One of Britain’s top novelists used a synagogue appearance marking Black History Month to urge the Jewish and black communities to show support for one another.

Ben Okri, who was the first black writer to win the Booker Prize with his novel The Famished Road in 1991, made his appeal at an event at the New North London Synagogue in London.

Mr Okri said figures in both communities had understood that they shared “a tradition of unjust suffering” and an understanding of “what it is to be unfairly judged”.
He told his audience: “We should not only understand one another, we should support one another.”

There was much “we can learn from one another,” he said.

The black community could learn from the Jewish community “the strength that you have in your togetherness,” he said. And also “the strength that you have in the way in which you are soaked, even when you are atheist, in the wisdom of your fathers and mothers”.

JeffGILBERT BenOkri 0 23

Okri's recently published book Every Leaf A Hallelujah

The black community was strong, he said, “but there is much division”.

“There is no division in the Jewish community?” his interlocuter, the synagogue’s rabbi, Jonathan Wittenberg, joked to audience laughter.

“It doesn’t look like it from the outside,” Mr Okri replied.

It was not the first time Mr Okri had spoken to members of the Masorti congregation. Two years ago he addressed a virtual pre-Shabbat service on the murder of George Floyd by police in the US.

But the main focus of the conversation between the two men this week was literature and spirituality rather than current affairs.

They discussed Mr Okri’s latest novel, The Last Gift of the Master Artists, and read from Every Leaf A Hallelujah, the “environmental fairy tale” he published last year — a work that clearly chimed with Rabbi Wittenberg, one of the leaders of EcoSynagogue in the UK.

When a member of the audience observed that there was a “deep connection” between the two men, which was “lovely to watch”, Mr Okri said, “We are spiritual brothers.”
Asked what should be done to build links between communities, Rabbi Wittenberg said,

“My instinct is to go for a deeper connection than the world of politics and to seek it within the domain of spirituality, tradition, story, myth.”

Asked after the event what he thought of the uproar over the antisemitic outbursts of the rapper Kanye West, Mr Okri said it was “very unfortunate that an influential figure like

Kanye West makes remarks like that about the Jewish community. I think it is to be highly regretted. I think it will be something he will look back on in the years to come as one of the really unfortunate turning points of his life. You open your mouth and you hurt a lot of people because you think you are in a position of invulnerability.”

It came, he believed, “from one of the disastrous aspects of success, a loss of humility” and also “from a poor understanding of the deep relations between the black and the Jewish communties and what we have in common”.