In America, there is a category of Jew known as JINO: Jews In Name Only, coined in 2011 by Ben Shapiro, a right-wing commentator. JINOS are, of course, “Bad Jews”, the expansive category that Emily Tamkin explores in her new book: Bad Jews: A History of American Jewish Politics and Identities.

Emily Tamkin author photo CMYK

Emily Tamkin

Tamkin herself, haunted by the spectre of Bad Jewishness, had doubts about her “right to write this book,” as she confesses in its introduction.

After all, her mother converted before she was born, and Jewish pre-school “was the end of my formal Jewish education”; she grew up in an “overwhelmingly non-Jewish town on Long Island” — she didn’t go to Hebrew school, did not have a batmitzvah, eats shellfish, “only ever dated one Jewish person”, married her non-Jewish husband in a Jewish ceremony on Simchat Torah (they were constrained by Covid) and, the clincher, didn’t go to Israel until lockdown.

But that, she realised, was precisely the point. American Jewish identity "can never be pinned down."

"There are..." she writes with the post-structuralist ease of the intellectual progressive left, “dominating narratives about what it means to be Jewish in America, but they are just that: narratives, and counternarratives, and counternarratives to the counternarratives. Stories we tell ourselves.”

Tamkin, who is 33, a graduate of Columbia and Oxford, and senior editor of the New Statesman’s US edition, had previously written a book about George Soros, unpicking the web of conspiracies that surround him.

“And, you know, I didn’t think of myself as covering Jewish issues in writing my book on Soros,” she tells me over Zoom from her heavily bookshelved living room in Washington DC. “But in writing the book on Soros, one of the criticisms that works against defences is, well, it’s not antisemitism because he’s not even really Jewish.

Just look at his relationship to Israel. He never goes to synagogue. He’s not religious. And this really bothered me, this idea that people would take it upon themselves to be arbiters of someone else’s identity. And also whether or not a person, a Jewish person could be a target of antisemitism based on whether or not you like him or not.”

American Jewry, polarised as unequivocal support for Israel leaks away among Democrats and the far right takes on the Zionist mantle, finds itself in a stark moment of crisis — and Tamkin, like all good reporter-scholars, wanted to show the history of the crisis.

“I saw a tweet around the time I started writing the book that said there’s a Jewish civil war going on in America. And yes, but there has also been one going on for the past hundred years.”

So during lockdown, Tamkin decided to chronicle how what it means to be a Bad Jew — or a Good Jew — has shaped Jewish debates and identity in a stormy 100-year history of immigration, assimilation, religion and politics in America, taking us into Jewish self-positioning in flashpoints from the civil rights movements to Black Lives Matter, in chapters that include “Foreign Jews”, “Zionist Jews”, “Civil Rights Jews”.

The themes running through the chapters return again and again to the way that Jews both reproduce and are victims of the wrongs of the outside world, specifically the US, entrenching and rebelling against discrimination, policing social, and cultural and even, as she argues, racial hierarchies.

Jews who came from the wrong bit of Europe, or had the wrong colour skin, could be victimised or excluded by other Jews, in cahoots with the interests of wider institutional culture.

Indeed, as a fully paid-up progressive, if an impressively thoughtful one at that, Tamkin is preoccupied with Jews’ relationship to “whiteness” and argues in one of the book’s most recurrent tropes that white Jews have “benefited” from “whiteness” and that they have, in some cases, also denigrated non-white Americans in order to “prove their whiteness”.

It is clear, before we even get to Israel (she is far more critical, especially of settlements, than me), that Tamkin and I are different kinds of Bad Jew. I prefer carbohydrates to regular shul attendance, but am an avowed Zionist and take a potential leader’s position on Israel seriously at the ballot box.

She, unlike me, goes to shul regularly, has a relationship with a rabbi, and engages more fulsomely with her Jewish identity than I do, with a book, plus speech peppered with Yiddish phrases, to prove it.

But, as a firm progressive and practitioner of Reform Judaism, she takes the idea of “white privilege” seriously, even in relation to Jews. Given that Jews — as she herself argues — are anything but racially uniform or “privileged”, which implies having something handed to you on a plate, I struggle to swallow this. Does she really think Jews should check their white privilege?

“Yeah, I think you should,” she says. “I think white Jews should check their white privilege. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t also antisemitism. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t violence against Jews in America.

"That doesn’t mean that there aren’t horrible things said against Jewish people. It just means that you also benefit from white privilege.”

And are the Charedim, I ask, now regular victims of disfiguring violence on American streets, benefitting from white privilege?

“I think they still, you know, are probably not the victims of state brutality in the same way that black and brown Americans are. However, by being a very, very visible religious and ethnic minority, they receive other forms of violence and hatred,” says Tamkin.

Many British Jews, painfully scarred by the use of anti-racism in the ranks of Corbyn’s Labour as a way of legitimising attacking Jews, would squirm at Tamkin’s desire that Jews not “exempt themselves from conversations about white supremacy in America.”

Indeed, when I ask her thoughts on Corbyn, she says diplomatically: “I think American Jews should not tell British Jews how to feel about Jeremy Corbyn.”

I ask if perhaps her progressivism has blinded her to antisemitism on the left. She allows that it’s possible, but also points out that Trump — under whose aegis explosive forms of antisemitism flourished — was actually in power, and may soon be again.

Tamkin spent a year doing a Master’s in Russian and Eastern European studies at Oxford and found British attitudes to Jews comically naïve.

She tells me she wrote an article at the time headlined ‘Oxford needs a Jewish friend’ “because I just felt like while I was there, I just kept bumping up against the stereotype of what a Jewish person was and these assumptions about who you had to be if you were Jewish, like either you were super-religious or you were about to move to Israel or, you know, you were surely from one of these towns that the Jewish people came from.”

I chuckle: next to the political, theological and geographical expansiveness of American Judaism, I can see that things might seem pretty parochial here.

But then, we look at American Jews and think: what actually makes them Jews? I ask Tamkin if the desire among many Reform Jews to bend towards all progressive causes risks dissolving the boundaries that keep the faith Jewish. In other words, can one have too flexible an idea of Judaism?

“I’m sure there are things that I would come up against to be like, ‘all right, even for me this is too much’. But I will tell you that the vast majority of people I interviewed for this book explained how they lived and why they were interpreting Jewishness as they were, and even if it wasn’t how I lived, I was like, all right, I can see that, that sounds Jewish. But, you know, when a politician brings out a rabbi who turns out to be a Jew for Jesus, then I am like, all right, that’s where I check out.”

Tamkin refers to something her rabbi said on Yom Kippur, quoting Rabbi Borovitz, a philosopher of Reform Judaism. “He said that he didn’t really live a particularly pious or mystical life. And so for him to be holy, it meant trying to always find something noble in these everyday activities and that’s what Jewishness was about for him.

And I really like that. And I think the people that I’ve spoken with for this book were trying to do that. They were trying to find their way to be Jewish in a way that was meaningful to them. And am I to tell them, like, no, that’s wrong?”

Tamkin has certainly discovered a politically and spiritually roomy form of Judaism for herself, and though perhaps it’s not the sort many British Jews might choose, it has allowed her to unearth a fascinating and important history at a crucial moment.

Bad Jews: A History of American Jewish Politics and Identities is published this week by Hurst