Britain's Jews
Confidence, Maturity, Anxiety
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- €14.99
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- €14.99
Publisher Description
'…detailed and fair.' - The Spectator
'An exhaustive, impressive achievement.' - The Tablet
As a minority, Jews in Britain are confident, their institutions competent and mature. And yet within Jewish life in Britain there is a pervading sense of anxiety.
Jews in Britain have risen to the top of nearly every profession, they run major companies, sit at the top tables in politics, make their voices heard in the media, are prominent in science and the arts. Of course there is serious poverty and gross disadvantage, just as there is in any community. But on any objective measure, British Jews have done well. Particularly when we consider where they came from, the impoverished, often oppressed lives that many Jews lived in Eastern Europe and the Ottoman Empire less than 200 years ago.
Jews have lived in Britain longer than any other minority. They've been here so long, and are so ingrained into the national fabric, that they are often not considered to be a minority at all. Until a periodic outburst of antisemitism or a flare up in the Middle East, or both, turns the spotlight on them once again.
British Jews have another distinction too. They have lived safely and securely, continuously, in Britain longer than any other modern Jewish community has lived anywhere else in the world. They have organised themselves in a way that serves as a model both to more recent immigrant communities in Britain and to Jewish communities elsewhere. Being British, they wear their distinctions lightly, they don't trumpet their achievements, in fact they rarely make a noise at all. But they give back quietly: established Jewish organisations help more recently arrived minorities to create their own structures, charities draw on the Jewish experience of dislocation and persecution to help oppressed people in the developing world, philanthropists support causes far beyond the boundaries of their own communities.
Britain's Jews is a challenging look at Jewish life in the UK today. Based on conversations with Jews from all walks of life, it depicts, in ways that are at times disturbing, at other times inspiring, what it is like to be Jewish in 21st century Britain. And why Jewish life is still a subject of fascination.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Freedman (Leonard Cohen: The Mystical Roots of Genius) takes stock of British Jewry in this uneven treatise. Noting that Britain is home to the longest running modern Jewish community on the planet, Freedman mines interviews with members of Modern Orthodox, Masorti, Liberal, reform communities, and others to uncover what Jewish identity means to them. In examining Jewish issues of recent decades—antisemitism, Zionism, religious observance, and affiliation breakdowns—Freedman emerges with a survey of problems facing Britain's Jews that will sound all too familiar to their American counterparts: a population thinned by assimilation, and a ramped-up antisemitism that's linked to widespread delegitimization of the Jewish right to a state. But the fruit of Freedman's work isn't quite ripe: he notes the optimism of those who believe there will always be a baseline level of British Jews, for example, without providing much in the way of context or analysis. As well, inconsistencies crop up—at one point, Freedman suggests London is "one of the most inhospitable Jewish cities in the world" despite elsewhere pointing out the richness of its Jewish life. This entry tackles a worthy topic, though it fails to fully do it justice. It's a missed opportunity for a richer study.
