter profile this week
January 8, 2020 18:05This week I decided to change my social media profile by adding the word “Jew”. I was brought up in a house where religion didn’t matter — my mother is Jewish and my father is Catholic and growing up, we celebrated all the holidays and were told we could believe in whatever we liked.
I’ve done it because of what’s going on politically across the UK and particularly because of the graffiti which appeared in London last week.
I have always identified as Jewish, but as part of multiple other identities including being a woman, a Scot, an atheist, a humanist and a European (all of which, to be honest, are more important to my day-to-day life).
But I’ve always been an outsider and this is key to my work as a writer. I live in Scotland. Here in Edinburgh, the Jewish cemetery was desecrated with graffiti a few years ago — my great grandparents are in there, my grandmother too. The graffiti was cleaned off never to be reapplied so I know that what’s happening isn’t new but it isn’t right either and the scale feels different.
For me, this rise in racism isn’t an isolated issue, solely for the Jewish community. I was as horrified to see how UK government policy treated the Windrush generation as I was to hear how my EU-passport holding friends are being forced to apply for (and in some cases struggle to obtain) permission to stay in the UK, where they have homes, families and jobs. It seems suddenly important to make diversity and the benefits of diversity clearer.
As a child, many people I knew in the Jewish community had come through World War Two one way or another. Jewish kids of my generation didn’t get a shock at 10 because we found out about the tooth fairy, like our non-Jewish mates — we got a shock because we found out about the Shoah.
For me, what was most harrowing was making the connection between the grainy black and white newsreels and the experiences of my Jewish friends’ parents as well as cousins on the distant reaches of my own family.
It seemed impossible to me that the people who played music, danced and joked at my parents’ parties had survived such cruelty. So for all these reasons, it’s time to stand up. Seeing what happened in London has shocked me. My daughter lives near that postcode. It’s not that I’ve ever hidden my background. My second novel, Ma Polinski’s Pockets, tells the story of a woman coming to terms with her mother’s death camp survival. And the first in my murder mystery series, Brighton Belle, has a vivid scene where a survivor hunts down and kills a camp commandant. But it’s time to stand up now outside fiction.
So far, I’ve only had one antisemitic response and that only a vague one but I’m going to keep talking about what’s happening publicly and calling myself Jewish, which is something I haven’t done before. Here goes.