25 min

(((David Aaronovitch))‪)‬ JDOV

    • Judaism

David Aaronovitch’s family were atheists and their faith was Marxism. At the same time, he knew he was “half Jewish”, but he didn’t know what this meant. All in all, he imagined his Jewishness to be like his Irishness – a story of the past, exotic but irrelevant. But in fact, it hasn’t been irrelevant, far from it. In this talk, David explains how, whilst he was happy to cherry-pick from this identity – if there was anything he particularly liked about Jewishness, he would lay claim to it – there was one major problem: he could cherry-pick the Jewishness, but the anti-Semitism picked him.

Aaronovitch is a columnist for the Jewish Chronicle and The Times, and author of three works of non-fiction

David Aaronovitch’s family were atheists and their faith was Marxism. At the same time, he knew he was “half Jewish”, but he didn’t know what this meant. All in all, he imagined his Jewishness to be like his Irishness – a story of the past, exotic but irrelevant. But in fact, it hasn’t been irrelevant, far from it. In this talk, David explains how, whilst he was happy to cherry-pick from this identity – if there was anything he particularly liked about Jewishness, he would lay claim to it – there was one major problem: he could cherry-pick the Jewishness, but the anti-Semitism picked him.

Aaronovitch is a columnist for the Jewish Chronicle and The Times, and author of three works of non-fiction

25 min