The J Word: tackling anti-semitism

From White Hart Lane to middle-class weddings, Hephzibah Anderson unpicks the prejudice that refuses to die

8 November 2013

A while ago, I found myself at a photo shoot with a chatty make-up artist. We’d somehow got on to the subject of Marc Jacobs. ‘He’s Jewish, isn’t he?’ she remarked of the eternally youthful American fashion designer. After that she hopscotched on to film and I tried to ignore a growing sense that what really linked her monologue’s subjects was their ethnicity: Michael Douglas, Steven Spielberg, Rachel Weisz, Adam Sandler, Russell Brand.

Wait, Russell Brand?

‘He’s a Jew, isn’t he?’

The question itself was off but her tone was most bothersome. One of my mum’s cousins is married to a Muslim woman who says that, when they first started dating, she began noticing the trouble some people have with the word ‘Jew’. They swallow it, as if they think they’re saying something bad.

As the hair and make-up girl explained why she thought Brand must be one of the chosen people — it apparently had to do with his smooth-seeming transition from stand-up to Hollywood — other words seemed to hover close by, unspoken but just barely. Words such as cabal, conspiracy.

My own response was comically English. In an almost apologetic rush to stop her from saying something unforgivable (especially as she was by now wielding red-hot curling tongs), I hurried to explain that while I was pretty certain she was wrong about Brand, I myself was part-Jewish. And there the chattiness ended.

British anti-Semitism is a peculiar yet pernicious phenomenon. Part of the warp and weft of our isles’ culture, it coexists alongside legendary tolerance and mildness — the same tolerance and mildness that has ultimately paved the way to Jewish assimilation. This is a nation whose feeling for fair play led to the debunking of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. But let’s not forget either that the blood libel, a still more lethal staple of anti-Semitic folklore that tells of how Jews ritually sacrifice Christian children, was first codified in 12th-century East Anglia.

That prejudice is built into some of the nation’s oldest cathedrals in the form of architectural geegaws with the bodies of fiendish creatures and the long-nosed faces of Jewish caricature. It’s in the lyrics of hymns — ‘The Jews chose darkness’ is one I remember from school. And it’s in the literature above all, from show-stealers like Shylock and Fagin to walk-on stereotypes in works by everyone from Chaucer to Agatha Christie.

As a boy growing up in the East End, my grandfather had to learn to box; Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts were on the march and my grandfather was bookish, bespectacled and Jewish. When war broke out, he enlisted, and while he was off fighting for his country with the British Expeditionary Force, his father was declared an ‘enemy alien’ and sent to an internment camp on the Isle of Man. Returning home at the end of the war, my grandfather learned that his race still excluded him from the local golf club.

In the decades since, anti-Semitism has been eclipsed by other prejudices. (‘I’m not a Paki, I’m a Yid!’ a friend remembers yelling at playground bullies in the 1980s.) Until recently, it might have been thought to have receded, for the most part, into a charged pause following the mention of things Jewish. Even that tone occasions little more than a moment’s social awkwardness, barely worth acknowledging.

In many ways, there’s never been a more inspirational time to be Jewish in London. A shiny new community centre on the Finchley Road, JW3, offers everything from Jewish-Italian cookery classes to rabbi-led yoga as it strives to promote a more outward-looking, American sense of communal confidence. Cultural fixtures such as the Jewish Film Festival and Jewish Book Week — the UK’s second oldest literary festival — go from strength to strength, and Four Four Jew, a stereotype-dashing exhibition of Jews and football, recently opened at Camden’s Jewish Museum. If you slide into a booth at Mishkin’s in Covent Garden, you can even nosh on a knish without crossing the Atlantic.

Yet while it hasn’t been deadly in centuries, British anti-Semitism has not died out. A recent flurry of news stories suggests that even as the Holocaust slips from living memory, hatred of Jews is alive and well in our city, as sinisterly versatile and opportunistic as ever.

First came the fracas caused by the FA’s ongoing attempts to discourage Spurs fans from calling themselves ‘the Yid Army’. Fans claim it as a badge of pride and insist they’re reappropriating the Y-word in the same way that the black community has reappropriated the N-word. This would be fine if it was theirs to reclaim; most, however, are not Jewish. Meanwhile, supporters of rival teams respond with chants that make the terraces sound a lot like a Nazi rally.

Then there was the controversy sparked by the Daily Mail’s characterisation of Ed Miliband’s late father, a Marxist academic, as ‘the man who hated Britain’. It was, tweeted John Mann, chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group Against Anti-Semitism, a ‘classical age-old anti-Semitic smear about disloyal Jews’. (‘Hitler should have finished the job,’ a man told my mother in a pub in the 1960s, after she’d finished expounding on her student infatuation with Communism.)

Lastly came the ugly ethnic slurs that comprised the soundtrack to an incompetent videographer’s footage of a Jewish wedding. That particular news story coincided with the world premiere of Religion and Anarchy, a series of plays by Steven Berkoff that kicks off with a two-hander from whose script the video’s dialogue might have been ripped, beginning by insulting the bride’s appearance and not stopping at excusing genocide.

Though halacha (Jewish religious law) rules me a full-on shiksa, I remain, as the saying goes, Jewish enough for Hitler. I didn’t set foot in a synagogue until I was 18, but there was klezmer (traditional Jewish music) and Isaac Bashevis Singer and, yes, chicken soup in my childhood. That that childhood happened to be in rural Norfolk also made a difference. I was born there, but to qualify as a true local, you needed to have at least one cousin in the same school year. And then there was my impossible first name.

All of these details and more made me identify disproportionately with my Jewish heritage in a way that baffled one aged Jewish relative. Prejudice she understood. A defining experience of her own Jewishness was being hauled off her tricycle as a toddler and chased by a pack of older kids eager to let her know she was a ‘dirty Yid’. But someone who wanted in when they’d effectively got out?

Living so far beyond the pale of the Watford Gap, I heard some things. Like the word ‘Jew’ hurled at any pupil who picked up a dropped coin in the corridor. It had an adjectival form, too — ‘I don’t want to be Jewey,’ a classmate’s mother would say. Even in London, people say things around me that I suspect my Jewish friends don’t get to hear so much. Like the friend’s boyfriend whose immediate response to 9/11 was to blame ‘those bloody Israelis’.

Which brings me back to that Edgware couple’s wedding video. It hardly deserves the attention but for the fact that it high-lights a disturbing new trend in British anti-Semitism: it shows just how globalised it has become. It’s a malodorous mishmash of old-style stereotypes combined with a total failure to differentiate between Jews and the state of Israel. For that bigoted videographer and his equally ignorant assistant, the word ‘Yid’ has been supplanted by another: Israeli.

I don’t know anyone who holds Israel above criticism, yet at a certain point anti-Zionism becomes indistinguishable from anti-Semitism. Certainly, the former appears to have lent a spurious new legitimacy to the latter. Reports show a marked increase in anti-Semitism during the 2008 Gaza war, a rise that has continued unabated.

Earlier this month, an EU survey found that one in four European Jews is now afraid to wear a symbol of Jewish identity in public, and 75 per cent of respondents do not report anti-Semitic harassment if they encounter it. When it comes to physical assaults, the figures remain alarming: 67 per cent considered reporting such assaults ineffectual.

While no prejudice is acceptable, history has shown anti-Semitism to be exceptionally pathological, fantastical and deadly. Over the centuries, the blood libel has been shot down by judges, monarchs and popes, and yet still it circulates, peddled as fact in the Arab world and plundered by Western cartoonists every time they need to lampoon Israel.

The sheer irrationality in which anti-Semitic beliefs are anchored can sometimes feel contagious. When a BBC London presenter called me ‘Hezbollah’ live on air for a full 40 minutes, I thought of that scene in Annie Hall, when Woody Allen’s Alvy recounts lunching with a telly exec whose ‘Did you?’ he hears first as ‘didchoo’ and then as ‘Jew’. London, mercifully, is not Hungary or France or Sweden, all places in which it’s becoming increasingly dicey to identify as Jewish. Nevertheless, as Jews, Gentiles and everything in between, we would do wrong to overlook those milder instances of anti-Semitism. Though they seem to occasion nothing more than fleeting social discomfort, they create an atmosphere of altogether less benign tolerance — the kind of tolerance that results in that wedding video or those football chants or intimations of ethnic fifth columnism. The kind of tolerance, in short, that betrays the London that ultimately told Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts to get lost.

The J Word: tackling anti-semitism

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