Non Jewish Jews

The Wandering Who? A Study of Jewish Identity Politics

By Gilad Atzmon

Zero Books 2011

Jewish Identity and Palestinian Rights

By David Landy

Zed Books 2011

So contested has the issue of antisemitism become and so promiscuously is the term used that it is increasingly difficult tofind clarity amid the fog of frenzied debate. The publication of these two recent books provides a much needed opportunity to map out exactly where the borderline between disillusionment with Israel, anti-Zionism and antisemitism actually lies. Read more

Jews and Sex

By Nathan Abrams

Five Leaves, 2008, £12.99

In the mid-1990s I worked as a research assistant for Jewish Continuity, the short-lived organisation that sought to ensure the continuity of Judaism in this country. One of its major concerns was preventing intermarriage and, in order to do so, great pains were taken to research the lives of British Jewish single young adults. Notwithstanding the naivety and crudity of some aspects of Jewish Continuity’s ‘anti-intermarriage’ agenda, a detailed picture emerged that contributed to the understanding of British Jewry. But I couldn’t help feeling then, as now, that something was missing — we didn’t investigate what young Jews thought about the prospect and the reality of sex with other Jews. Was intermarriage partially a result of young Jews finding other Jews a sexual turn-off? Are non-Jews more sexually alluring to Jews (and visa versa)? What, in short, is the ‘sexual economy’ of British Jewish life?

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Debating the Debate

‘Anglo-Jewry finds its voice’, trumpeted the front page of the Jewish Chronicle during the harrowing days of the Gaza bombardment.

What voice exactly was this? What was it saying? More importantly, for whom was it speaking?

If the tangible feelings of dismay, paralysis and incredulity around me were anything to go by, whole swathes of Anglo-Jewry were left unspoken for.

Urgently, it seemed, a platform was needed for those unheard voices. The following is a transcript of the first conversation organised by the JQ to establish what these voices might be saying. What are the issues? How might they be broached? How, as a community, might we manage these differences?

The conversation was chaired by Jonathan Boyd (acting director of Jewish Policy Research). The participants were Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg (Rabbi of New North London Syngogue), Douglas Krikler (Chief Executive of the UJIA), Paul Usiskin (Co-chair of Peace Now UK), Geoffrey Alderman, (Columnist, Professor of Politics & Contemporary History at the University of Buckingham) Kevin Sefton, (Limmud Trustee) Joseph Finlay (Musician, involved with Jewdas and the Moishe House), Keith Kahn-Harris (Sociologist, convenor of New Jewish Thought www.newjewishthought.org) and Daniella Peled (journalist and analyst who specialises on the Middle East).

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Klezmer America

Jonathan Freedman, Klezmer America: Jewishness, Ethnicity, Modernity (Columbia University Press, 2008, £20.50)

Despite the title, this is not a book about klezmer, at least not in the conventional sense. That’s not to say that klezmer isn’t discussed in it, but it is part of a wider discussion of the problematics and potentials of Jewish culture in America.

The author, a professor of English and American studies at the University of Michigan, is interested in how ‘dealing with the collective fictions that accrete around the examples of Jews, Jewishness and Judaism can unsettle even the most seemingly secure of the seemingly calcified categories by which our culture parses otherness’. For those not used to the language of academic cultural studies, this sentence may seem a little intimidating, but there are riches in Klezmer America that await the patient reader. In this collection of linked essays Freedman looks at a host of case studies in his examination of how ‘Jews, Jewishness and Judaism’ subvert and throw light on the seemingly intractable structures of race and ethnicity in America.

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