I am, I suppose, a non-Jewish Jew. I was educated at a minor English public school, I do not attend synagogue, I do not pray to God, and I am engaged to a practising Christian. (Any children we have will attend synagogue, and learn Hebrew at his insistence, not mine; he talks about something called "Dual Covenant Theology" and would prefer an alien God to a non-existent one).
At an English public school, a Jew is always an outsider; certainly it was a talking point and I was called "Jew!" quite often, more in bewilderment than hatred. And this gives one a peculiar feeling of watchfulness and impermanence, and also a desire to name yourself a Jew, partly because it irritates others so much.
My Jewishness - Judaism is too devout a word - feels like an exotic luxury, a gift I do not have to work for. I worship Freud, not a sky fairy, and although I love the stories of the Torah, the central calling of religion eludes me. I cannot give God a name, although I do not tend to atheism; to say there is nothing seems more foolish to me that saying there is something - and it is exactly like this. (The specificity of religion bewilders me - how can one be so certain? Agnosticism seems the only sensible option.)
Through this Jewishness, I feel connected to a wondrous intellectual tradition, breathtaking in its depth and richness; the tradition that created psychoanalysis, political movements that changed the world and heart-breaking literature. I have a tribe, with cousins in every country, and a homeland - should I need it - in the desert. I have the Jewish comic tradition - I often think I am one of Woody Allen's paranoid Jews - and, through my Jewish historian mother, a feel of deep connection with the Jews who came before. When I was a child, I thought I could hear their voices, when I read Singer, I see them.
