'A Zionist is a Jew with somewhere to live': An olah's observations while back in London - opinion

Tracy Emin’s bed is still unmade after all these years, the stained sheets screaming softly in the Eyal Ofer Concourse of the Tate Gallery on the banks of the River Thames.

I was first mesmerized by her scattered slippers and used sanitary products in London’s Charles Saatchi Gallery decades ago, but the settings resonated more this time: Jews funded both exhibition spaces.

In today’s upside-down Jew-bashing reality, one wonders whether patrons of Emin’s art care that it’s Jewish cash enabling their culture.

Jew-bashing is the story of the hour, yet if you didn’t know better, London doesn’t seem, on the surface, terribly different.

Jews are still singing zmirot, kosher-food joints are flourishing, and Jewish schools have waiting lists.

But scratch the surface, and it’s not so fabulous: Jewish pupils are often clamoring for places in more heimish surroundings as they’ve been bullied in fancier public schools, Jewish doctors tell of being boycotted and maligned, and students are not feeling safe on campus.

IT ALL feels hard to grasp. England last chucked out its Jews in 1290, when King Edward I issued his Edict of Expulsion (probably on Tisha B’Av, and definitely the only mass expulsion from Albion, ever).

Since Oliver Cromwell readmitted them almost 400 years later, Jews have lived comfortably in England’s pleasant climes, in peace and prosperity.

No more. And who better to articulate the astonishment, the outrage, the fear, than Howard Jacobson, arguably the greatest Jewish writer alive today?

Called “the British Philip Roth,” Jacobson prefers to be known as “the Jewish Jane Austen.” Either way, I would award him the Nobel Prize for literature, but good luck with that in these crazy times.

Once a sought-after and hugely respected speaker at literary festivals from Hay-on-Wye to Edinburgh, he was not invited this year, although he did talk about Howl at the Bath and Oxford Festivals.

He was also warmly welcomed, obviously, at London’s Jewish Book Week. So far, no American publishers have picked up his brilliant new novel about how it feels to be a Jew in London today, in the aftermath of Oct. 7.

In a pretty impressive example of the Jewish tribe coming through for each other, Saul Bellow’s son is now set to publish Howl stateside.

Howl is not a happy read, although Ferdinand Draxler, the floundering primary school headmaster protagonist, is often hilariously confused.

Jacobson believes that comedy is a form of exorcism; his protagonist has done a thesis on Shakespeare’s clowns and their healing properties.

It happened to me – I giggled out loud on the Tube, and then hastily checked myself for visible signs of my nationality: no Star of David, no passport in sight, and reading on a Kindle – which could offend nobody.

I’m not saying that I’d have been bludgeoned at the Regent’s Street station had anyone recognized that I was reading a Jewish book (gasp!), but the mere fact that it fleetingly crossed my mind seemed insane. Don’t you agree?

YET, SOHO is still a magical space, and Jews are still allowed to ensconce themselves in the Dean Street Townhouse, where I met Jacobson for a breakfast to remember, and not only because of the berry-granola in coconut yogurt.

The man is a writer and a raconteur, a Man Booker Prize winner (for The Finkler Question, which examines all things Jewish and all types of Jews), a university lecturer, journalist, and two-time winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction.

He has also scripted and appeared in numerous TV programs, but most of all, he is a mensch.

And a worried one, at that.

“And we’re all thinking of leaving Israel,” I say, over my second cappuccino. “We see no future there if Netanyahu gets in again. Our hot topic is whether our kids have foreign passports.”

“We mustn’t let Netanyahu turn us against the whole Zionist enterprise,” he muses, and I suddenly see that he is right. “We should be saying that Zionism is tragic now, and it’s just heartbreaking that sometimes it feels as if the original dream is dead, but we have to know the whole history of the country, and understand the big picture.”

“A Zionist is a Jew with somewhere to live,” says one of the characters in Howl, and, as I take notes in the sedate setting in Soho, I feel my optimism and love for the holy land flooding back.

Jacobson is not only a powerful voice of mainstream Jews; his eloquence seems to reignite my feelings of peoplehood and belonging to where you just know you want to be.

Israel is greater than this present coalition of shame. We will replace our government, heal the harm they are wreaking, and get our groove back. A Zionist is a Jew with somewhere to live, and how lucky are we to have somewhere to live.

Her then-boyfriend called her late on October 6 to come down to the Nova Festival, where he was working. By chance, he changed the plan as she was leaving for the South; he was needed at a different music festival, and she joined him there instead.

She loves living by the sea, loves the way her career is unfolding here, and loves her life. She’s convinced the government will change and all will be well. She also hopes her family will follow her to the Holy Land soon.

Life is so hard here. And August seems even harder, with mosquitoes and mad heat and bored kids and haredim blocking the roads, chanting “War.”

But I don’t know daughters here who feel “exhilarated” over Oct. 7, and Jews are not canceled here from our culture. In a matter of weeks, we will change our priorities and breathe again.

And if giants like Jacobson want to join us, welcome. We will be worthy. ■