How to be a Jew

“Turn to the side.”

I was 17 the first time I ever experienced overt anti-Semitism. Until then, I had a chaotic, scary and unstable childhood, but there was nothing that I ever considered to be anti-Semitic.

“Turn to the side, and show me your nose,” said the once-angelic choirboy star turned spotty teen, who was a classmate at my new boarding school. “You don’t look Jewish,” he concluded.

I was confused. Was that a good or a bad thing? I blushed and laughed it off, What else was there to do? I was 17 and had only ever been at girls’ schools, and these were not the kind of boys I had grown up with: safe, slightly dorky boys, with their dark hair and dark eyes, the ones who would hold you by the waist at bar mitzvahs and nervously sway to the music.

These were a totally alien race to me: full of sperm, bad skin and eyes that would suddenly snap up and leer at you like ‘Jaws’.

Not long after this encounter, there was another: the young, bequiffed scion of a famous family, previously educated at a prestigious public school, asking: “What’s the Holocaust?” in our Theatre Studies A-level class.

We were doing, the teacher had announced, a production of Arthur Miller’s ‘Playing For Time’, the tale of the women’s orchestra at Auschwitz.

I was baffled more than upset. This boy was my age and he didn’t know about the Holocaust?

I couldn’t remember a time when I didn’t know about the Holocaust. Being a Jew equalled the Holocaust; it was etched inside me.

There are no family members — that I know of — who perished in a concentration camp, thank G-d. Both sides of my family have been in London since, or just before, the early 1900s.

But the Holocaust was all up in my business: from the books I read, to the TV shows I watched (Remember ‘Bluebell’ on the BBC, anyone? I still remember that resistance traitor having her head shaved).

We discussed it all the time — as a kid, I once even asked my mother why the Jews claimed their Judaism even as they were being loaded onto the trucks like cattle. I would have pretended not to be Jewish, I proudly proclaimed (yes me, with my pitch black shock of thick hair. I am not a fast runner and would have been on the first wagon), which my mother — who had railed against the observant Judaism she grew up with — thought was very clever.

But the thing was, we were Jewish. You could rail against it all you wanted, but we just were.

I was born and grew up in north-west London, where the streets were paved with Jews. We were everywhere, buying smoked salmon in the local deli — “make sure it’s fresh and slightly dryer than normal, please”. Jews were in the sour tang of pickles hitting the roof of my mouth which topped the bridge rolls my grandma made for family teas.

They were in the fresh cream birthday cakes she ordered for us at Sherrards bakery in St John’s Wood and in the hundreds of chickens she roasted on Friday nights. They were in the jokes my grandpa made as he did the ‘Bloom Passover service’, which meant speed-reading fluent Hebrew through the Jews’ travails of 40 days and nights in the desert without having the slightest bit of yeast to hand, all while my grandma named the daubs of wine we made on our plates as we recited the plagues after her enemies (mostly her daughters’ ex-husbands).

And look, there we were on Hampstead High Street, buying singles in Our Price, the kids congregating outside the Tube station. Jews in their natural habitat.

My school was in the City of London. From seven to 14, it was a cosy blanket of Jews. We had Jewish assemblies once or twice a week and that would leave a huge echo in the Great Hall where the rest of the pupils sang ‘Jerusalem’ and recited the Lord’s Prayer as we Jews congregated and clambered over each other in a small classroom (doesn’t mean I can’t say the LP and belt out ‘Dear Lord and Father of Mankind’ with the best of them though).

For the rest of the time we all mingled together like bolshy puppies. We wore the same uniform, we stood for our teachers as they entered the classroom, curtsied for our headmistress and got chips on the way home.

The only one — one — time I could feel a glimpse of distaste about Judaism was when we were reading Esther Hautzig’s ‘The Endless Steppe’, the tale of a well to do Jewish family torn from their home and sent to work on the land in Siberia.

My English teacher, an extremely well-spoken lady, had me read aloud from the book. “My mama…” I read. “No, no, I think you’ll find it’s mah-maaa,” she intoned as if the Mitford sisters had brought their martinis and taffeta to Vilna.

“What?” I thought. “It’s ma-ma”, the small girl narrating the book already at home in my overly dramatic and imaginative head. I could feel how she spoke. Were there posh Brits in Poland? It was baffling, even to a 12-year-old. But I used her intonation, even though it has always stuck with me, like a bad wart. At least we were actually learning about Jewish history.

Then I left for another girls’ school across the city in South Kensington, a brave new world, where my sister and I were the only Jews in the hood. But still, it was London, we were multicultural, weren’t we, and my sweet new classmates, among them minor royalty and Arab heiresses, spent our time buying pains au chocolat in the nearby French boulangeries, sneaking out to Burger King and being shown how to put a condom on a banana by a well-meaning teacher amidst the encroaching AIDS pandemic.

Jews were not discussed.

But still, I went to cheder and attended yawningly dull high holy day services with my grandparents, where the chatter of the women in the gallery high above the men would often cause the rabbi to yell up and shush them as I lectured my grandma on feminism, and my grandpa below would use hand signals like an air traffic controller to tell us when to meet him outside.

I went on Israel tour after my GCSEs, so frantically nervous I almost had to be shoved on the plane, but had the time of my life. There were Jews everywhere, in every nook and cranny. A Holocaust survivor, her tattoo a faint grimace on her arm which glared up at us, gently spoke. We were confronted by the giant piles of shoes ripped off the Jews in the camps at Yad Vashem, sang Hebrew ditties around campfires and climbed Masada.

And then I went to boarding school for sixth form instead of staying in the safe womb of London. I wanted boys, I wanted freedom from my mother, who — bless her — could go 0–60 in mood swings and whose marks had more than once been left on my back. I wanted to do drama and write and this school looked like the answer.

But as soon as the car’s wheels reached the driveway of the old mansion, I realized we were not in north west London anymore, and there were no ruby red slippers to take me home.

While my sister, who had joined me, loved it. I was an outsider, and felt like a very small Jewish loner in the Surrey hills.

As for that play we put on? Well, its stars put on some truly shambolic Eastern European accents while I was an extra with a line or two, stuck on stage in a wooden bunk for the majority of the production.

My sister and I were the only ones off on Jewish holidays, and there was no frame of reference for the other kids. Though I tried to befriend them, it was clear that there was a gulf between us.

I floundered as home was not safe, school was not safe. Nothing felt safe. And being Jewish didn’t feel safe, for the first time in my life. It had always felt like home, you could make fun of it, blow a raspberry at it, but still come home.

And it wasn’t a lack of bagels. It was the way too that the teachers looked at me. I was ‘other’, I felt. There was a distrust that I couldn’t put my finger on.

But then came Manchester University and a sea change. Young Jews away from home for the first time and free to do as they pleased, as a tidal wave deposited them in this Northern city of raves, Take That, student bar Squirrels and Club Tropicana.

I was with Jews practically 24/7. We romanced and roamed through Manchester. I made non-Jewish friends on my course, but home was with the Jews and the girls whom I still consider sisters.

But — and there is a but — again, I was an outsider. How to be a Jew, I constantly wondered.

I was, by now, after all my different tail ends of schooling and upbringing, a half-Jew, it felt like. I was not Kosher, my Hebrew reading skills were non-existent, and when my university friends came over one Christmas, my mother had hung a wreath on the door and put up a tree — to their abject horror.

Even when I went to work on a Jewish camp in Pennsylvania the summer before university, I dated a blond boy who looked like he had come from the Hitler Youth and was the tallest of any staff there. “Trust you,” my grandma tutted when I got home, “to find the only Christian in a camp full of Jews.”

Put me in a room of Jews and I will instantly gravitate to them, like a beacon calling me. As it did at university. But still, I was not the same. I was other. My mother was dying of cancer and my father was on the first of his stays at Her Majesty’s Pleasure. I had turned up in Manchester with my hair dyed russet red, so where did I fit in?

I was not suburban, and I did not have a sprawling kitchen and a mum and dad at home.

One of my housemates once asked us a question: “If there was a war between Britain and Israel, who would you back? “Britain of course,” I replied, setting off a debate within the household.

When my mother died, the gulf only widened as the well-meaning mothers of my friends invited me into their homes for Friday nights and holidays, while I sat uncomfortable in my head, as it just showed me what I didn’t have.

How to be a Jew?

As I entered my 20s, I learned the Jewish boys I knew were not looking for ‘other’. Instead, they wanted some version of their mothers.

They did not want girls who had decided that the perfect career choice was a tabloid journalist, spending their time running around the country and jumping on planes. And I, in a fit of pique, decided I did not want them. I did not want a nice Jewish boy. I was still figuring out how to be a Jew.

And now.

I am a Jew. I will try to fight to be a Jew. I have found out on my own what it means to be the kind of Jew I want to be.

I have a wide range of friends — Jews and non Jews.

About two years ago, and back in London visiting from New York, I was having dinner and as I picked at my food, a friend of a friend turned to me and said, “I forgot you’re Jewish, turn to the side.”

My blood ran cold as she peered at me. “Your nose isn’t big at all.”

My throat tensed as a million different scenarios and words ran rampant inside my mind.

What should I say? “What the hell, you can’t say that” and ruin dinner? Get up and walk out?

Again, I said nothing.

The next day, I asked my Jewish friends if I should call up and say something to our mutual friend.

But, I added, all they will say is “Oh my G-d, don’t be ridiculous, so and so’s not anti-Semitic at all, they didn’t mean anything by it.” So what to do?

I left it, and as the world turns and the hot stinking breath of anti-Semitism hovers over us, I am pissed off at myself.

I should have said something. I should have stood up for myself. I am other — I like being other — everybody is other, aren’t we, when it boils down to it.

Over the past few years, I have watched others fight and wage war against the anti-Semites, against the ones who prove that the old tropes are never quite gone.

While sitting in my dentist’s chair in Manhattan in early 2019, we were discussing Ilhan Omar’s recent tweet about “the Benjamins baby”, in a reference to a song about $100 bills potentially suggesting Jews were buying political support.

It came up as she raged about Donald Trump and the Republicans and I replied by saying there were issues on both sides — bringing up Omar.

The Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota argued that the references were clear. “To resort to age-old stereotypes about Jews using money to buy influence is terrible, particularly in the year 2019 we should all know better,” Steve Hunegs, executive director of the JCRC said at the time.

Explaining my perspective, I argued that it was an old anti-Semitic trope. With her fingers and tools in my mouth, my dentist replied: “Don’t be ridiculous, she’s just quoting a rap song, those are rap lyrics.”

My bum clenched. Do I get up and go? I stayed. Again, ugh. What to do?

Omar apologized, tweeting: “Anti-Semitism is real and I am grateful for Jewish allies and colleagues who are educating me on the painful history of anti-Semitic tropes. My intention is never to offend my constituents or Jewish Americans as a whole.”

I never went back to that dentist.

How to be a Jew? Speak up and fight — and if someone asks you: never, ever turn to the side.

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