Rising to Red Ken's bait does us no favours

Published in the Sunday Times, 27 February 2005

For me it was the words. The physical act of having my first son, Jacob, circumcised had less impact, on me at any rate, than the words I uttered at the ceremony where it was done – just eight days after his birth.

“Blessed are you, Lord our God, King of the Universe, who commands us to enter our sons into the covenant of our father, Abraham.” As I held him seconds afterwards, those were the words I spoke.

They kept coming back to me. What exactly was this covenant of Abraham into which I had enrolled Jacob? Was I handing him a gift or placing a burden on his tiny, infant shoulders? Those questions nagged away for many months, eventually prompting a search into the story of my own family, as I tried to work out what inheritance I was passing on to my child — a search which has now culminated in a book, Jacob’s Gift.

Even before I started I knew my son would never be short of evidence suggesting Jewishness was more of a curse than a blessing. He will only have to learn elementary history to see that Jews have been singled out for hatred and oppression almost from the very beginning and for centuries thereafter. One day he will be able to flick open his schoolboy atlas almost anywhere, jab a random finger and find a place where Jews have been persecuted. And, of course, looming over it all will be perhaps the darkest event in human history: the Nazi murder of six million Jews.

This heavy legacy is real and cannot be ignored. It leads Jews who hear the phrase ‘chosen people’ to reply wryly, ‘Chosen for what?’ And yet I have become ever more determined that it not become the central fact of my son’s identity.

I don’t want him to believe that to be Jewish is to carry a mark that guarantees suffering and pain. I want him to see that it is, instead, a key to a wide, deep cultural store packed with ideas, humour, food, books, art, music, wisdom and much else. I want his identity to carry a positive, not negative, charge.

There are plenty of people whose Jewishness works the other way. These are the Jews who may never enter a synagogue, but will always make a bee-line for a Holocaust museum. They are the people who may never visit Israel, but are always on the lookout for a hint of media bias against the country. They may never see a Jewish play or read a Jewish novel, but they will be the first to detect a trace of anti-semitism.

There is some of this in the air right now, after what has been a curious few weeks for British Jews. A series of episodes have come together to make Jews wonder whether anti-semitism is enjoying an unwelcome revival.

First to stir anxiety were the proposed Labour party posters, one depicting Michael Howard and Oliver Letwin as winged pigs, the other showing Howard as a hypnotist in what appeared to be a Fagin-style pose. Next came the clash between Ken Livingstone and a Jewish reporter for the London Evening Standard, whom the mayor likened to a concentration camp guard.

Gather any group of Jews together and you’ll soon hear them debating those items, one by one. The consensus is that the flying pigs ad was innocuous, but that the Fagin poster was ‘dodgy’ at the least and maybe much worse. It seemed to depict Howard in a caricature Jewish shrug and the watch-chain image, combined with the slogan about money, all struck a few too many uncomfortable chords.

As for Ken, he was clearly guilty of crassness. To analogise his own treatment at the hands of Associated Newspapers with Jewish suffering under the Nazis trivialises the Holocaust and demeans him. What’s more, the reporter told the mayor he was Jewish and was offended by his words but Ken went right on and compounded the offence.

That counts as insensitive behaviour — but it does not amount to hatred of Jews. (Far worse, in my book, was Ken’s cosy hug with Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who has justified suicide bombings against Israeli civilians, singling out female bombers for special praise.)

Nevertheless, and even if I took a harder line on the mayor’s conduct, I’m not sure I would want to let it dominate my every waking hour. For one thing, I don’t want Jews’ history of pain to be the one thing the world knows about us.

So I understand why the Israeli ambassador to the UK, Zvi Hefetz, accuses Ken Livingstone of a “gross insensitivity” that has shocked Jews and non-Jews around the globe — but part of me wishes the ambassador had chosen to regard this as a local dispute, unworthy of the attentions of a foreign government.

The same goes for the Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks. He chose his words carefully, saying that Holocaust survivors had been “deeply wounded” by the mayor’s remarks and that, even if that had not been the intention, the refusal to apologise was “regrettable.” Nothing wrong in any of that, but again I wonder whether a scrap between a politician and a reporter merited the intervention of Anglo-Jewry’s most senior religious figure.

As it happens, both Hefetz and Sacks opine about a wide range of topics. But those remarks only rarely get reported. Instead, what the public hears is Britain’s Jewish leadership regularly, even constantly, expressing its vulnerability and hurt. After last month’s Auschwitz commemorations and the rows over Labour’s assorted antics this month, there is a risk that the Jewish place in the public mind becomes one forever marked ‘victim.’

If that’s a bad external image, it’s also bad for our internal health. Too many Jewish parents tell their children they have to stay Jewish — or marry Jewish partners — because of the lengths their ancestors went through to survive. One eminent thinker called it the Eleventh Commandment: to stay Jewish in order to deny Hitler a posthumous victory.

That’s no basis for an identity, to endure simply because we have endured, to stay Jewish to spite our enemies. No, Jews need to find better, more uplifting elements in their culture than listening out for warning signs from those who may dislike, or even hate, them.

That’s my job with Jacob and with my new son, Sam. I hope to teach them to learn from their past, even from its bleakest chapters and to be vigilant about anti-semitism in their own life-times: they should call it when they see it. But I also hope they see that their Jewishness is to be defined by them rather than their foes. And that they have inherited a legacy that includes several burdens – but many, many gifts.

Posted on February 27, 2005 07:00 PM

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