Yiddishkeit/
Jewish stuff

Marmite on my matzoh

Yes, one can be simultaneously English and Jewish -- who'd have believed it? Not everyone.

My accent marks me as a Brit to Americans (although the English aren't so sure). To many, that summons up a vision of extremely polite white people drinking tea with the Queen. Or perhaps Dick Van Dyke as that happy-go-lucky London chimney sweep: "Owy sey Mary Powppins..." Nothing Jewish there, of course. And so occasionally when the so-you's-a-Jew? question has come up I've been subtly tested to verify my credentials. One fellow even asked me "Voz iz ir nomen yunger?" (What's your name, lad?) on the incorrect assumption that only Jews understand Yiddish. Now, my Yiddish is just about non-existant but I was able to stumble out "Mayn Englisher nomyn oder mayn Yuddish?" (Do you mean my English name or my Jewish one?). In the anthropology field we call it social boundary maintenance. Interesting, eh?

My local shul is Congregation Shomrei Torah in Santa Rosa, California. It's a friendly place and they are tolerant of my Ashkenazi Hebrew, which I cleverly use to cover up mistakes when layning. "Oh no, I didn't get it wrong. That's just how the word's pronounced." Hmmm. As a member of the Chevra Kadisha of Sonoma County, I act as a shomer fairly regularly for kavod hamet. Dick Newman z"l and I were co-founders of the local chapter of Hillel, the Jewish student organization. I served on the Board from 1999 to 2015.

Some thoughts about "The Jew" in literature

Narrating 19th- and early 20th-century novels (see my audio recordings page) has brought me face to face with historic attitudes toward Jews. And it's not very pretty.

As an anthropologist I know that, at the time, ethnicity and "race" were widely considered fixed genetic qualities. A century ago in mainstream British society, to be called "white" (as in, "you're a real white man") was the highest compliment to one's character and integrity. The Jew, of course, was not white (in spite of what Whoopi Goldberg once claimed). The Jew's shrewdness was always selfish. Resentful of his marginal status in society, The Jew was clannish and self-serving with that debased cunning form of cleverness. The Jew could cast off his ancestral religion but could not help but retain his in-born proclivities.

The Jew was a useful tool for fiction writers. The very word Jew summoned up a raft of stereotyped images. When a minor character in THE THIRTY-NINE STEPS raves about an international Jewish conspiracy, author John Buchan knew that his readers in 1915 were comfortable with the image. It was an easy way to establish atmosphere. On the flip side, George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (1876) and Benjamin Farjeon's Aaron Cohen (1895) almost float above the ground in their excess of virtue. The result of the latter was a series of novels by, for example, Israel Zangwill and Amy Levy, who wanted to depict Anglo-Jewish life warts and all. This was not popular with the conservative establishment, which condemned Levy's REUBEN SACHS (1888) as a shonda fur die goyim.

In contrast to these thoroughly Anglicized authors were the Eastern European-born Jews who wrote in Yiddish about life in the Pale of Settlement. Sholem-Aleichem's 1921 stories JEWISH CHILDREN (יידיש קינדער) is full of funny, sometimes deeply disturbing tales of a tight-knit, highly controlled society that is a sure antidote to latter-day sentimentality about life in the shtetl.