Over the past couple of decades, the Jewish community in Britain has been enjoying a cultural renaissance. Yet despite this—indeed perhaps because of this—many prominent Jewish leaders and institutions now claim that Anglo-Jewry is in unprecedented danger.
The British Jewish community's cultural lethargy used to estrange many of its leading intellectuals. As Stephen Brook wrote in The Club, his perceptive study of British Jewry in 1989: "scan the cultural pages of the Jewish Chronicle and weep." But since the early 1990s there has been a concerted attempt, both within the mainstream institutions of Anglo-Jewry and at its more radical fringes, to change this. Jewish Book Week, which concluded on 2nd March 2009, drew in over 5,000 people this year, rivaling Cheltenham and Hay. The new Jewish Community Centre for London puts on a consistently exciting and often quirky programme of events; the annual Limmud conference (Limmud.org) brings together over 2,000 Jews for a festival of Jewish learning. There's been a huge expansion in Jewish day schools which, even if you disapprove of faith schooling, cannot but be seen as evidence of a community willing to invest vast sums in its educational future. And on the other end of this ever widening spectrum, there's the iconoclastic collective, Jewdas (jewdas.org), which puts on events in squats that mix radical Jewish learning and wild klezmer-DJing, and whose website viciously lampoons the Jewish great and good.
But this cultural flowering, typically a sign of a self-confident and energetic community, has run in tandem with a vocal campaign to convince the public that Britain's Jews are under threat as never before. British Jewish community leaders, from Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks to novelist Howard Jacobson, have repeatedly and publicly expressed their alarm at what Sacks called in 2006 "a tsunami of anti-semitism." Since the start of the second Palestinian intifada in autumn 2000, they claim, anti-Jewish feeling in Britain has visibly grown; disproportionate criticism of Israel, they say, masks a resurgence of Jew-hatred, manifested in everything from violent attacks against Jews by radical Islamists to campaigns to boycott Israel from the left.
While figures from the Community Security Trust show there has been a rise in attacks on Jews in Britain in recent years, there are deep divisions within the Jewish community about the causes—and indeed the gravity—of this. Critics of Israel within the Jewish community—from organisations like Independent Jewish Voices and Jews for Justice for Palestinians—say that accusations of anti-semitism are used to stifle debate about Israel. In turn, many Jewish leaders accuse such critics of legitimatising anti-semitism and some shriller Jewish voices—Melanie Philips being the best example—argue that the very survival of the Jewish community in the UK is imperilled.
This argument is a fierce and often circular one. But in the midst of it, the reality somehow gets lost: Jews become victims or perpetrators, the focus of debate but not living, breathing, individuals.
On the one hand, the Jewish community has never been so dynamic; on the other, many Jews feel under threat and divisions over Israel within the Jewish community can create a deeply poisonous atmosphere. Yet both of these things indicate something positive: that the Jewish community that has finally adapted to British multiculturalism. Whereas once British Jews kept their heads down, their leaders exhorting them to be good citizens first and foremost ("Englishmen of the Mosaic faith"), since the early 1990s there has been less reticence about being publicly, proudly Jewish. This confidence had lead to many things; including great cultural vitality, but also to a greater willingness to openly articulate feelings of persecution. It has also meant an increasing refusal to toe the line by those who dissent from the communal leadership. Surely this is healthy at least.
What the Jewish community now needs is to internalise the principle of British multiculturalism; to accommodate—indeed, celebrate—the differences that have opened up in this new more self-confident era. Jews and non-Jews alike must recognise the diversity of today's Anglo-Jewry. The excitement generated by Jewish Book Week is as much a part of the story of the British Jewish community as are the endless debates about Israel and anti-semitism.
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A Jewish awakening
Jews in Britain have never been more culturally confident or politically diverse. Why, then, are so many of their leaders scared?
March 1, 2009
