On Marriage

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DB: In the introduction to my book I’m interested in whether there’s much of a difference, really, between a word that you whisper – which tends to be the British way – and one that you’re required to shout out – in a declamatory, American way. And, actually, during a period in British politics – when the word ‘Jew’ is trending on Twitter and people are googling the word ‘Jew’ and looking probably in all sorts of insalubrious places to find out what Jews are up to –, you have a very strong wish and desire to speak to other people going through the same thing, in a somewhat contained and close setting. EV: The point that you’re making in your book Feeling Jewish : A Book for Just About Anyone (2017), that Jewishness is kind of short-hand for urbanism, for modernity, in some kind of way.

They feel nobody sees the brilliance that goes into creating comedy, and how deep and wise what they’re saying is in comic form. There’s almost nobody I meet these days where I can’t very quickly detect the form their resentment takes – that is, the way in which they feel they’re not being heard, as if they’re being somehow silenced or marginalised, or as if their case isn’t permitted. JA: But again, not as much as in America – the cool, young, sort of ‘hipster Judaism’ that is huge in America.At the core of OCLW's new programme on Writing Jewish Women's Lives, our new series of afternoon literary seminars are a chance to discuss books by and about Jewish women. EV: When we talked to Ronald Harwood, he said England was the most welcoming country, that he has never experienced antisemitism. She pushes at the boundaries of marriage as a framework for conceiving of ourselves in relation to others .

And for me also it’s about the shared nature of feelings – they’re not private, and they shouldn’t be bound up with an ideology of privacy and property. And yet in saying that, they didn’t realise the awful implication of their words, which was that they took Shylock to be not an anti-Semitic representation of a Jew, but a realistic one. AH: Also, making fun of yourself… At the conference “Contemporary British-Jewish Cultures” at Bangor University this month (March 2018) many speakers described this idea as something inherently Jewish, too. The feeling of being European has arisen, I think, in particular amongst Jews in this country, partly because some of them, since the Referendum, have discovered that they can go and get passports – from Germany, Poland. For if the word ‘Jew’ is not fitting in comfortably with other words, if there’s a kind of pause before the word, a momentary decision about how to utter it exactly, then that tells us something.Baum is an erudite and entertaining guide through the landscape of marriage, bringing a lively intellectual rigour to changing attitudes on matters of religion, feminism, parenting and sexuality. So as they saw it, their choice was between condemning him for being bad, or showing a liberal understanding of why he turned out so bad.