Everyday Jews E-Book

Keith Kahn-Harris

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 353

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Can Jews be allowed to become boring? With Israel and antisemitism constantly in the news, it seems as though the Jewish people - a fraction of a percentage of the world's population - have become synonymous with controversy, drama and anxiety. But what if there was another side to this persistently interesting people; one that non-Jews often don't know about and Jews rarely talk about? This is the stuff of 'everyday' Jewishness; the capacity to be ordinary, mundane and sometimes just plain dull. Keith Kahn-Harris lifts the lid on this surprising world in a book for Jews and non-Jews alike. Arguing that his people's extraordinary public visibility today is harming their ability to live everyday Jewish lives, he celebrates the mundanity and mediocrity of a people before it vanishes completely.

Leseprobe

To the Jews who serve in the engine room of Jewish life.

To my mother who helped me appreciate their work.

To Deborah, who helped me understand what it is to be a Jewish leader.

And to my children, who helped me see the absurdities.

 

 

Published in the UK and USA in 2025 by Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre, 39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP

email: [email protected]

www.iconbooks.com

ISBN: 978-183773-211-1 ebook: 978-183773-212-8

Text copyright © 2025 Keith Kahn-Harris

The author has asserted his moral rights.

Lyrics from I Have a Voice reproduced by kind permission of Elana Arian.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Typeset by SJmagic DESIGN SERVICES, India

Printed and bound in Great Britain

Contents

About the author

A note on language

Introduction

Chapter One

Baseball in the bloodlands

Chapter Two

The secrets of the Jews

Chapter Three

The Jewification game

Chapter Four

Frailty in numbers

Chapter Five

Punching below our weight

Chapter Six

Living and dying to organise

Chapter Seven

What’s the point of it all?

Chapter Eight

The great Chanukah swindle

Chapter Nine

The Israel chapter

Chapter Ten

Sacred smallness

Chapter Eleven

A small-minded people

Conclusion

Endnotes

About the author

Dr Keith Kahn-Harris is a sociologist and author, based in London. He is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Jewish Policy Research and a Senior Lecturer at Leo Baeck College. He also makes time for pursuing other interests outside the community, including extreme metal music and the warning messages in Kinder Surprise Eggs.

The author of nine books, his most recent publications are Strange Hate: Antisemitism, Racism and the Limits of Diversity, The Babel Message: A Love Letter to Language (Icon) and (co-authored with Rob Stothard) What Does A Jew Look Like? Find out more at kahn-harris.org.

A note on language

I want this book to be read by both Jews and non-Jews. I aim to reveal aspects of Jewish life that Jews rarely think much about and that non-Jews may not know even exist. The challenge I have faced is how to discuss Jewish life without including so much background information that the book starts to look like a textbook that will state the obvious to Jews and appear overly pedagogic to non-Jews.

I have approached this dilemma pragmatically. I do explain some aspects of Jewish life and terminology – hopefully in a concise and efficient way – but not every time. Some elementary aspects of Jewish knowledge are left unexplained or untranslated. We are, after all, living in an online world where the first paragraph of a Wikipedia page will tell you what a common term like ‘Shabbat’ means.

I have previously written two glossaries that might prove useful to readers. My 2012 book Judaism: All That Matters is a short introductory text that explains what Judaism is in a light-hearted way; What Does a Jew Look Like?, my 2022 collaboration with the photographer Rob Stothard, portrays a diverse selection of British Jews and includes explanations for key terms. In 2018 I also wrote a factsheet on British Jewry and its multiple denominations and factions for the Religion Media Centre; most of it still holds up and you can find the link in this footnote.1

While this book makes an argument about the Jewish people today as a whole, in practice much of the book has a more immediate relevance to particular Jewish communities. My involvement in British Jewish communal life means that many of the examples in the book lean towards the United Kingdom. As the two largest Jewish populations in the world, the American and Israeli Jewish populations are discussed too and, to a lesser extent, I consider European examples as well.

A major challenge I have faced in this, and all the other Jewish books I have written, concerns language. Some of the terms we use in English to describe and classify Jews and Jewish stuff are barely fit for purpose. Classifying Jews as a ‘religion’ or a ‘faith’ is too narrow, since not all Jews identify with or practise anything that can be called a religious faith. ‘Ethnicity’ or (worse) ‘race’ does not capture the religious side. While ‘ethno-religion’ is more satisfactory, it’s forbiddingly academic, although I have used it occasionally in this book.

At times in this book, I have wanted to find some way of referring to the totality of Jewish being and doing. ‘Judaism’ is too narrow, so I have used terms like ‘Jewishness’ or ‘Jewish life’, which are rather vague. To refer to the collective mass of Jews I veer between ‘Jewish people’ and ‘Jewish community’. I lean towards referring to us as a people when thinking globally and to us as a community when thinking about Jews in a particular location, such as the UK.

Jews differ from each other in ways even more fundamental than geography. One of the main cleavages within the Jewish people is between Haredi Judaism and other ways of being and doing Jewish. Haredi Jews (the term translates to ‘trembling’, or more loosely ‘fearful’, as in fear of God) are the most ‘visible’ Jews, the men often wearing black hats, black coats and beards, the women dressed modestly with hair covered. They hold to the strictest interpretations of Jewish law and practice. The term ‘Hasidic’ is often used to describe them, but it is unsatisfactory, as Hasidic Jews are only one type of Haredi Jew. Indeed, Haredi Judaism is itself highly diverse, with multiple sects and streams. Broadly speaking, what they have in common is a desire to minimise contact with the secular world, ensure that as many men as possible spend as much of their lives as possible in Torah study, and rebuild their numbers after the Holocaust by having extremely large families.

Much of this book discusses and addresses Jews who are not Haredi; who participate in the contemporary world and do not seek isolation from it. However, Haredi Jews are not the only ones whose religious practice is based on a view of Jewish law as divinely ordained. What are sometimes called ‘modern orthodox’ Jews combine strict adherence to Jewish law with involvement in the non-Jewish world. Under this broad heading, there are also multiple streams. When I refer to ‘orthodox’ Judaism in this book without further qualification, I am referring to the broad spectrum of practice from Haredi to the progressive end of modern orthodoxy.

My own Jewish practice is, broadly speaking, aligned with ‘Reform’ Judaism inasmuch as I am a member of a Reform synagogue. There are confusing terminological issues here too. In some countries, this kind of denomination is termed ‘Liberal’. In the UK, Reform and Liberal Judaism were two distinct movements, but in 2023 they announced their intention to merge. The new name for the merged movement is likely to be ‘Progressive’ Judaism, and this is also used as an umbrella term covering the various movements that see Jewish law as ‘divinely inspired’ but not immutable. Sometimes that includes ‘Masorti’, or ‘Conservative’ Judaism – whose practice leans closer to orthodox Judaism – and sometimes it doesn’t. When I use ‘progressive’ in this book I mean non-orthodox Judaisms. When I use ‘Reform’ in the book, I also mean Liberal Judaism.

‘Non-Jews’ is an awful term. It defines most of humanity as an absence of Jewishness, which is rather overblown. I have resorted to using it for wont of a better alternative. I’ve always hated ‘gentile’ for reasons I can’t quite articulate (maybe it sounds forbiddingly Christian?). The Hebrew term ‘goy’ originally meant something like ‘nation’ but evolved into meaning non-Jewish people. Today, while not a pejorative term in theory, it can sometimes be used that way, so I have avoided it here.

When it comes to writing about Jewish concepts and practices in English, the whole situation is a mess. Hebrew (and sometimes other languages like Yiddish, Ladino and Aramaic) is woven into the fabric of how Jews name what they believe and what they do. The problem is that there is no single universally agreed standard for transliterating Hebrew into English and other languages. Chanukah is Hanukah is Hanoucca is Hanoukka (the latter two found more commonly in French). While I’ve tried to go with the most common usages, that’s not the end of the problems. It can look clumsy to pluralise a Hebrew word with an English ‘s’, so I’ve sometimes gone with Hebrew pluralisations, which involve the suffixes -im and -ot (masculine and feminine). Watch out for those. When quoting texts directly, I have been faithful to the transliteration style they use.

A related problem is when to use the Hebrew term and when to use an English one. There is a weird practice in some books of using non-Hebrew terms even when the Hebrew term might be better known. The best example is when tefillin are described as ‘phylacteries’. You can look both words up if you like. Suffice it to say that I have yet to meet an English speaker who knows what phylacteries are but not what tefillin are.

Consistency is an overrated value. Writing about Jews is a messy business, at least when you do it in English. As this is a book about how Jews and Jewish life are sometimes misrepresented and misunderstood, it makes a curious sort of sense to avoid the pretence that the Jewish people can be summed up in a neat package, tied up with a pretty bow.

Introduction

‘What did you do during in the war, Daddy?’

During the war that began on 7 October 2023, I spent much of the time doing what I usually do, communing with my fellow Jews. In that dark period, as I watched Israelis being killed, tortured and kidnapped, shortly followed by Palestinians dying in their thousands, I continued to live my Jewish life. Here are some of things I did in the days following 7 October:

•I attended staff meetings

•I organised travel and accommodation arrangements for a seminar in Brussels

•I confirmed the tech requirements for a hybrid lecture

•I managed to finally sort out my new pension arrangements.

I’m a professional Jew, working for two British Jewish organisations. I believe in the missions of those organisations; one of which trains rabbis and the other which conducts research on Jewish topics. I hold senior positions and do valuable work. But like all jobs, a big part of what I do is pushing paper and coordinating my work with others.

Amid the horrors of the Gaza war, the mundane routines of professional life were a comfort; they provided a spine to my life at a time when everything seemed in flux. That was true for other Jewish professionals whom I know. It was also true for the myriad volunteers on which Jewish organisations rely. Board meetings took place, fundraising dinners happened, synagogues held services. We may have been worrying about Israel–Palestine and fearful of rising antisemitism, but we kept going with everyday Jewish life.

You’d know very little of this if you were to look at press coverage and social media from the period. What you would see is Jews holding vigils and demonstrations, Jews suffering antisemitic attacks, Jews lobbying governments, Jews supporting and condemning the Israeli military, Jews arguing, Jews emoting and Jews feeling.

Of course, this sort of stuff is news; it makes great copy for newspapers and great content for social media. I wouldn’t expect to see the headline ‘Bar Mitzvah Goes Ahead as Planned’. What was less understandable was how some Jewish newspapers almost completely abandoned coverage of anything other than Israel and antisemitism. In fact, a couple of weeks after the war began, a British rabbi was convicted of downloading child pornography, and it didn’t even make the UK Jewish press for several weeks. If that sort of stuff was ignored, what chance was there for more prosaic stories?

This is a common pattern. This book will argue that the image people have of Jews, as well as the image that Jews have of themselves, is profoundly distorted. For a very long time, certainly for the entirety of Christian history, Jews have been seen in much of the world as important. That importance means that we are, inevitably, interesting. While sometimes this interest can take the form of philosemitic admiration, historically it has more usually provided the foundation of antisemitism. As David Nirenberg argued in his classic history Anti-Judaism, the obsessive interest in Jews has been an obsession with understanding and explaining other phenomena through the Jews.1

The ‘Jewish question’ (or, more darkly, the ‘Jewish problem’) emerged in modern Europe following the start of the process of emancipation of Jews that began towards the end of the eighteenth century. As Jews became citizens and left the ghetto, the question arose of what place they could take in this brave new world. The answers to this question divided Jews from themselves and Jews from non-Jews. The Jewish question becoming a kind of tool to think about much bigger questions. That was the case in France at the turn of the twentieth century, when the nation was divided over the fate of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish army officer who was falsely accused, unfairly convicted and finally, in 1906, exonerated of treason. When French citizens, the intelligentsia in particular, were discussing whether one French-Jewish man had spied for Germany, they were arguing about the nature of French identity, modern society and whether a religious minority could ever integrate within the French nation.

Today, controversies regarding Israel, the Holocaust and antisemitism have become ways of addressing much bigger sets of questions. The arguments triggered around the world by the Gaza war were also arguments about other things. In the UK, the war has catalysed debates about the future of the Labour Party and the BBC. In the US, the war has been fought over the nature of the modern university. Israelis and Palestinians, Jews and Muslims, have sometimes been reduced to bit-part players in a story that is supposed to be about them.

Non-Jewish fascination in us – philosemitic, antisemitic or any other kind – has inflated the extent to which understanding the Jews means understanding the world. As the bloody history of Israeli–Palestinian conflict shows, huge global interest does not necessarily solve problems.

Jews have colluded in this process. It’s hard to see how we could have avoided doing so. When the press comes calling, we have no hesitation in talking about our fears and hopes to a non-Jewish audience. We are outspoken and do not take things lying down. We are very, very interested in ourselves. That doesn’t mean that Jews necessarily see themselves as superior. The sense of significance I am talking about is more solipsistic than chauvinistic. While that solipsism is a function of the freedom we now possess, we are still profoundly damaged by the persistent tendency of ourselves and our friends to render us as a question, a puzzle, a conundrum to be solved.

The problem with how important we have become is that we lose the right to simply exist and go about our everyday business. Our public existence risks becoming our whole existence. Jewish life risks being hollowed out as we lose touch with its mundane basis in the fabric of Jewish life. Non-Jews develop a bizarre picture of who we are – and we do too.

In this book I will explore how we misrepresent ourselves and are misrepresented by others; I will also show how Jews can walk themselves back from this questionable existence. I will suggest that the goal of emancipation should never have been the Nobel Prizes we won, the literature we produced, the dazzling brilliance of our involvement in modern societies, states and cultures. Rather, we should have set ourselves the task of becomingan unremarkable sub-group of humanity. We need to look again at the oft-derided possibilities of a parochial form of Jewish community, an inward-looking identity, a modesty about our place in the world.

Of course, the persistence of antisemitism and endless war in Israel–Palestine are not completely under our control. Our enemies and their fantasies about Jews are part of the reason we are so damned interesting. Our ‘friends’ too will need a lot of persuasion that we are capable of being dull.

What Jews can control is what we value about Jewish existence and how we present what we value to others and to ourselves. Fortunately, there is something valuable in Jewish life that is hidden in plain sight and can provide a different way of understanding who Jews are. It is everyday Jewish life that I seek to raise in status. Everyday life is a matter of doing; a mass of routines, of mundane, taken-for-granted activities and practices. It’s everything from the intricate Jewish laws that govern how orthodox Jews slaughter animals, to the quirks of how secular Jews celebrate Christmas. What I will call the Jewish way of doing is distinctive, but it is not extraordinary.

Everyday Jewish doing can even be boring; that is part of its value. When Jews are boring, they unknowingly rebel against the incessant pressure Jews receive to be significant in the world. Boring things keep the world going; they also lay the groundwork for ostensibly ‘interesting’ things to happen. By valorising the boring, I am valorising the means of Jewish life over its ends; the process and the journey rather than the destination.

The everyday is messy and imperfect. That is how most of us live most of the time, in a constant stream of improvisation without undue introspection. The everyday is not precise and exactly defined. This fuzziness is exemplified by my use of the term in the title of this book. I originally wanted to call it ‘Boring Jews’, but my publisher rightly thought this would lead to misunderstanding. I tried ‘Ordinary Jews’, but it turns out there’s been multiple books published before under this title. I experimented with ‘mundane’ and ‘banal’, but these seemed a little highfalutin. So everyday it is; a necessary compromise in a world where the perfect is the enemy of the good.

I openly acknowledge the irony of writing a book for the general public that attempts, through every writerly trick I know, to beguile the reader into accepting that Jews can be dull. There is a precedent for the ironic veneration of dullness. One of the most wonderful and joyous occasions I have participated in was the Boring Conference, which was held annually in London for a few years pre-pandemic. James Ward, the guy that organised the event, is the author of an excellent book on stationery.2 The conference featured speakers on everything from elevators to roundabouts. I spoke in 2017 about the multilingual warning messages on Kinder Surprise Eggs, an obsession that ultimately turned into a book.3 The conceit of the event was that apparently boring things can be interesting. That doesn’t mean that everyone came away sharing the fascinations of the obsessives who presented. The joy came from witnessing their obsession. So it’s possible to find something boring and compelling at the same time. What ties those twin reactions together is a fascination with people. In contrast, while Jews are people and people are fascinated with Jews, that fascination is often based on projection and the erasure of their everyday existence and all too often turns us into symbols of something else.

Even if this book fails to be interesting, even if you don’t find Jews interestingly boring, I will still make arguments that are worth giving a hearing to. While Jews may be a pretty extreme case study of the dangers of being significant, the denigration of the everyday and the celebration of the extraordinary is a much bigger phenomenon. In a conflict-ridden world, there is a common insecurity that drives us to justify our existence. A nation, or an aspirant nation, must have an extraordinary culture. An ethnic group must be colourful. An individual must be articulate. Just getting on with the stuff of life is rarely ‘enough’. And God help you if you are a trainspotter, literally or figuratively, and revel in the little details that make up the whole …

This book, then, makes the case to my fellow Jews that we should not hide our everyday capacity for dullness, and makes the case to non-Jews that they should let us ‘come out’ as uninteresting. Perhaps this process can console Jews during a time of unbearable significance. My approach won’t stop antisemitism, at least not in the short term. It won’t help heal our irreconcilable differences over Israel. But it might help us survive the turmoil. It will definitely help in cooling the ardour of our supposed allies who are so enthralled by our importance. Maybe in the long term we might become too dull to hate, to love or even to bother to know in the first place.

This is a counter-intuitive approach to Jewish survival. I was brought up, like many other Jews, on stories of heroic Jewish activists, such as Emma Goldman or Rabbi Joshua Heschel. I was taught that we are on this earth to ‘repair the world’ (tikkun olam). This is the version of the ‘chosen people’ that progressive Jews of my era embraced. Obviously, I am not arguing against Jewish activism and doing good in the world. I am suggesting, though, that Jews like me may need to consider the unimaginable – that quietist parochialism, keeping your head down and concentrating on doing everyday Jewish stuff may have a value that we dismissed prematurely. If we aren’t to be swallowed up by our lofty values, we have to recover a sense of the lowly value of just getting through the day.

This book asks – pleads even – non-Jewish readers to let us be boring. I hope that non-Jews who read this book will be persuaded to not just let Jews be uninteresting, but also to revel in their own everyday mundanity. And God knows, in an age of anxiety, of endemic war, pandemics, fury and division, we need to be grounded in something other than existential angst. Too often we respond to a fractious world by latching onto the ‘big issues’, fighting fundamental fights about values and ideologies. In doing so we can lose sight of the multitudinous activity that actually makes us human and makes us social. This is the domain of the minutiae that define the uniqueness of individual lives, cultures and civilisations. It’s a domain that can be experienced as boring even when it is quirky and strange when held up to the light. That is its magic.

As a sociologist, I have been thinking and writing about mundane everydayness and how it intersects with the extraordinary for many years, particularly in my work on metal music and culture.4 However, as a Jew, it is only relatively recently that I have come to embrace the everyday as a Jewish ideal. Doing so has led me to question many of the assumptions I had regarding what Jews should be. I can’t quite believe I have come to this point. It’s been a surprising journey, and it didn’t start on 7 October 2023 but earlier that year, on a Polish baseball field …

Chapter One

Baseball in the bloodlands

A question of survival

How am I going to survive this?

That was the question I asked myself as I boarded the coach at Warsaw Airport. I’d been in a foul mood since my flight landed and I was in a foul mood as I got off the coach at Warsaw Airport a week later. In fact, I was in a foul mood for much of the time I toured the land of my Polish ancestors.

I didn’t expect that I would feel so angry. This was, after all, my chance to get a taste of the good stuff, that addictive morbidity of which Jewish writers’ careers are made. Here I would – finally! – become part of the story. I would walk the streets where my family, the Rojers of Kutno, once lived. I would mourn the ghost of their presence in the traces that remain of Jewish Poland. I would visit the extermination camp where they were murdered. And I would grieve.

But it all felt wrong from the start.

The first warning sign was the convenience store in Warsaw Airport. I’d popped in to buy a sandwich and was distracted by the other Polish products on sale. There was Polish kombucha! When I visit a country I adore exploring convenience store products, particularly strange and wonderful soft drinks. I realised that I was going to enjoy this trip … Until I remembered what I was actually here for. I bought a cheese sandwich and trudged off to find my group at the designated meeting point.

I sat alone on a double seat on the bus, surrounded by excited and nervous Jews (mostly older than me) getting to know each other. I plugged in my earphones. Tonight was the night of the Eurovision Song Contest, the first time I would be separated from my family for the event since my wife and I had children. I tried to join in by listening to the show on streaming radio and texting my kids on WhatsApp. It wasn’t the same. And when I tried to tell a new acquaintance that I was missing Eurovision, she was only interested in how the Israeli entrant would do.

The memorial tour was organised by a group of Jewish descendants of central Poland. Our group included Jews from the UK, USA, Canada, Australia and Israel. Most people were lovely and the organisers had put together a packed itinerary, with the help of local Poles who were keen to commemorate the vanished Jewish presence in their towns.

The people weren’t what annoyed me about the tour. And I couldn’t fault the programme. So what was it that was triggering me? On the trip from the airport I gazed out the window at the Polish branch of IKEA, at road signs, gas stations and adverts, and tried to work out what I was feeling. As the tour progressed, I felt myself yearning for something I couldn’t quite name. I kept being intrigued by shops, the countryside, the forests and rivers, together with the urban fabric of the towns we visited. I kept having to remind myself what I was here to do. On the day we visited Kutno, I tried to focus as we toured what remained of Jewish life – the cemetery the Nazis destroyed, the dilapidated ruins of the ghetto.

Halfway through the week, I took a day off and hired a car. On that beautiful spring day, my heart soared as I drove parallel to the wide Vistula through sun-dappled woods, and onward to the picturesque town of Płock (the hometown of a different branch of my family). I walked around the Jewish district, bought a Polish kombucha and a Polish Kinder Surprise Egg. Then I drove on to Kutno, this time alone.

As I drove into the grounds of the campus on the outskirts of the town, I realised that this was it. This was what I was really here for, even if I couldn’t admit it to anyone else in the group (or to my mother, who had desperately wanted to join the tour but was unable to due to my father’s advancing dementia).

I was here to find out about Polish baseball.

The diamond gleamed in the spring sunshine, awaiting the new season with intense anticipation. The grass was perfectly cropped, the pitcher’s mound neat and tidy, the bases had not a single scuff mark. The stands, soon to be filled with cheering supporters, were silent. There were five diamonds at the Europejskie Centrum Małej Ligii Basebolowej. Two of them were adult-sized, used by the local club Stal Kutno. The rest were smaller, designed to host the European Little League baseball championships every July.

I was given a tour of the complex by Waldemar Szymański, the man who was instrumental in bringing to the town a facility that any American city would be proud of. I wanted to know how baseball came to Kutno, but he also wanted to know how I came to Kutno.

In 2013, I was invited to give a talk at a TEDx event in Krakow. My topic was ‘small worlds’, how little communities are spaces of quiet heroism and meaning. I suggested to the audience that if you were to choose a small world at random, you’d inevitably find interesting stories. I challenged them to find something out about a small world I assumed existed but knew absolutely nothing about – the baseball scene in Poland.

A few weeks later a journalist who had attended my talk got in touch to tell me that Polish baseball was a bigger deal than I’d thought. In fact, he’d written an entire article on the subject, focusing on the European Little League Baseball Centre in Kutno. My interest in small worlds collided with my family history. When I arrived at the baseball centre I suddenly got what it was that I was yearning for, the absence of which was making me furious with frustration.

It was life that was missing. Life in all its mundanity and strange beauty; life as ordinary, routine, yet somehow extraordinary; the sort of life that we only notice when it is absent. I found that life in the form of Waldemar Szymański. An old man with health problems, his passion for what he had built shone through nevertheless. He almost cried with pride as he showed me his legacy.

Baseball has been played in Poland as early as the 1950s. It was brought to Kutno in 1984 by a Cuban, Juan Echevarria Motola, who had married a local woman he’d met when they were at university together in Prague. In the late 1980s, Waldemar fell in love with the game at a demonstration event; too old to play himself, he started umpiring, encouraged his son to take up the sport, and soon became a significant figure in the national baseball association. Aided by the support of the Polish-American Major League player Stan Musial, Waldemar managed to attract the European Little League Centre to the town in the mid-1990s.

Baseball has been good to Waldemar. He travelled the world, attended matches all over the US and became a member of the Polish Olympic Committee. And the world came to Kutno, to his town.

I wasn’t supposed to be here for the living, for baseball stadiums and nice old Polish men. I was supposed to be a temporary sojourner in a Poland that was long gone, where millions of Jews once lived and sometimes thrived. A place from which Jews were ripped with extreme violence; hundreds of years of life destroyed in just six. And while it was not Poles who perpetrated the genocide that wiped out the Polish branches of my family, that didn’t mean Poland was a place of innocence. The lengthy history of Polish antisemitism, particularly the post-war campaigns that saw most of the Jews who had survived the Holocaust leave the country, makes many Jews uneasy with Poles. While the local contacts we met seemed to be enthusiastic about commemorating Jewish life, our group debated their sincerity and possible ulterior motives.

Although some of the Americans in the group were intrigued by the existence of Polish baseball, most of the time Polish everyday life was only a backdrop to the real story, our story, an extraordinary and terrible story, a story that marked us out and made us irreducibly different. I don’t mind being different. In fact, I love my Jewish difference. But on my trip to Poland I felt an almost physical aversion to this kind of difference. While I felt proud and honoured to be the first family member to return to Kutno in order to remember those who had been murdered, I resented my new identity as ‘Holocaust-obsessed Jew coming back to the old country’. Sometimes I felt like what has been termed a ‘stuffed Jew’, a living museum exhibit, visiting a place of lifeless relics.1

Being part of the story

As a writer, it would be quite helpful if I was that kind of Jew. I am acutely aware that the Holocaust is hot stuff. It is the font of an endless torrent of stories: of murder, of suffering, of resilience and escape. Jews and non-Jews alike are drawn to the life stories of Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, Anne Frank and to any number of other accounts.

I had always assumed that I could never be part of that story. My grandparents were all the children or grandchildren of those who got out of Poland before the First World War. I was brought up knowing that some of my distant ancestors never made it out and were never heard from again. In retirement, my mother started to fill in the blanks of our family history. In the process she discovered the group who were to organise the memorial tour I participated in.

The more I found out about my ancestors, the more I became aware of what we would never know. When I visited the Polish addresses we had managed to find, at which family members had at some point lived, I felt a certain sense of satisfaction, but it didn’t make them come to life. I don’t have enough to build a story out of. My Polish family lived and were murdered. That’s it. I will never get to write a Holocaust book about my family. On the trip I felt an unsettling mix of anger and disappointment at my own narcissism, as well as at the Holocaust obsessions of Jews and non-Jews alike.

When I returned to London, I published an article that attempted to work through what I had experienced on the Poland trip (self-censoring the anger and thwarted writerly ambition).2 I talked about the final place we visited, the extermination camp at Chełmno where my ancestors were likely murdered. The disturbing emptiness of the forest clearing in which it was situated, the lack of bodies, the lack of knowledge, seemed to represent a kind of void, a profound lack that we desperately seek to fill with stories. In my article I admitted that, while I certainly didn’t feel nothing, I was very much aware that I had no one to mourn – just names of ancestors about whose everyday lives we know nothing. I shared the article with the group and, while most of them seemed to appreciate what I was trying to say, one of the organisers of the trip emailed me as follows:

When I was in ‘our towns’ I sensed the vibrant and difficult life our ancestors lived. When I was in Chełmno, I felt the terror of a five year old child hanging to his mother’s hand who wanted to live but had run out of options.

The extraordinary presumption – to know what a five-year-old about to be gassed might feel – seemed to me to be a way of filling the nothingness with something. More darkly, it’s also an example of how sorrow can become a kind of currency, a claim to some kind of status as mourner.

Refusing to be a dead Jew

There are incentives for Jews and non-Jews to focus on the negative aspects of Jewish experience. I see this in my professional life all the time. One of my jobs is to run the European Jewish Research Archive, an online repository of social research on European Jewish populations.3 Over the years, the proportion of research publications devoted to contemporary antisemitism, or to Holocaust memorialisation, has risen inexorably; in 2022 such publications constituted half of the total.4 There are few incentives to research European Jewish life. Funding is much more accessible for those who wish to research dead Jews and threatened Jews.

Look, I love to settle down with a good book about the Holocaust as much as the next person. Holocaust stories are endlessly alluring, not despite their horror, but because of it. They are stories about life pushed to the limit and beyond, about the very boundaries of what human beings are capable of inflicting and enduring.

I have always refused to place the genocide of my people at the heart of my Jewish identity. Of course, I do still have some sympathy with the argument that choosing to identify as Jewish is a retrospective slap in the face to the Jew-haters, Nazis most of all. This is what the rabbi and philosopher Emil Fackenheim called the ‘614th commandment’ (there are 613 in the Torah), to ‘not hand Hitler a posthumous victory’.5 Stubborn defiance aside, there are so many good things about Jewish life, in all its diversity, that placing the Holocaust at the centre of Jewish identity seems tantamount to treating the good stuff as unimportant. The same goes for antisemitism. While Jews need to understand and fight antisemitism, we should be doing so in order to make it easier, safer and less stressful to live distinctive Jewish lives. Those of us who write about contemporary antisemitism should be doing so with the aspiration that, in the future, antisemitism will only be of interest to historians.

The problem is that some Jews and non-Jews are so fixated on antisemitism and the Holocaust that they come across as uninterested in Jewish life. That’s understandable – although by no means always the case – for those who directly experienced the Holocaust, or whose parents, grandparents or other close relations did. What’s the excuse of non-Jews who take on Holocaust remembrance or fighting antisemitism as their cause, yet are apathetic or ignorant of other aspects of Jewish existence?

It’s all too easy to treat Jews as if they are Charlie Brown, living under a permanent grey cloud. Jews do it too. The US writer Dara Horn’s 2021 book People Love Dead Jews skewered the ways in which a fascination with Jewish suffering is often combined with limited respect or understanding for actually existing Jews.6 The trouble is that Horn herself doesn’t seem to escape the trap. Her book is serious, angry and (with the exception of the final chapter in which she extols study of the Talmud) treats Jews as labouring under the weight of unbearable grief and fear. But not everyone is as crushingly serious as Horn is. Sometimes Jewishness is worn lightly. It’s as though she cannot see the texture of Jewish life that is hiding in plain sight. Ironically, Horn’s book is popular because she ultimately feeds into the demand for Jews to be weighty and angsty. People love dead Jews because we let them.

The anger I experienced in Poland was the culmination of years of frustration. During the period when Jeremy Corbyn led the British Labour Party, I was in demand as a writer who could help people understand the antisemitism controversy that swirled around him. I wrote many articles for the Guardian and other newspapers; I wrote a book, Strange Hate: Antisemitism, Racism and the Limits of Diversity,that analysed why antisemitism in the left is so controversial; I spoke to Jewish and non-Jewish audiences about what was going on. All this was good for my career, but in the end I became infuriated by the precipitous gap between the interest shown in antisemitism and the apathy towards other aspects of Jewish existence. Sadly, Jews were as responsible for that gap as non-Jews.

By the time I got to Poland I had had just about enough of negative Jewish identities. I resented being forced to inhabit a Jewish identity that was removed from everyday existence. It was only in my visit to the baseball centre that I felt that I was here, now. For most of the trip I felt I had been forced into inhabiting a negative Jewish space that was completely removed from our actual surroundings. That’s often how Jews have lived, separated by force from the rest of society. But I’m a Jew from a place and time where it is possible to see no contradiction between living Jewishly in all its fullness and living where I happened to be. It’s true that it’s easier for me than others. I grew up in the UK at a time when antisemitism was at a tolerable level. I am not a visibly orthodox Jew so I can easily ‘pass’ wherever I want. I am Jewish everywhere, and also other things too. In Poland I got a glimpse of a Jewishness removed from its environment and I did not like it. While this has helped me empathise with generations of Jews who were similarly set apart in antisemitic societies, this time we had set ourselves apart voluntarily.

In Jewish tradition, we are supposed to be separate from others, at least to some degree. The closest translation of ‘holy’ in Hebrew is kodesh,but its sense is very different; it implies being set apart, removed, dedicated to the divine. The ‘chosenness’ of the chosen people implies not so much selected to be privileged, exulted and better than anyone else, more that we are chosen to receive the yoke of rigorous responsibility to keep the arduous instructions of the divine. What can sound like Jewish supremacy is, in fact, a burden. While this burden is not necessarily of the Charlie Brown variety, it’s easy to see how it can become so.

How do we reconcile the desire that Jews have for separateness with our desire not to be hated for it? How do we mourn the suffering of Jews without becoming defined by that suffering? How can a Jew like me go to mourn his ancestors without feeling like they are removed from the world? And how can we get both Jews and non-Jews to show more interest in the manifold other dimensions of Jewishness?

Even asking such questions can reproduce the problem. If we see Jewishness as a problem to be addressed through angst-ridden analysis, we can simply replace one kind of obsessive focus on Jews with another.

There is a way out: To acknowledge that there is a bigger issue at work here. One that impacts on all of us to some degree, Jewish or not …

The extraordinary and the everyday

Like those dinosaurs who could only see their prey when it was in motion, human beings are programmed to look for the extraordinary, for some kind of change against the background foliage. That capacity to focus on that which stands out allows us to ‘see’ the differences between individual humans and groups of humans. While to see difference doesn’t necessarily mean hating that difference, it’s a short step from finding the extraordinary alluring to finding the extraordinary disgusting.

The allure of difference also affects how we see ourselves. That which is not in motion, the solid stuff of life, is often taken for granted, invisible. It’s rarely what humans take pride in. Rather, as individuals and groups we exult in our extraordinariness.