Last update - 02:55 01/07/2005
Straight Talk / Upsides and downsides
By Julie Burchill
Recently the English comedian Stephen Fry - who has made his name and his fortune playing upper class Gentile "silly ass" types - went back to a village in Slovakia to look for the grave of his Jewish great-grandfather. When he got there, he found the cemetery smashed up, and his ancestor's grave desecrated by robbers who had dug up the body to steal his rings and the gold from his teeth. The horror, yes, but the irony, too; going all that way, when he could have stayed in England and got the same!
Over the past nine years, the number of anti-Semitic attacks in Britain - from assault on the person to destruction of property - has almost doubled, now standing at more than 600 a year; this in a country which has only 350,000 Jews! A vile combination of right-wing racists and totally unhinged Islamo-fascists are the culprits; to a lesser extent, British Sikhs and Hindus also get it from both sides.
As if this weren't enough, the previously Waspier-than-thou Fry has now also discovered that he is on the "hit list" of the BNP, an extreme British nationalist movement, and the combination of these two things have produced in him an identification as a Jew that the numerous positive features that generally go with being Jewish did not manage to. To a philo-Semite such as myself - who spent a good part of her teenage years lying through her teeth about her imaginary Jewish origins - the idea that one could actually BE A JEW and not prance around boasting about it is hard enough to handle. But then, I've always refused to believe that Woody Allen, for example, actually IS a Jew because he's not sexy, smart or sexually continent enough, so I may not be the most common-sensical of people on this subject.
These are strange times to be a Jew in England. From being the most likely race to "pass," now any fraction of Jewish blood outrules any other heritage. English women as diverse as the socialite Jemima Khan (nee Goldsmith, Jewish father) and the politician Oona King (black father, Jewish mother) have suffered in very different ways. Miss Goldsmith converted to Islam when she married the Pakistani politician Imran Khan; their marriage is now ending for various reasons, but the constant bitching about her Jewish roots can't have helped. Miss King lost her seat in the last election to George Galloway, the militantly pro-Muslim candidate, after a campaign of harassment against her which included being told by drive-by youths "Get back to Israel!" It seems a long time ago when an Anglo-Jewish brainbox such as Jonathan Miller could quip light-heartedly "I'm not a JEW - I'm Jew-ISH" without sounding like a deluded self-loather about to have a rude awakening. "If any Englishman ever forgets his class origin, another Englishman will soon remind him," a wise man once said. These days, the same is true of Jews in England. The upside of the new anti-Semitism is that formerly sleeping, silent Jews such as Stephen Fry are identifying as Jews in a way they thought they never would. The downside, though, is everything else.