The Jewish world has seen some wonderful innovators in the world of technology. There’s Zuckerberg of Meta and Altman of Open AI; Danny Page and Sergei Brin, the co-founders of Google. Back in the day – and closer to home – we had Lord Sugar, who pioneered home computers with the retro green-on-black graphics of Amstrad, (before becoming famous for firing hapless wannabes on The Apprentice).
Sugar lives in Chigwell, Essex, the suburb in which I grew up, and where my father Lawrence still lives. But an IG7 postcode is all the Levys and the Sugars have in common. Because, when they were giving out the Jewish techno-savvy gene, my family was obviously waiting in a different call-queue.
Take Dad and his many TVs, for example. Every time my father wants to turn on his fancy, interlinked Sky box system, the whole thing crashes and he has to call an audio-visual expert around to fix it for him. There are hundreds of channels at his disposal, but Dad can’t even get BBC1.
My father and his inoperable TVs remind me of that 1980s Jackie Mason sketch. In his touring show, the American rabbi-turned-stand-up comic tells a story about a Jewish man who has just bought a top-of-the range Mercedes.
“Best engineering in the world,” remarks a gentile friend.
The Jew replies: “What does a Jew know from engineering? He can’t even turn on the radio.”
Dad calls an email a “letter” and regularly, inadvertently telephones our family WhatsApp chat group, so we see his little icon flashing there as we go about our day.
But this technophobia is clearly genetic. Newspaper app passwords don’t ever seem to work for me and I have to set up a new one every time I want to read an article. The other day, I was sent an HR “on-boarding” form, the baroque demands of which moved me to want to commit violence in quite an unprecedented way.
You know that whirling multicoloured wheel you get when your Apple laptop crashes, the one that looks like a beachball? “I’ve got the beachball” is my code for any life situation when I’m put under undue stress and my personal hard-drive crashes. Miss an exit on the motorway? I’ve got the beachball. Two editors ask me for immediate amendments in the same five-minute period? The spinning wheel of death appears. But more often than not, it happens when technology is involved.
I know I’m not alone in this: many friends my age report similar frustrations.
I’m trying to work out why IT difficulties are so particularly painful. The thing about technology is that it’s brilliant when it does what it’s meant to (that password worked, the wi-fi cone has appeared and the day is saved!) and infuriating when it doesn’t (where’s the bloody wi-fi cone?). One feels utterly disempowered.
Fortunately for me, these days I have my new husband, Jeremy, to come to the rescue. It’s my great fortune that when Jeremy was starting his career as an actor and playwright, he also earned extra cash on the IT help desk of a New York investment bank. Jeremy makes a peerless kosher roast chicken, and can fix my broadband: can you think of a more amazing match?
When I get the technology beachball, Jeremy rolls his eyes, and gently manoeuvres me – shrieking – out of the room before deftly fixing the issue.
Jeremy has a theory about Jews and technology. He believes we exist on a statistical “barbell curve”, where our IT competence is heavily concentrated at two extreme poles, rather than evenly distributed in the middle. That is to say, we Hebrews are either brilliant at technology, or really, really bad at it. The AV guy who rushes round to fix my dad’s television woes is an Israeli called Chemi, for example.
Here’s my take: there’s a difference between the Jewish genius inspired to invent the technology in the first place, and the schlemiel who is left to handle the mundane frustrations of when it goes wrong – and it does go wrong a lot! – without the appropriate training or experience. Jewish intellectual traditions may drive innovation, but they don’t mean the rest of us know how to install a printer.
Which is not to say that Jeremy hasn’t tried. He bought me some AirPods – I loved these, actually – but one fell down the back of the radiator, and the other cheeped helplessly behind a sofa somewhere until it ran out of juice. I used the Apple Watch for several months, but in the end I just thought it too ugly, so it now sits uncharged in my top drawer.
Last Chanukah, with great fanfare, Jeremy bought me a Moleskine Smart Writing pad – a kind of electronic notebook with a fancy “pen”. God knows how much that cost, and yes, I feel guilty about it. But there it is, dusty and unloved, on the window ledge. (To be fair, Jeremy doesn’t use it, either.)
Here, perhaps lies the secret. I like being analogue. I adore my paper calendar and my fluorescent marker pens with which I make a colour-coded “to do” list at the end of every day. I like reading actual novels. And I do believe those neuroscientists who insist that doing things the old-style way is actually better for our focus and cognitive health.
So ultimately, it’s a conscious choice that I sit at the gormless end of Jeremy’s IT barbell curve. Some Jews – the Zuckerbergs, the Ellisons and the Dells and their fans – were predestined to be the People of the iPad. As for me, and the rest of us – against the tide of progress, we are happy to remain the People of the Book.
To get more from opinion, click here to sign up for our free Editor's Picks newsletter.