Someone brought chicken schnitzel. A few too many brought loaves of challah. And someone — thrillingly — brought a gigantic bowl of pickles. There was a table of kosher wine, but by the end of the evening barely a bottle had been touched. That’s how you know you’re at a Jewish party: when everyone is way more interested in the food than the booze. Outside, the weather felt bleak and the future at best uncertain. But inside, at our first neighbourhood Shabbat, there was only warmth and a reassuring collective certainty of purpose: to get the big piece of roast chicken.
This party, which I went to on Friday night, did not have promising beginnings. Let’s just say Truman Capote probably wasn’t inspired to hold his famous Black and White Ball this way. It all started about two weeks ago when a Jewish journalist, Ami Kaufman, filmed a woman on a bridge tearing down posters of the Israelis kidnapped by Hamas. Nothing unusual in that these days, of course. In fact, less than a month ago I wrote here about people tearing posters off that same bridge, near my home in north London, after a woman — a different one — was photographed doing exactly that.
But there was something new about this latest video: when Kaufman asked the woman why she was doing this, she didn’t ignore him, as poster protesters usually do when confronted. Instead she snapped that she did this to “clean the street, clean this shit. When Kaufman told her the kidnapped Israelis were innocent, she screamed, “No, they’re not!”
My area of London isn’t especially Jewish, but when I saw Kaufman’s video, which he posted on the social media site everyone knows as Twitter, I sent it to the few — two — Jewish families I know in the neighbourhood. I then fried my eyeballs watching the tweeted responses to Kaufman’s video: “The posters are Zionist propaganda to justify genocide”, “Israel is reaping what it sowed”, so on and so on. As I lay in the dark and thought about my children, asleep in our home not far from that bridge, I felt something I hadn’t really felt before: I felt scared.
Look, I know that a lot of people feel that Jews go on about antisemitism and wheel out the H-word (take a guess) to justify, well, anything. Oh those Jews, they compare every criticism of Israel to Auschwitz. Those hysterical drama queens! I thought like this myself when I was a know-nothing teenager and I’d listen to my older relatives divide up the world between those who protected the Jews during the Second World War and those who didn’t. But those of us who grew up hearing stories from our grandparents about how their neighbours slowly and then suddenly turned against them in Poland, or France, or Germany, or Austria, or anywhere, tend to have a heightened sensitivity about the possibility of history repeating itself.
Anzeige
I tell myself not to catastrophise. Of Labour’s front bench, only Peter Kyle was at last weekend’s march against antisemitism in London. Will any of them be at today’s march for the Israeli women who were sexually assaulted on October 7? And how to react when a former diplomat tells a national newspaper that Ireland can support Palestine because of “the lack of influence” — as the newspaper put it — Jews have there, compared to in Britain and France. “It’s given us a freer hand to take what we consider a more principled position,” the diplomat told the newspaper two weeks ago. (The newspaper removed this quote after an outcry.) Perhaps that lack of dodgy Jewish influence is also why Ireland stayed determinedly neutral during the Second World War, although Eamon de Valera, the prime minister, somewhat un-neutrally expressed official condolences when Hitler killed himself and he also claimed that the reports of torture and murder in Bergen-Belsen’s concentration camp were just propaganda. Was that the “more principled position”?
One last question: at what point does “getting hysterical” become “being clear-eyed”? That’s what I couldn’t figure out that night as I lay in bed and watched Kaufman’s video again and again.
The next morning, I considered my options: I could be scared into hiding myself, as one of my neighbours had done, removing her mezuzah from her front door frame. I could spend the day inside tweeting furiously, or as I call it, engaging in self-harm. I did neither. Instead, a handful of my Jewish neighbours and I set up a WhatsApp group. A few of us invited a few more and — oy vay — suddenly there were several dozen of us. I worried that people would use the group to swap links to terrifying news stories, as happens in so many WhatsApp groups these days. But there has been none of that: it has been all kvelling (Yiddish for rejoicing) and no kvetching (complaining.) It is probably my most joyful WhatsApp group, all Yiddish puns and challah jokes, and happiness that we have made something so delightful out of something so awful, as is the Jewish way. Instead of being silent and fearful, we’re doing what Jews have been doing for centuries: debating which is the best local bagel place.
At the Shabbat party, a cheerful rabbi did the blessings while small boys in yarmulkes and Santa Claus jumpers ran around the room. There were more questions about which dishes were gluten-free than which were kosher. You bet we’re assimilated but we’ll always be Jewish, and on Friday night, it felt, once again, like only a blessing. “Shall we do this again on Thursday for the first night of Hanukkah?” one person asked. Another replied: “I’ll bring the schnitzel.”
This article was amended on December 3, 2023, to take account of the following correction: we wrongly said Labour frontbenchers were absent from the march against antisemitism in London. It was attended by the shadow science minister, Peter Kyle.
