Gross!

This is one of those handwringing articles (by a Miriam Gross in the Spectator - registration required) about how hard it is to be Jewish these days. See how she starts:

The fact that I am Jewish has always mystified me. It bears no relation to anything else in my life — not to the way I was brought up, not to religion since I am agnostic, nor to any community in which I have lived.

Her parents (German/Russian) were assimilationists in that they thought Jews should actively assimilate. But then:

Despite these views my parents both emigrated to Palestine in the 1930s (they weren’t married at the time), very soon after the Nazis started introducing anti-Jewish legislation. They did this in a spirit of defiance and adventure — they were in their twenties — but also as a precaution: Palestine might have become the only place where Jews could live in safety. Their Jewishness, like that of so many German Jews, was in a sense ‘thrust upon them’ by anti-Semitism.

Now that last sentence is true. Even Christians with Jewish roots had to wear the yellow star in church. The perplexing thing about going to Palestine "in a spirit of defiance" is who were they defying? Hitler found zionism quite useful in the 1930s. The German Zionist Federation had signed an agreement with him whereby Jews going to Palestine could take more belongings with them than those who went elsewhere. Leaving Germany, particularly for Palestine, was certainly understandable, but it was hardly an act of defiance. Then she tells us about herself:

I learnt nothing about Judaism or about Jewish traditions and culture at school, any more than I did from my parents. I never once took part in a Jewish festival nor did I ever go into a synagogue.

So it is not surprising that, for most of my life, I have had almost no sense of Jewish identity. I feel much more English than Jewish. This must be true of hundreds of Jews with similar backgrounds.

She then discusses Jews with regard to each other:

Jews are as different from one another as non-Jews....

What, for example, do Einstein and Lauren Bacall have in common? Or Kafka and Michael Howard, or Primo Levi and Philip Green, or the Chief Rabbi and Ruby Wax? Or, for that matter, an Algerian Jewish farmer and a New York psychoanalyst? Nothing. Or rather, only one thing: Hitler would transport them all to a concentration camp.

Now I could really warm to this theme. And it gets better:

The question of whether there is such a thing as a Jewish race has been endlessly debated, but race has always seemed to me a meaningless concept when applied to people whose physical appearances range from the swarthily Semitic to the blondly Danish and whose moral, social and intellectual characteristics cover the whole gamut of human behaviour.

But then it starts to deteriorate:

just as my parents were forced by the Nazis to focus on their Jewishness, so the recent resurgence of anti-Semitism in many parts of the world has made me much more conscious of being a Jew. Not that I have ever personally encountered anti-Semitism. But even in England — which, whatever anyone might say to the contrary, is not a racist country — there is more of it in the air; the anti-Semitism of the past...is coming back into the open.

Now it starts to actually degenerate:

I now sometimes find myself telling new acquaintances that I am Jewish for no other reason than to prevent the possibility of their letting drop some anti-Semitic remark. It would be less easy to do this when talking to Muslims who have been taught that Jews are devils, responsible for all the ills of the world including 9/11; or who have perhaps read and believed the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, that horrible forgery which is now a bestseller throughout the Arab world.

So, she has never experienced anti-semitism, not from Muslims or non-Muslims. She has read the "reports" though, but in spite of her never having experienced it she tells people that she is Jewish so that they won't say anything offensive to her. She has never met any Muslims apparently because she would find it harder to tell them that she is Jewish in order to stop them from saying anything beastly about Jews, but in spite of that, still she has never experienced anti-semitism. It is therefore, safe to assume she cannot have met any Muslims. If she had she would have heard them say something anti-semitic since she would not have told them that she is Jewish because she "would. have found this less easy" than telling non-Muslims. So now we can welcome her back to the Jewish fold. She has never experienced anti-semitism but she knows there's a lot of it about, after all she reads the Spectator. She has, it seems, never met a Muslim but:

In this new climate I feel more of a bond with other Jews than I ever have in the past - indeed it is a rather comforting fellow feeling, somewhat akin, perhaps, to belonging to a secret society.

Now if you're not Jewish, please don't ever say that being Jewish is like belonging to a secret society. You'd be eaten alive and that would be before angry Jews got their hands on you.

But no one would wish to acquire a sense of identity based on the negative fact of other people’s prejudices. It’s true that many Jews, perhaps most, have been shaped by traditional Jewish religion and culture, but it would be spurious for me to claim a part in experiences which I don’t share.

Ah well, a glimmer of hope. An end to victimology and she ends on what could be a withering denunciation of zionism

The tendency, nowadays, to put everyone into an ethnic slot, to make "ethnicity" a primary consideration in defining people, is, it seems to me, impoverishing society in general. And it’s the surest way of increasing divisiveness and intolerance.

What a shame that the main argument in her article is that Jews, who have no positive Jewish attribute, can join in a secret society of Jews because they have read that Muslims, who they have never met, don't like us.