Judaism

Several years ago I applied for a teaching position in an American university. In response I received a lot of forms to fill out, including one that required me to identify my ‘ethnicity or race’. I hate to tell this to those of my liberal friends who relish historical analogies from 1930s Europe, but when I noted how black Americans were classified in the form —‘You are defined as Black even if only one of your parents was an African American’—the Nuremberg Race Laws came to mind. When I look at myself in the mirror, I see, even with a summer tan, a very white man. So I assumed it would be a waste of time to fill in the part about race on the form the university had sent me.

A reader sent in a television preview from the Daily Star for Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds in which ‘Brad Pitt leads a squad of Jewish-American soldiers on a Nazi killing spree’. The film, it added, is ‘not as funny as ’Allo ’Allo! but Pitt raises laughs out of his shonky language skills’. The reader was shocked by what she thought a crude piece of anti-Semitic vocabulary. I am old enough to be aware of shonky as an offensive term referring to Jews, but I don’t think that was meant here. Indeed it is frequently used in the papers to mean ‘wobbly’ (as if it were wonky) or ‘ropy’.

Christians are celebrating their second locked down Easter this weekend. If Mr S wasn't a model of Christian charity, he'd quite like to remind certain people of this fact, especially those irritating folk who last year insisted that locking down just before the Muslim festival of Eid was somehow an attack British Islam. Perhaps not everything is motivated by conflict between different identity groups? Oh wait, yes it is. With parishioners cooped up at home, someone in the Church of England thought it might be nice to encourage a bit of domestic ritual (yes, that antiquated idea of physical, structured worship).

This week my son came home from school and asked me if it was true that the Jews killed Jesus. Um, I said. Read the Gospels. Read Hyam Maccoby. Ask your father. My husband is a religious maniac, though Christian. Any patriarchy will do. He insists I pretend to be an ultra-Orthodox Jew for festivals, and finds recipes for weird ceremonial breads. ‘Can’t we make Judaism fun?’ he asks. I reply, aghast: ‘It isn’t supposed to be fun.’ My Judaism is rather Holocaust--centric. I told a family therapist after my parents’ divorce: ‘I lost a father and gained a Shoah.

There are two groups in the Jewish community – mainstream Jews who, while still religious, do their best to assimilate into the wider community and the Chareidi, ultra-orthodox Jews who tend to shun British society. Those two groups are now locked in a struggle for the future of the Jewish community. For over 100 years, the Chareidi – with their distinctive costume, based on the fashions of 18th century Poland – have had a sort of symbiotic relationship with the mainstream. If mainstream Jews needed kosher slaughterers, rabbinical judgements, circumcisions and even rabbis for the smaller pulpits, they relied on the Chareidi. They were the ones with an encyclopaedic knowledge of Jewish law.

Virginia governor Ralph Northam: first a doctor and now apparently a theologian. Northam took a shot at churchgoers during a press conference announcing the state's latest coronavirus restrictions on Thursday, arrogantly explaining to Virginia residents how they are supposed to understand their relationship with God. While reminding churches to practice social distancing and require masks indoors during Thursday's presser, Gov. Northam smugly remarked that 'you do not need to sit in the church pews for God to hear your prayers.' Northam also asked people of faith what the most important thing is this time of year: 'Is it the worship or the building?' 'For me, God is wherever you are,' he added.

The former chief rabbi, Lord Jonathan Sacks, died yesterday at the age of 72. In an article for The Spectator, republished here, he wrote about the need for less 'I' and more 'we': Last Monday night and Tuesday were our Jewish festival of Purim, when we recall the events described in the Book of Esther. It is the oddest of all festivals. There is rejoicing, which starts a fortnight before at the beginning of the Jewish month of Adar. There’s a celebratory meal on the day itself. We send charitable gifts to the poor and presents to friends. There’s riotous noise during the reading of Esther whenever the name of the arch-villain Haman is mentioned.

Though you wouldn’t know it from most American media outlets, the phenomenon of vandalizing and burning religious sites which is accelerating in Europe has, like a virus, jumped an ocean and is now among us. Over the past month, statues of Christ and the Virgin Mary have been damaged in states as far apart as Colorado, Missouri, New York, Tennessee, and Massachusetts. On July 11, a vehicle was driven into a Catholic church in Florida with the clear intent of burning the building to the ground while congregants were inside. But it’s not just Catholic symbols and edifices being targeted. America’s Jewish community has received similar treatment.

Last Monday night and Tuesday were our Jewish festival of Purim, when we recall the events described in the Book of Esther. It is the oddest of all festivals. There is rejoicing, which starts a fortnight before at the beginning of the Jewish month of Adar. There’s a celebratory meal on the day itself. We send charitable gifts to the poor and presents to friends. There’s riotous noise during the reading of Esther whenever the name of the arch-villain Haman is mentioned. And it’s the one day in the year when it’s considered a religious duty to drink slightly too much alcohol.