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Jonathan Freedland

By

Jonathan Freedland,

Jonathan Freedland

Opinion

War is not always the answer

August 28, 2014 11:30
2 min read

Perhaps it was my choice of holiday reading. The book that dominated my summer break was Howard Jacobson's exceptional and unsettling new novel, simply titled "J". The word "Jew" does not appear, yet that very absence is the book's haunting theme. He depicts a world in which a people once present appear to have been erased, though exactly "what happened, if it happened" - in the novel's repeated phrase -is left vague, especially to those living a couple of generations later.

It is dark and disturbing and unlike anything Jacobson has written before. Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, it would not be a shock if it brought the second victory in four years for Britain's greatest Jewish writer.

But it left me unnerved. Not least because the mood I'd left behind was already anxious. Anti-Jewish sentiment has surged in Europe, while in Britain the Community Security Trust reports that July was the second worst month for antisemitic incidents in 30 years.

For many, the apparently minor flap over the Tricycle Theatre's hosting of the UK Jewish Film Festival felt like an ominous tipping point. The Tricycle's insistence that the festival was only welcome if it cut all financial ties with the Israeli Embassy - a decision now, thankfully, reversed - seemed a realisation of long-held Jewish fears. Did this mean that Jewish participation in the cultural life of the country - and, remember, this was a festival of Jewish, not Israeli, cinema - would now be conditional on our first issuing a public disavowal of Israel?