In her acclaimed 2021 essay collection People Love Dead Jews, the American writer and academic Dara Horn mounted a persuasive attack against the way we memorialise Jewish suffering, arguing that mainstream commemorations of atrocities such as the Holocaust or even the way we often represent Jews in literature falsified history and obscured the reality of Jews in the here and now. Her thesis stemmed from her belief that such commemorations tended to entrench fixed ideas about the Jewish experience, which in turn limit the conversation about such things. It is striking that Keith Kahn-Harris and Gavin Schaffer both cite Horn in their respective books about modern Jewish identity; in their different ways, both authors attempt to rescue recent and contemporary British-Jewish experience from the dead hand of received wisdom.
Kahn-Harris is a sociologist, an activist, and an expert on heavy metal. Intended for the general reader and written in a punchy style, Everyday Jews invites us to revel in mundane aspects of Jewish life that, it is claimed, Jews mostly don’t discuss, and of which non-Jews probably aren’t aware. As a survey of the banal activities that Jews can get involved in, the book’s scope is impressively broad. It includes making “mediocre” music (Kahn-Harris’s view of the Maccabeats – google them), “eating food that is less delightful than it could be” (dry parev cookies, anyone?), praying in dilapidated synagogues, and working in any of the community’s innumerable bureaucracies, among many others.
Keith Kahn-Harris[Missing Credit]
Kahn-Harris’s enthusiasm for this sort of thing seems boundless. Everyday activities, he writes, such as organising the nuts and bolts of ritual observance might be “meaningless”, but they can confer “deep satisfaction, however thankless… the mechanics of doing can transcend the superficial purpose of what one does”. It is Zen and the art of synagogue maintenance.
So far, so genial. Yet Kahn-Harris is strikingly unsympathetic to a different tradition in Jewish thought, which is preoccupied with intellectually grandiose questions such as the nature of Jewish identity or the role of Jews in history. Commenting on a lecture by the author Howard Jacobson about the angst-ridden contribution of Jews to Western civilisation, Kahn-Harris turns catty: “The trouble is that… so much Jewish culture ends up giving a particular kind of Jew an outsize role in defining who Jews are… that kind of Jew is rarely one who does much everyday Jewish stuff, let alone one who does it with other Jews.”
He applies similar strictures to Norman Lebrecht, Stephen Fry, Alexei Sayle, and others, for their respective ruminations about Jewish identity. Dara Horn herself is criticised for being “crushingly serious”.
Although Kahn-Harris can stoop to personal arguments, he does have substantive points to make about Jewish identity-thinking, particularly the way it is bound up with the notion that the Jewish people have a special role to play in history, a mysterious, essential “purpose”. Kahn-Harris very explicitly rejects this idea in both its religious and secular manifestations, as the basis on which the drama of Jewish identity gets elevated above everyday Jewish practice. He proposes that Jews instead embrace the mindset of “doing for doing’s sake”.
That sounds like a reasonable challenge to the notion of Jews as a people with a purpose. It is not unprecedented. As one of the most interesting chapters in Everyday Jews points out, the history of Zionism is imbued with the desire for normalisation.
Ultimately, Kahn-Harris takes a dim view of nationalism as a vehicle for sustaining normality: in a historically remarkable reversal of perspectives, the diaspora seems to offer a better prospect for becoming “an everyday Jew… a normal Jew”.
There are, nevertheless, problems with the way that Kahn-Harris unpacks “doing for doing’s sake”, even in the diaspora context. Not only does he oppose the everyday to the supposed deep purpose of the Jewish people, but also to purposiveness in general. For example, a lengthy section on the Community Security Trust (CST) purports to show that combatting antisemitism is “only half the point” – the organisation acts as “a social club”, whose culture of doing things with other Jews is what “matters most”.
This disillusioned, ironic view of Jewish organisations seems to have deep roots in Kahn-Harris’s life story. He mentions being miserable in his teens at a Habonim summer camp, when he discovered that the movement’s ideological stance was “utterly irrelevant to the real business… frenzied socialising and coupling”. Lesson learnt? “Never again would [he] treat the stated purpose of Jewish youth activities as their actual purpose.”
It’s a revealing moment, suggesting that the impulse towards dropping the notion of purpose is born in powerlessness and disappointment. Indeed, nothing escapes the fairground mirror of irony that Kahn-Harris holds up to the Anglo-Jewry. The community itself might as well take for its distinctive purpose the organisation of supper quizzes, since no other group of people seems as devoted to this kind of gathering.
While Kahn-Harris does concede that trauma, emotion, and identity are not ”irrelevant” to the Jewish story, they matter to him mostly as inputs into the purpose-free business of doing things together. Even the atrocities of October 7 and the war in Gaza are seen in this light. He even-handedly notes the shock and horror felt by Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews, then details the “host of new organisations and projects” created by them as “feeling… is reproduced in practice”. It doesn’t matter that many of these projects seem bound for failure: what counts is the collaborative effort itself. It is hard to escape the conclusion that “doing for doing’s sake” is a counsel of despair.
Irony can be a lot of fun and a great psychological defence mechanism, but it can also be corrosive. Even those readers who join Kahn-Harris in relishing the supposed absurdity of it all will probably want to look elsewhere for a less stifling perspective.
Happily, other approaches to modern British-Jewish identity are available. Gavin Schaffer is an academic historian and An unorthodox history is a meticulous study of the community in the second half of the 20th century. Its objective is to show, with a hat tip to Horn, that contrary to popular narratives of decline, the community is in a state of “rude health”, although we might need to adjust some cherished notions to see it that way.
Gavin Schaffer[Missing Credit]
Schaffer’s approach is rigorously methodical. Each chapter addresses a fault line in Jewish identity, a point of contention that at first sight would seem to lead to unavoidable rupture and exclusion. Examples include, among others, the rise of progressive and Charedi Judaism, the place of queer Jews in the community, marrying out, aliyah, and Jewish messianism (as exemplified by Jews for Jesus).
In each case, using a wide range of material, Schaffer sets out the intellectual and emotional drivers for each side of the divide.
He then asks whether there is some middle ground, some way in which the opposition has historically been softened or even effaced.
The answer varies from case to case, but overall Schaffer makes a strong argument for the view that there has usually been more scope for agreement than initially meets the eye.
Everyday Jews: Why the Jewish People Are Not Who You Think They Are, by Keith Kahn-Harris
Icon Books
An unorthodox history: British Jews since 1945, by Gavin Schaffer
Manchester University Press
