Putting the Id back in Yid by Stephen Frosh

The Freudian century began in Vienna but found its eventual home in America. There it was that most psychoanalysts wound up and entered the blood stream of the culture so that Freudian speech and American speech — or at least a certain kind of American speech: broad, aspiring, complaining, witty, frenzied, guilt-ridden — ran together.
At its height, mid-century, American psychoanalysis testified to the presence of unconscious sexual or violent wishes that were geared towards producing trouble. Ego psychology assumed that something explosive (the id) needed controlling and turning to good use. Freud lived at a time of social upheaval and genuine revolutionary fervour, in which the masses, like the unconscious, were breaking free from centuries-long repression. It was also the start of a period of Jewish emancipation that shared these same characteristics. The Jews of the West had burst out of their ghettoes like water breaching a dam, and, despite their continuing exclusion and the continued growth of anti-Semitism (or maybe because of it), their immense, pent-up energy was visible everywhere. Freud’s own work depended on this moment of Jewish freedom which existed in complex relation to the ubiquitous anti-Semitism.

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Walking to Hollywood by Will Self

In Empire of Their Own, a worthy, scrupulous and curiously dull account of how immigrant Jews founded the state of mind known as ‘Hollywood’— first in America, then latterly throughout the wider world — its author, Neal Gabler, glosses their Diaspora from the European ghettoes and shtetls, thus: Carl Laemmle, born 1867 in Laupheim, a small village in south-western Germany, ‘…prevailed upon his father, a penurious land speculator, to let him come to America to seek his fortune. He would eventually found Universal Pictures.’ Adolph Zukor, who was born in the Tokay region of Hungary and orphaned as a child, ‘…was bundled off to an uncle nearby, a steely, bloodless rabbinical scholar. Lonely, independent and unloved, Zukor, like Laemmle, petitioned to leave for America and a new life. He would later build Paramount Pictures.’ Then there was William Fox, also from Hungary, whose parents were the émigrés, but whose experiences of ‘hawking soda pop, sandwiches and chimney black he would… parlay into the Fox Film Corporation’.

And of course there was Louis B. Mayer, who ‘had forgotten exactly where in Russia he had been born and on what day,’ and whose voortrek took him to Canada, then to Boston where he made money in the salvage business, before heading west to found Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Benjamin Warner left his wife and children in Poland, worked as a cobbler in Baltimore, brought his family over to the new world, then ‘…For years, he roamed the East and Canada, peddling notions from a wagon before finally settling in Youngstown, Ohio.’ Here Warner raised the four sons whose purchase of a broken film projector set them on the road to become the eponymous Warner Brothers.

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Will Self is the author of seven novels (the most recent of which The Butt is published in paperback in May), five collections of short stories, and three novellas. He has contributed extensively to a plethora of publications over the years, and four collections of his journalism have been published. He lives in London with his wife, the journalist Deborah Orr

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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The rise of the Jewish nerds

In the nineteenth-century, you couldn’t forward YouTube videos, but you could purchase and mail a wide variety of postcards with exceedingly mean ethnic caricatures on them. The ones that took the Jew as their subject usually depicted him as clumsy and androgynous — falling off a bicycle, dropping a rifle when drafted into the army, wrestling incompetently with another Jew, being upended by frolicking children — wailing, smiling goofily, groping for his glasses. Read more

The End of the Jew as Metaphor

For some twenty-five or thirty years — between the mid-1950s and the early 1980s — a single explosive development in our literature made the experience of being Jewish-in-America a metaphor that attracted major talents, changed the language, and galvanized imaginative writing throughout a Western world badly in need of a charge. Read more

Doing Write by History

‘Nothing to see here,’ said the cameraman. And before I could even object — ‘But that’s the point!’ — the crew had started their long slog back to the U-Bahn station. Their patience had been overextended one time too many.

They were right.
There was nothing to see.
And I was right too.
That was exactly the point. Read more