Whether we like it or not, the idea that every Jew is an ambassador for the Jewish people is deeply engrained in us. After all, even in the most benign circumstances, it’s very human for non-Jews to extrapolate from one Jew to all Jews.
We ‘educate’ the world about Jews just by existing in the world. Inevitably then, the way we represent Jews and Jewish life to the world can be highly revealing about how we want to be seen and what we find Jewishly important enough to emphasise.
Conversely, it is also revealing what we hide or consider too unimportant to dwell on. Of course, antisemites routinely accuse Jews of lying about who they are for nefarious purposes. And in the maelstrom of controversy around Israel, ‘hasbara’ – public diplomacy for the Jewish state – is sometimes represented as having inordinate, sinister power.
No, what I am referring to is something much less conscious and much less dramatic; a widespread tendency among Jews to play down one particular side of Jewish life – the everyday stuff that Jews do. In my recently-published book ‘Everyday Jews’ I give a couple of examples of this unconscious misrepresentation. One is from the much-loved British comedy series Friday Night Dinner.
In one episode, the ‘boys’ are asked to be pallbearers at the funeral of their (Jewish) uncle. Yet in Jewish funerals in the UK, mourners never carry the coffin. The other example is from the US TV series The Marvellous Mrs Maisel. The opening scene is set at a wedding dinner and includes a rabbi wearing a tallit (and not a tallit katan).
Keith Kahn-Harris. Pic: Courtesy
Again, this is something that would never happen. What’s revealing about these two examples – and there are many more – is that in other respects these are shows, written by Jews, that lovingly and accurately represent Jewish life in North London and the Upper West Side.
The point is that they are faithful to a particular aspect of Jewish reality and not to another. They re-create how Jews speak, how they feel, how they emote and what they care about – in short, what it is to be Jewish. They are much less interested in faithfully showing what Jews do, particularly in terms of religious practice. Jews have a highly visible presence in post-war western culture.
Through Jewish arts and culture, the world has witnessed Jewish angst, Jewish humour, Jewish pride, Jewish self-loathing and all the other facets of Jewish being. The world has seen much less of the stuff of Jewish doing, whether that be the committees we sit on, the services we sit through, the candles we light at home and the many other mundane things that make up Jewish life.
Or rather, Jews do pay attention to everyday Jewish doing, but it tends to be behind closed doors. This is the stuff of Purim spiels, summer camp skits and the arts that are confined to Jewish spaces. In my book I suggest – cheekily I confess – that our greatest artists are often those with the least consequential Jewish lives.
And the corollary – even cheekier – is that the Jewish artists that have the most intimate relationship with Jewish doing are sometimes our least consequential artists. Why is it that Jews so often play down everyday Jewish doing? It’s not because of ignorance; at least not all the time.
Why would Robert Popper – writer of Friday Night Dinner – have made such an effort to bring suburban Jewish life to the screen so perfectly in some respects and yet been so apathetic about including a practice that he would know full well that Jews like the ones he brought to life would absolutely never do?
In ‘Everyday Jews’ I have tried to unpick the reasons why Jews are often so diffident about representing the everyday doing of Jewish life. Part of the reason is that Jews are so often associated with the extraordinary, with the significant, that it is difficult to square that with the undeniable existence of the ordinary and the insignificant.
That makes it much easier for writers and artists to focus on what it is to feel Jewish – which is often to feel extraordinary and angst-ridden – rather than the myriad actions that make up Jewish life.
Since October 7th 2023 it was become ever more difficult for Jews to show our mundane side. It is much easier for Jews – of whatever opinion – to show how we are emoting, suffering and protesting, than to admit that everyday life is still continuing.
Indeed, it is sometimes politically more useful to represent us as bearing the weight of extraordinary times than to show us still carrying on with doing ordinary Jewish life. This is understandable, but the long-term effect of this may simply reinforce the tendency to see Jews as irreducibly different and never normal.
Can we ever be ordinary and insignificant, given the long history of the world finding us so hateably significant (or for philosemites, loveably significant)? Would we even want to be an undistinguished sub-set of humanity? At the very least we need to be asking the question.
Keith Kahn-Harris has been project director of the European Jewish Research Archive since its inception in 2014.
- ‘Everyday Jews’: Why the Jewish people are not who you think they are, by Keith Kahn-Harris, is published by Icon Books.Â
