‘British Jews have always admired America’s capacity for promoting Jewish flourishing.’ (Credit: J.G. Fox)
If you were searching for a metaphor for the state of the Jews, you could do a lot worse than pickles. A few years ago Seth Rogen composed a paean to Ellis Island Yiddishkeit, An American Pickle, following a fresh-off-the-boat pickle vendor from the 1910s who wakes up in modern-day Brooklyn. Although there is some mention of pogroms, overall it is an upbeat assessment of the diaspora experience. Such arguments about Jewish history, as a slew of recent books are keen to exploit, are increasingly appealing to a cohort of young, American, “anti-Zionist” Jews. Even diaspora Jews who feel a stronger connection to Israel are, especially in the wake of recent Israeli elections, increasingly dispirited with the direction of the country. It is becoming natural to wonder whether New York, not Palestine, was the promised land all along.
As such, while promoting An American Pickle, Rogen remarked that the State of Israel “makes no sense”. He despaired that, “as a Jewish person, I was fed a huge amount of lies about Israel my entire life”. But he was also fed pickles: proper, New York, dill-and-garlic, half-sour, girthy, lacto-fermented pickles. Not the small, wrinkly, saltier-than-the-Dead-Sea variety you get in Israel, locked up in austere metal cans. No, it is in these old-world, Pale of Settlement pickles, the sort you’d find in a good pastrami on rye or speckling lumpy chopped liver, that Rogen invests his Jewishness. It is to this pickle that he writes his Jewish love-letter.
He is not the only one. The American actress Hannah Einbinder caused a stir when she said “Free Palestine” at the Emmy Awards last year. Her speech rapidly became a symbol of a much-touted rupture between American Jews and Israel, or else the pro-Israel old guard in America, who still think wistfully about their years on kibbutz in the Sixties, and the younger “anti-Zionist” whippersnappers, for whom Israel is an irrelevance at best and a painful embarrassment at worst. Einbinder is adamant that her activism, including her rejection of “liberal Zionism”, is rooted in her Jewish values and upbringing. “Something actually Jewish to cleanse the stories,” she captioned a picture on Instagram of a handsome platter of pickles: pickles, you see, are actually Jewish, while Zionism is not. “Lotta Zionists sayin im not Jewish,” she posted on a different occasion in gratingly Zoomer style; “well then explain why im drinking electrolytes out of a pickle jar ive been reusing for half a year!”
Now consider, against this vibrant, self-confident culture, the pickle of Anglo-Jewry. Our haimisha cucumbers, delicious though they are, wither at the comparison. They sexed her up, Mrs Elswood, a few years ago; and in so doing, I am sorry to say, they made her appear less Jewish. The gherkins are drenched in vinegar instead of being allowed to ferment in their own fluids: it is like making champagne with a SodaStream. There is no fresh, citrusy dill in those glass jars. There are only indeterminate “flavourings”, and a handful of mustard seeds wafting around pointlessly like dust caught in the light.
It is a perfect symbol of Anglo-Jewry. There is no nostalgia in Britain for the early-20th-century pickle vendor, and still less for the shtetl; there is no great longing for the old times. It is no accident that the “Els” in “Mrs Elswood” comes from Elstree, the apogee of Jewish embourgeoisement. Elstree is a leafy, affluent, commuter-belt suburb, only a 25-minute train ride from St Pancras, but tucked away safely in the Green Belt, out of Sadiq Khan’s maw. Nothing interesting has ever happened there: even Elstree Studios, where bits of Star Wars and the music video for “Bohemian Rhapsody” were filmed, is really in Borehamwood. Elstree suits the purposes of a parochial, inward-looking community; 18% of all working Jews in Britain work professionally for a Jewish organisation, and there’s no shortage of Jewish organisations nearby. It would be quite pleasant, I think, to begin one’s life at Barnet Hospital and end it at Bushey Cemetery; to be always tethered to this stolid patch of the world, where London meets Hertfordshire, except maybe for three enervating years studying politics at Nottingham. Britain gave its Jews all the good parts of shtetl life — the gossip, the match-making, the comforts and excitements of community — without any of the persecution and penury. It gave the Jews Elstree, and the Jews are grateful.
“I like Britain”, says Anglo-Jewry’s Nestor, Lord Finkelstein, “and its suburbs and its boring democracy and its middle class gentility and its small ideas”. What makes Britain a great place for Jews is its “bourgeois complacency”. The heartbreak of the recent antisemitic attacks in Heaton Park and Golders Green and the wider rise in hate crimes is compounded by the sense that this complacency is no longer possible. Jewish suburbia will endure, but it will have to be more vigilant, more suspicious of the outside world.
England’s bourgeois life has always appealed to Jewish immigrants. The great historian of Tudor England, Geoffrey Elton, born Gottfried Ehrenberg in Twenties Germany, dedicated his last book to The English, whose bourgeois ways had convinced him that he “had arrived in the country in which I ought to have been born”. Tom Stoppard, born Tomáš Sträussler, did not, like so many of his fellow writers and artists, go berserk in the summer of 1968: “I was too old, too self-conscious, too monogamous, too frightened of drugs, too much in love with England, and too hung up to let it all hang out.”
It is interesting that, where Anglo-Jewry does produce genius, it tends not to be avant garde. Elton was an old-fashioned historian, and Stoppard quite an old-fashioned playwright. Both men had a soft spot for Thatcher, whose own affection for British Jews is well known: many Jews numbered among her constituents in Finchley and her colleagues in cabinet. Elstree’s seat is Conservative and always has been. There have been Jewish socialists in Britain too, of course: Isaac Deutscher, Eric Hobsbawm, Ralph Miliband. But as Britain’s Jews shifted Rightwards, they became peripheral to the community. In 2015, only 15% of British Jews wanted to make Ralph’s son Ed Prime Minister, only slightly more than would vote for Jeremy Corbyn a couple of years later. (He is probably even less popular among British Jews today, in light of his policies as Foreign Secretary.) The paradigmatic Jewish public intellectuals of this era were rather men like Keith Joseph and Nigel Lawson, nobody much to the Left of Isaiah Berlin. The historian William Rubinstein (no relation) wrote in his 1982 book, The Left, the Right and the Jews, that, once British Jews had entered the upper-middle class, “the old Leftist enthusiasms of the shtetl are abandoned for the warm security of the centre Right”.
Anglo-Jewry flourishes in the warm security of the suburbs, and it flourishes in a suburban kind of way. The British rabbi Lionel Blue once quipped that “The Jews are just like everyone else, only more so”. Among British Jews there is a high degree of characteristically British social anxiety, tending towards conformism. This probably is not conducive to creativity and artistic experiment. Except, perhaps, for Howard Jacobson, British letters lack a Philip Roth or a Norman Mailer. Roth himself seemed to grasp why. His alter ego in Deception complains about the English character of England’s Jews. England was missing something that he was accustomed to in New York: “Jews with force…, Jews with appetite. Jews without shame. Complaining Jews who get under your skin. Brash Jews who eat with their elbows on the table. Unaccommodating Jews, full of anger, insult, argument, and impudence.” He finishes on that familiar American note: “New York’s the real obstreperous Zion, whether Ariel Sharon knows it or not.”
It is hardly surprising, therefore, that when British Jews chafe against this bourgeois conformism — or when they express disdain, in particular, for its attachments to Israel — they are quick to look to obstreperous America. If the Jews are just like everyone else, only more so, and the British middle classes on the whole are “America-brained”, then British Jews are the most America-brained Britons of all.
In his much-discussed polemic Jews Don’t Count, David Baddiel testily declares that he does not care about Israel “more than any other country, and to assume I do is racist… my Jewish identity is about Groucho Marx, and Larry David, and Sarah Silverman, and Philip Roth, and Seinfeld, and Saul Bellow, and pickled herring, and Passovers in Cricklewood in 1973, and my mother being a refugee from the Nazis, and wearing a yarmulke at my Jewish primary school…” None of these things, he concludes this rant, “has anything to do with a Middle Eastern country three thousand miles away”.
Most of the things on Baddiel’s list — six, by my count — do, however, have something to do with a North American country 3,500 miles away. For those British Jews who wish to forego Jerusalem, New York is the only possible alternative. It’s an increasingly attractive proposition. However Right-wing British Jews may be, four in five dislike Benjamin Netanyahu; looking only at Israel’s demographics, the trends that Netanyahu embodies are only going to get stronger. Nine out of every 10 Jews in the world live either in America or in Israel. The rest of us, the one in 10 Jews who don’t live either in America or Israel, simply choose which of those poles to look to.
If Netanyahu can be said to represent one pole, then perhaps Larry David, who appears twice in Baddiel’s list, represents the other. One thought kept coming to me while reading Blake J. Harris’s weighty new tome, Emperor of Nothing: The Making of Larry David: there could be no Larry David in Britain. Perhaps that is why British Jewish comedians like David Baddiel admire him so much. Bourgeois conformity is not kind to “social assassins”. Elstree’s no place for eccentrics.
The biography doesn’t dwell much on David’s Jewishness, but it doesn’t have to: it is simply self-evident that David is a product of a quintessentially Jewish world. Before he made his name with Seinfeld and then Curb Your Enthusiasm, David was best known to the American public for playing an Orthodox rabbi on the sketch show Fridays in a fictional low-budget TV show called Matzoi!. The premise is that he is some kind of kung fu master, who shouts out “Oi!” in place of “Eee-ya!”; he is protecting the world from a sinister group called “Global Organisation of Young Irrational Maniacs” (GOYIM).
Curb (much more than Seinfeld) is chock-full of Jewishness. Its soundtrack is infused with klezmer. Plotlines often involve Passover seders, Friday Night Dinners, shivas, minyans, and bat mitzvahs. There is lots about the Holocaust: the classic “Survivor Fight”, or the scene where Larry steals a pair of shoes from an exhibition at the Holocaust Museum.
And yet what is striking about Larry David’s Jewishness, in Harris’s biography as much as in Curb, is the conspicuous absence of Israel. Only one episode of Curb features Israel prominently, “Palestinian Chicken”, and it ends with Larry stuck in the middle between a pro-Israel crowd on the one side and an anti-Israel side on the other. He, like Baddiel, is basically indifferent to this “Middle Eastern country three thousand miles away”. David is not anti-Israel, by any means: he recently irritated some of his fans by mocking the anti-Israel politics of the DSA. But it seems that Israel does not play an especially significant role in his Jewish identity.
Now compare him with the British Jewish comedian Sacha Baron Cohen — at whose birthday party (one learns from the new biography) David was introduced to his now-wife. Here Israel is inescapable. Often, while playing his characters, Baron Cohen slips into Hebrew. He also has an enduring fascination with the Mossad, exhibited in The Spy (2019) and his character Col. Erran Morad, now starring in the new Ali G film. Larry David’s Jewishness is American and diasporic. Baron Cohen, on the other hand, looks to Israel.
That is quite typical of British Jews. There is, in Britain, extremely little home-grown Jewish “anti-Zionism” to speak of. While 37% of American Jews identify themselves as Zionist, 66% of British Jews do. Even among young British Jews “anti-Zionism” is practically non-existent: one is far more likely, in my experience, to be regaled with tales about “antisemitism on campus” than to encounter young Jews saying words like “genocide”, “apartheid”, or “Ben Gvir”. It is telling that the main Jewish spokesperson at the now-proscribed Palestine Action, Max Geller, is American.
The independence and assertiveness of America’s Jewish community is something that Jews in Britain have historically envied. British Jews may cling to the warm security of its boring suburbia, but they have also always admired America’s capacity for promoting Jewish flourishing. It was a British Jew, Israel Zangwill, who coined the term “melting pot” to refer to American multiculturalism. “Ah, Vera”, says a character in his 1908 play of the same name, “what is the glory of Rome and Jerusalem where all nations and races come to worship and look back, compared with the glory of America, where all races and nations come to labour and look forward!”
But even in America, pickles and “anti-Zionism” won’t be enough. There are pickles aplenty in Curb Your Enthusiasm — there is even “the pickle boy” — but there are not only pickles. Larry David’s Jewishness draws from deeper sources. It helps that he is old enough to remember the old-timey “Noo Yawk” Yiddishkeit in its pomp. It is not clear that younger American Jews have inherited much of this, nor that their attachment to the superficial trappings of Jewish culture, abstracted to such a degree that it could be practically any Eastern European immigrant culture, can sustain a community indefinitely. America’s Left-wing Jews also face a steep demographic decline. Zangwill envied America for “looking forward”, but the “anti-Zionist” American Jews today seem to prefer looking back: at the shtetl, the Bund, the Yiddish-speaking pickle man. The Jewish community in Britain today is frightened, its suburbs most of all, and less sure of itself than usual. But it is, in its humdrum way, resilient and durable.
