This is not good for the Jews

On the question of Labour and antisemitism, my Jewish friends are divided. My Jewish family, on the other hand, are all voting Labour, either in Canterbury, where Rosie Duffield won a historic but fragile victory over the sitting Conservative just two years ago, or here in our south London constituency of Tooting, where the admirable Rosena Allin-Khan has a relatively safe seat.

I suppose I am as personally invested in the fate of British Jews as a non-Jew can be. And I don’t dismiss the accusations of antisemitism within the Labour ranks as simply a right-wing smear campaign, though the tabloids have certainly played a role in distorting the facts and exaggerating the problem. But I’ll be voting Labour anyway.

This will be, at least in part, a tactical vote to defeat the Conservative Party and its vision for our country as an off-shore tax-haven subject to the ravages of global corporate asset-stripping (if I lived in Brighton, I’d vote Green; in Dominic Raab's nearby constituency I've been stuffing envelopes for the Liberal Democrats). It will certainly not be a vote of confidence in Jeremy Corbyn. 

As a member of the Labour Party, I voted against Corbyn three years ago when his leadership was challenged. My objection to him was not that he came from a left wing faction of the party, whose priorities I mainly agree with, but that he was allowing the party to be divided by factionalism. There's a desire among his more enthusiastic supporters to purify the Party and remake it in Corbyn's image. I marched against the Iraq war and thought Blair too timid in his support for the public sector, but I don't see the point, 12 years after his departure, of labelling Labour moderates as Blairites and working to have them deselected. The bullying of MPs who waver from left-wing orthodoxy on the Palestinian question rises from the same well of self-righteous intolerance. 

It’s clear that among some Labour activists the line between criticising Israel and blaming Jews has been hopelessly blurred. Whatever his private convictions, Corbyn has been sloppy about this himself and has failed to take a firm stand against it as leader.

So how can I justify voting for his party? First, because the Corbyn faction doesn’t yet represent the party as a whole. The Conservatives, in contrast, have been thoroughly taken over by Brexit-mongers. And second, because Boris Johnson’s prejudices are not even in question and have been on display for years. Though he uses his bumbling comic style to deflect criticism, in a bigotry competition with Corbyn, Johnson would be the clear winner.

As the husband and stepfather of Jews, should I take comfort in the fact that Johnson’s sneers have been directed at Muslims and people of colour, rather than at our lot? Well, no, because I refuse to be pushed into making a choice between antisemitism and Islamophobia. Those in positions of power have always found it useful to turn the poor, the powerless and the culturally marginalised against each other. It’s not a game I’m willing to play.

And in any case, the racist impulse tends to be indivisible. People who express hatred of one group of foreigners are not reliable friends to any other group. An ultra-conservative Britain that isolates itself from Europe because it dislikes Poles, threatens to deport elderly British West Indians on a historical technicality, deliberately creates a “hostile environment” for refugees and other undocumented migrants, and gambles with the future of its own Irish citizens is not a trustworthy friend to Jews.

I think about those White Supremacists marching in Charlottesville. How easily their chant slipped from "You [brown people] will not replace us" to "Jews will not replace us". I wouldn’t trust Little Englanders not to engage in the same kind of slippage if it suited them, or if it suited their leaders to encourage it. Expressions of support for Israel from members of the extreme Right are not reliable indicators of an absence of antisemitic feeling any more than concern for the Palestinians necessarily means indifference to the fate of the Jewish population of Israel or of Jews around the world.

Last week a group of British writers published a letter explaining why they could not, in good conscience, vote Labour in this Election. Perplexingly, some of them have never been Labour supporters, so the suggestion that Corbyn’s views were causing them moral anguish was disingenuous. But for the progressive voters among them the dilemma is clearly genuine. “Antisemitism,” they wrote, “is central to a wider debate about the kind of country we want to be. To ignore it because Brexit looms larger is to declare that anti-Jewish prejudice is a price worth paying for a Labour government. Which other community’s concerns are disposable in this way? Who would be next?"

That question, with its distant echo of Niemöller's confession, correctly identifies the sliding nature of prejudice. But it is misleading in implying that, in contemporary Britain, the Jewish community is at particular risk. We don’t need to ask who would be next because the victims of prejudice are all around us. One way of compiling a list would be to start with a compendium of Boris Johnson’s jokey ethnic slurs.

My late and much lamented mother-in-law would occasionally, in response to some turn in American or global events, drily observe that “this is not good for the Jews”. The Brexit project, if and when it is completed, will be no better for British Jews than for the British people in general.

The plot against America

I wrote this for The Bangladesh Daily Star shortly after the US election and have only just got round to posting it here. There can no longer be any doubt that Trump intends to govern as a kleptocrat: he is already shaping foreign policy around his personal business interests. How his fascistic impulses will be expressed remains to be seen.

In his novel The Plot Against America, Philip Roth imagines two years of alternative history for the United States. In the 1940 presidential election, Charles Lindbergh, the aviator and Nazi sympathiser, defeats Roosevelt on an anti-war platform. The drama is played out on the national scale, but what captures us imaginatively is the impact of the new regime on the Roth family in Newark, New Jersey, as witnessed by seven-year-old Philip. (Putting his real childhood self at the centre of a story that in other ways departs so obviously from reality is an audacious move typical of Roth.)

Under the Government’s ‘Just Folks’ scheme, Philip’s older brother Sandy is persuaded to spend the summer with a tobacco farming family in Kentucky. Won over by this experience, he volunteers to work for the newly created Office of American Absorption. He encourages other Jewish city boys to join him in assimilating into the mainstream protestant culture of the American heartland. The Roth parents are profoundly disturbed by this social conversion of their older son. While the family is torn apart internally by conflict between those inclined to collaborate and those determined to resist, outside the home they encounter increasing levels of antisemitism. There are anti-Jewish riots and neighbourhood curfews, Jewish friends lose their jobs or are compulsorily relocated, and the authorities turn a blind eye to acts of racist violence and murder.

When it came out in 2004, I was inclined to interpret the novel as a comment on the Bush presidency. While studying for an MA in Creative Writing soon after, I argued in an essay that it tapped into the unease of conscientious Americans in the era of the Patriot Act. At a time when an internal minority was under suspicion and subject to unconstitutional scrutiny, and the Christian convictions of the President and his circle were encroaching on public policy, Roth’s 1940s Jews seemed to stand in for twenty-first century American Muslims. Of course I wasn’t alone in making this connection. Reviewers had mentioned it, though Roth himself, while strongly opposed to Bush, had denied that this was his purpose. 

In retrospect I see more clearly that the story resists such an allegorical reading. The isolationist Lindbergh, eager to keep America out of the war and do a deal with the expansionist tyrant Hitler, never seemed much like George Bush, who assumed America could effortlessly dominate the world through its military might. The most obvious victims of Bush’s policies were not minority US citizens but the civilian populations of invaded countries and the foreign detainees designated as enemy combatants unprotected by the Geneva Convention. 

Now Roth’s novel feels chillingly relevant. A celebrity without political experience, motivated by crude bigotry and ambition and indifferent to the world beyond America’s borders, Donald Trump looks like Roth’s President Lindberg in a way that Bush never did. As Philip’s father says of his fellow Americans, unaccountably besotted with their new President: ‘They live in a dream, and we live in a nightmare.’

Wandering the back streets of Budapest

Leni has a few days’ work in Budapest and I’m joining her because the hotel room is paid for and so why not? I’m glad to be in a city I don’t know and get a brief glimpse of an unfamiliar culture. 

But I’m an awkward tourist. I’m too conscious of the futility of gawping at the approved novelties. If there’s snobbery in this, it’s the kind E.M. Forster pokes fun at in Adele and Mrs Moore searching for “the real India”.

There’s another kind of snobbery, of which I’m not guilty, that expresses itself in a desire to preserve high art for those with sufficient knowledge and refinement to appreciate it (I once heard it suggested that tourist visas to Venice should be issued only to those who pass a test). I’m afraid I’d too often fall on the wrong side of that divide and am, in any case, suspicious of the class distinctions we’re sometimes encouraged to impose on culture. 

I'm inclined to think that one man’s schlock is another man’s objet d’art, and it’s all subject to commodification anyway in the kind of tourist route that leads you from ticket booth, to museum, to gift shop, to café serving typical local dishes and accepting euros.

As I’ve grown older I’ve learned to submit with better grace to the role of tourist. But I’m happiest when I have a project. For Leni, visiting the Jewish quarter is definitely a project. All four of her grandparents migrated from Eastern Europe. There's some interesting vagueness about where from exactly – they were Yiddish speaking Jews who had left the old country behind and the hardship of life in the ghetto or the shtetl – but they all came from somewhere in Lithunia, Poland or Hungary.

Leni is pleased to discover that in Budapest more evidence of that old world survives than in Warsaw or Vilnius, including the Great Synogogue, the largest in Europe. Bombed by the pro-Nazi Arrow Cross party shortly before WWII, and later by the Allies, it’s been extensively restored, partly with funding from Estée Lauder (born Josephine Esther Mentzer).

Its troubles aren’t over, however. In 2012 the Jobbik party burnt an Israeli flag outside, thereby crossing the line between demonstrating against the policies of a foreign government and intimidating a local minority. As a Hungarian friend succinctly explains: far right parties in Western Europe are anti-Muslim; in Eastern Europe they’re anti-Semitic (a deceptively symmetrical formulation that perhaps raises more questions than it answers).

Visiting the Great Synagogue is top of Leni’s to-do list, but so far we’ve failed to get inside. Our first attempt was on Sunday morning and the queue was round the block. We checked the guide book for opening times and decided to return on a weekday.

We were back first thing this morning but found it shut. A young security guard in a black baseball cap said it was closed for two days. We crossed the street and ordered some breakfast. Then I went back to speak to the guard again. You’re closed to tourists, I said, but what about worshippers? He gave me a challenging look and said, “What festival is this?” I certainly hadn’t mugged up for a quiz on the Jewish calendar. I’m not Jewish, I told him, but my wife is. “Six o’clock” he said. “You’re wife only. No bag, no camera.”

I’d considered using the word pilgrim. It would have been more accurate. Leni has no intention of worshipping a patriarchal and sectarian god, but is legitimately responding to an impulse to stand where her ancestors may once have stood. But I was afraid the word might sound too Christian for my purpose. I needn’t have worried. Wikipedia informs me that Shavuot, which falls this week (according to the kind of arcane calculation that determines such movable feasts), is one of three Jewish festivals of pilgrimage, when in ancient times Jews were expected to travel to the temple in Jerusalem. 

I also discover that it’s associated with the revelation of the Torah on Mount Sinai and the eating of cheese blintzes. If I’d taken the trouble to learn this in advance I might have offered a cheese blintz to the guard.

Denied entrance for the time being, we explored the backstreets, paused outside the forbidding façade of the orthodox synagogue, and then turning down the narrow Rumbach Sebestyen Street found a third synagogue, derelict and neglected, where we were free to wander for three-quarters of an hour with two or three other visitors. Who knows, we probably had an experience that was, in its own way, more culturally rich, spiritually engaging and authentically atavistic than the one we’d planned. And we didn’t have to pass a test to get in.