Like many of the staff here, I never expected to end up working at the JC. While I’ve always been proud of my Judaism, used to live in Israel and became barmitzvah relatively gladly, I never considered working for a Jewish paper.
My background (non-Jewish mum, not from North London) has always made me feel slightly outside the NW London, Brent-Cross shopping UK Jewish mainstream. And although I went to the University of Nottingham, against all odds I managed to successfully avoid the packs of cliquey glossy-haired Jewish women who roam the campus.
In the past few years, I’ve started to consider my Judaism slightly more seriously and as fate would have it, here I am at the JC. Since I’ve rediscovered my fondness for the paper, I’ve noticed a few things. Chief among them, the lack of opinions from young people. Sure, there are some twenty-something voices — our resident matchmaker for example — but generally the voice of the JC is, how shall I put it, quite mature.
So I am seizing this opportunity to enlighten my elders. Sometimes I feel like I’ve grown up on a different planet when talking to my parents generation. I don’t watch terrestrial television, don’t get their references about AbFab or Steptoe and Son. I was raised on Friends, not Fawlty Towers. Culture has been democratised to the point where I barely have to care about “mainstream” British culture. I couldn’t tell you who won Strictly last year or what happened in Line of Duty, but I can tell you what happened in every scene of the last season of Curb.
Millenials live our lives downstream of America. One consequence is that we import so many of our political protests from across the pond. The fact that most people left-of-centre were calling for increased public funding for services (including police) for over 10 years, was instantly forgotten in the summer of 2020, when a laughable cry of “defund the police” rang out around Westminster.
And of course, it’s not just politics. My friends wear American college sweatshirts from states they’ve never been to, lies are described as “cap”, the police are feds. America, as the teens would say, is living rent-free in all our heads. Our music, our films and even the Jews we idolise are all from orth America. Stars like Drake, Doja Cat. Haim.
US Jewish culture always seems more exciting, more vibrant, more joyful than ours, and now the walls have come down, we can all enjoy it as easily as if we lived on Long Island. . I can watch a very Jewish rapper on iPlayer, making nebbishe jokes about his penis. I can binge Seinfeld on Netflix far easier than finding old episodes of Baddiel and Skinner. I absolutely love the freedom this brings.
Another trend we Millenials share with our transatlantic cousins is our relationship with social media. Unlike the boomers before us or the Zoomers after (both of whom tend to have messy, low-effort online personas albeit for different reasons), those of my generation are essentially micro-influencers of our own lives. As my friends get engaged, get married and accumulate animals/children, every milestone is a manicured, curated PR event. New partners are “soft launched”, proposals are “teased”. Truly, we are all Meghan Markle.
This doesn’t mean we are all airheads. We’re tired of being told to spend less on iced coffees and avocados, by those who bought their first house in Zone One for four pounds and a firm handshake.
I’m sure there are things I can learn from the older generation. Things like the value of hard work, how to be a landlord and how to guilt-trip my future children into calling at least once a week.
But mostly I’d like someone over 50 to sell me a house at well below market rate before I get evicted from my rented flat.
