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A history of Mel Brooks as a ‘disobedient Jew’
(JTA) — Jeremy Dauber subtitles his new biography of Mel Brooks “Disobedient Jew.” It’s a phrase that captures two indivisible aspects of the 96-year-old director, actor, producer and songwriter.
The “Jew” is obvious. Born Melvin Kaminsky in Brooklyn in 1926, Brooks channeled the Yiddish accents and Jewish sensibilities of his old neighborhoods into characters like the 2000 Year Old Man — a comedy routine he worked up with his friend, the writer and director Carl Reiner. He worked Jewish obsessions into films like 1967’s “The Producers,” which features two scheming Jewish characters who stage a sympathetic Broadway musical about Hitler in order to bilk their investors.
Brooks’ signature move is to inject Jews into every aspect of human history and culture, which can be seen in the forthcoming Hulu series “History of the World, Part II.” A sequel to his 1981 film, “History of the World, Part I,” it parodies historical episodes in a style he honed as a writer on 1950s television programs such as “Your Show of Shows,” whose writers’ rooms were stocked with a galaxy of striving Jewish comedy writers just like him.
The “Disobedient” part describes Brooks’ relationship to a movie industry that he conquered starting in the early 1970s. In a series of parodies of classic movie genres — the Western in “Blazing Saddles,” the horror movie in “Young Frankenstein,” Alfred Hitchcock in “High Anxiety — he would gently, sometimes crudely and always lovingly bite the hand that was feeding him quite nicely: In 1976, he was fifth on the list of top 10 box office attractions, just behind Clint Eastwood.
Dauber describes the parody Brooks mastered as “nothing less than the essential statement of American Jewish tension between them and us, culturally speaking; between affection for the mainstream and alienation from it.”
Dauber is professor of Jewish literature and American studies at Columbia University, whose previous books include “Jewish Comedy” and “American Comics: A History.” “Mel Brooks: Disobedient Jew” is part of the Jewish Lives series of brief interpretative biographies from Yale University Press.
Dauber and I spoke about why America fell for a self-described “spectacular Jew” from Brooklyn, Brooks’ lifelong engagement with the Holocaust, and why “Young Frankenstein” may be Brooks’ most Jewish movie.
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: “History of the World, Part II” comes out March 6. “History of the World, Part I” may not be in the top tier of Brooks films, but it seems to touch on so many aspects of his career that you trace in your book: the parody of classic movie forms, the musical comedy, injecting Jews into every aspect of human civilization, and the anything-for-a-laugh sensibility.
Jeremy Dauber: I agree. There’s the one thing that really brings it home, and it’s probably the most famous or infamous scene from the film. That’s the Spanish Inquisition scene. You have Brooks sort of probing the limits of bad taste. He had done that most famously in “The Producers” with its Nazi kickline, but here he takes the same idea — that one of the ways that you attack antisemitism is through ridicule — and turns the persecution of the Jews into a big musical number. It’s his love of music and dance. But the thing that’s almost the most interesting about this is that he takes on the role of the Torquemada character.
As his henchman sing and dance and the Jews face torture, the Brooklyn-born Jew plays the Catholic friar who tormented the Jews.
That’s right. And what’s the crime that he accuses the Jews of? “Don‘t be boring! Don‘t be dull!” That’s the worst thing that you can be. It’s his way of saying, “If I have a religion, you know, it is show business.”
His fascination with showbiz seems inseparable from his Jewishness, as if being a showbiz Jew is a denomination in its own right.
One of my favorite lines of his is when he marries [actress] Anne Bancroft, who of course is not Jewish. And he says, “She doesn’t have to convert: She’s a star.” If you’re a star, if you’re a celebrity, you’re kind of in your own firmament faith-wise, and so it’s okay. Showbiz is this faith. But it is very Jewish, because show business is a way to acceptance. It’s a way that America can love him as a Jew, as Mel Brooks, as a kid from the outer boroughs who can grow up to marry Anne Bancroft.
Jeremy Dauber is the author of “Mel Brooks: Disobedient Jew” (Yale University Press)
You write early on that “Mel Brooks, more than any other single figure, symbolizes the Jewish perspective on and contribution to American mass entertainment.” On one foot, can you expand on that?
Jews understand that there’s a path to success and that being embraced by a culture means learning about it, immersing yourself in it, being so deeply involved in it that you understand it and master it. But simultaneously, you’re doing that as a kind of outsider. You’re always not quite in it, even though you’re of it in some deep way. In some ways, it’s the apotheosis of what Brooks does, which is being a parodist. In order to be the kind of parodist that Mel Brooks is, you have to be acutely attuned to every aspect of the cultural medium that you’re parodying. You have to know it inside and outside and backwards and forwards. And Brooks certainly does, but at the same time you have to be able to sort of step outside of it and say, you know, “Well, I’m watching a Western, but come on, what’s going on with these guys? Like why doesn’t anyone ever, you know, pass gas after eating so many beans?”
You have this great phrase, that to be an American Jew is to be part of the “loyal opposition.”
That’s right. Brooks at his best is always kind of poking and prodding at convention, but loyally. He’s not like the countercultural figures of his day. He’s a studio guy. He’s really within the system, but is poking at the system as well.
You wrote in that vein about his 1963 short film, “The Critic,” which won him an Oscar. Brooks plays an old Jewish man making fun of an art film.
On the one hand, he’s doing it in the voice of one of his older Jewish relatives, the Jewish generation with an Eastern European accent, to make fun of these kinds of intellectuals. He’s trying to channel the everyman’s response to high art. “What is this I’m watching? I don’t understand this at all.” On the other hand, Brooks is much more intellectual than he’s often given credit for.
For me the paradox of Brooks’ career is conveyed in a phrase that appears a couple of times in the book: “too Jewish.” The irony is that the more he leaned into his Jewishness, the more successful he got, starting with the “2000 Year Old Man” character, in which he channels Yiddish dialect in a series of wildly successful comedy albums with his friend Carl Reiner. How do you explain America’s embrace of these extremely ethnic tropes?
Brooks’ great motion pictures of the late 1960s and 1970s sort of track with America’s embrace of Jewishness. You have “The Graduate,” which came out at around the same time as “The Producers,” and which showed that someone like Dustin Hoffman can be a leading man. It doesn’t have to be a Robert Redford. You have Allan Sherman and all these popular Jewish comedians. You have “Fiddler on the Roof” becoming one of Broadway’s biggest hits. That gives Brooks license to kind of jump in with both feet. In the 1950s, writing on “The Show of Shows” for Sid Caesar, the Jewishness was there but in a very kind of hidden way. Whereas, it’s very hard to watch the 2000 Year Old Man and say, well, that’s not a Jewish product.
What he also avoided — and here I will contrast him with the novelist Philip Roth — were accusations that he was “bad for the Jews.” Philip Roth was told that his negative portrayals of Jewish characters was embarrassing the Jews in front of the gentiles, but for some reason, I don’t remember anyone complaining even though the Max Bialystock character in “The Producers” can be fairly described as a conniving Jew. What made Brooks’ ethnic comedy more palatable to other Jews?
“The Producers” had a lot of pushback, but for a lot of other reasons.
I guess people had enough to deal with when he staged a musical comedy about Hitler.
Exactly. But the other part is that his biggest films are not as explicitly Jewish as something like Roth’s novel “Portnoy’s Complaint.” I actually think “Young Frankenstein” is one of the most Jewish movies that Mel Brooks ever made, but you’re not going to watch “Young Frankenstein” and say, wow, there are Jews all over the place here.
What about “Young Frankenstein,” a parody of classic horror movies, seems quintessentially Jewish?
The script, which is a lot of Gene Wilder and not just Mel Brooks, is really about someone saying, “You know, I don’t have this heritage — I’m trying to fit in with everybody else. My name is Dr. FRAHNK-en-shteen.” And then people say, “No, this is your heritage. You are Dr. Frankenstein.” [Wilder’s character realizes] “it is my heritage, and I’m embracing it. And I’m Frankenstein. And you may find that monstrous but that’s your business.” It’s about assimilation and embracing who you are.
And of course, Wilder as Dr. Frankenstein is unmistakably Jewish, even when he plays a cowboy in “Blazing Saddles.”
Right. Again, by the mid-’70s, you know, you have Gene Wilder and Elliot Gould and Dustin Hoffman, all Jews, in leading roles. “Young Frankenstein” ends up being a movie about coming home and embracing identity, which is playing itself out a lot in American Jewish culture in the 1970s.
I guess I have to go back and watch it for the 14th time with a different point of view.
That’s the fun part of my job.
You talk about what’s happening at the same time as Brooks’ huge success, which is, although he’s a little younger, the emergence of Woody Allen. You describe Brooks and Woody Allen as the voice of American Jewish comedy, but in very different ways. What are the major differences?
Gene Wilder, who worked with both of them, says that working with Allen is like lighting these tiny little candles, and with Brooks, you’re making big atom bombs. The critical knock against Brooks was that he was much more interested in the joke than the story. And I think with the exception maybe of “Young Frankenstein” there’s a lot of truth to that. The jokes are phenomenal, so that’s fine. Allen pretty quickly moved towards a much more narrative kind of film, and so began to be seen as this incredibly intellectual figure. In real life, Allen always claimed that he wasn’t nearly as intellectual as everyone thought, while Brooks had many more kinds of intellectual ambitions than the movie career that he had. There is a counterfactual world in which “The 12 Chairs,” his 1970 movie based on a novel by two Russian Jewish novelists and which nobody talks about, makes a ton of money.
Instead, it bombs, and he makes “Blazing Saddles,” which works out very well for everybody.
Although he does create Brooksfilms, and produces more narrative, serious-minded films like “The Elephant Man” and “84 Charing Cross Road.”
Right, and decides that if he puts his name on these as a director, they’re going to be rejected out of hand. There is a shelf of scholarship on Woody Allen, but if you look at who had influence on America in terms of box office and popularity, it’s Brooks winning in a walk.
You also mention Brooks and Steven Spielberg in the same sentence. Why do they belong together?
Partly because they had huge popular success in the mid-’70s. Brooks is a generation older, but they are hitting their cinematic success at the same time. And they are both movie fans.
Which comes out in their work — Brooks in his film parodies and Spielberg in the films that echo the films he loved as kid.
Until maybe his remake of “West Side Story,” Spielberg is not really a theater guy in the way that Brooks is, when success meant to make it on Broadway. When Brooks was winning all those Tonys in 2001 for the Broadway musical version of “The Producers,” it may have been almost more meaningful for his 5-year-old, or 7- or 8-year-old self than making his incredibly popular pictures.
You also write about Brooks being a small “c” conservative, a bit of a square. Which I think will surprise people who think about the fart jokes and the peepee jokes and all that stuff. And by square, I mean, kind of old showbizzy, even a little prudish sometimes.
I think that’s right. There’s a great moment that I quote at the end of the book where they are trying out the musical version of “The Producers,” and they want to put the word “f–k” in and Brooks is like, “I don’t know if we can do that on Broadway,” and Nathan Lane is like, “Have we met? You’re Mel Brooks!” He’s a 1950s guy.
Another place where this kind of conservatism comes in is when you compare him to other comedians of the 1950s and ’60s — the so-called “sick comics” like Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl who were pushing the envelope in terms of subject matter and politics. He wasn’t part of that. He was part of Hollywood. He was trying to make it in network television.
There is an interview in that era when he complained that people who are writing for television are not “dangerous.” Meanwhile, he himself was writing for television. But I think it’s fair to say that “The Producers” was really something different. You didn’t have to be Jewish to be offended by “The Producers.” But as we were saying before, he is more of the loyal opposition, rather than sort of truly out there. He’s not making “Easy Rider.”
An exhibit space at the Museum of Broadway evokes the scenery from the Mel Brooks musical “The Producers.” (NYJW)
“The Producers” is part of Brooks’ lifelong gambit of mocking the Nazis, I think starting when he would sing anti-Hitler songs as a GI in Europe at the tail end of World War II. Later he would remake Jack Benny’s World War II-era anti-Nazi comedy, “To Be or Not to Be.” And then there is the quick “Hitler on Ice” gag in “History of the World, Part I.” Brooks always maintains that mocking Nazis is the ultimate revenge on them, while you note that Woody Allen in “Manhattan” makes almost the opposite argument: that the way to fight white supremacists is with bricks and baseball bats. Did you come down on one side or the other?
To add just a twinge of complication is the fact that Brooks actually fought Nazis, and also had a brother who was shot down in combat. So for me to sit in moral judgment on anybody who fought in World War II is not a place that I want to be. What’s interesting is that Brooks makes a lot of these statements over the course of a career in which Nazism is done, in the past, defeated. Tragically, the events of the last number of years made white supremacy and neo-Nazism a live question again. When “The Producers” was staged as a musical in the early 21st century, people could say, “Okay, Nazism’s time has passed.” It’s not clear to me that we would restage “The Producers” now as a musical on Broadway, when just last week you had actual neo-Nazis handing out their literature outside a Broadway show. It would certainly be a lot more laden than it was in 2001.
Time also caught up with Brooks in his depiction of LGBT characters. Gay characters are the punchlines in “The Producers” and “Blazing Saddles” in ways that have not aged well. But you also note how both movies are about two men who love each other, to the exclusion of women.
There’s an emotive component to him about these male relationships. Bialystok and Bloom [the protagonists in “The Producers”] is a kind of love story. One of the interesting things is that as it became comparatively more comfortable for gay men to live their truth in society and in Hollywood, there was an evolution. In that remake of “To Be or Not to Be,” there is a much more sympathetic gay character who’s not stereotypical.
What other aspects of Brooks’ Jewishness have we not touched upon? For instance, he’s not particularly interested in Judaism as a religion, and ritual and theology rarely come up in his films, even to be mocked.
It’s not something that he’s particularly interested in. To him, being Jewish is a voice and a language. From the beginning of his career the voice is there. What he’s saying in these accents is that this is Jewish history working through me. It is, admittedly, a very narrow slice of Jewish history.
The first- and second-generation children of Jewish immigrants growing up in Brooklyn neighborhoods that were overwhelmingly Jewish.
It was a Jewishness that was aspirational. It was intellectual. It was a musical Jewishness. It was not in the way we use this phrase now, but it was a cultural Jewishness. It was not a synagogue Jewishness or a theological Jewishness. But of course he is Jewish, deeply Jewish. He couldn’t be anything else. And so he didn’t, and thank God for that.
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The post A history of Mel Brooks as a ‘disobedient Jew’ appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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The Iran War: Peace Through Strength
Mojtaba Khamenei, the second son of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, visits Hezbollah’s office in Tehran, Iran, Oct. 1, 2024. Photo: Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS
George Washington once observed, “To be prepared for war is one of the most effective means of preserving peace.” And as it turns out, sometimes the best way to preserve peace is to go to war — and finish the job.
Until October 2023, Israel — and, to a large extent, the United States as well — operated under a doctrine that seemed sensible enough: avoid war whenever possible, and when provoked, respond in a limited, carefully measured way.
When rockets were fired, Israel retaliated just enough to signal displeasure. When terrorist leaders threatened destruction, their words were dismissed as overheated rhetoric, aimed at rallying an eager audience of haters rather than signaling an intention to wage war. And when enemies amassed weapons, the assumption was that overwhelming military superiority would deter their use.
The theory behind this approach was simple. Escalation is dangerous, and war is costly — financially and, of course, in human lives. Restraint, it was believed, would keep life relatively stable. Israel responded when necessary, but always carefully, operating on the assumption that a rap on the knuckles would be enough to signal that continuing attacks was a bad idea.
The problem, as October 7 revealed with horrifying clarity, is that not every enemy shares this logic. For some enemies, it isn’t about equilibrium or stability; it’s about inflicting violence on those you hate — again and again, without pause or restraint.
For decades, Israel’s main adversaries — Hamas, Hezbollah, and above all the Iranian regime — made their intentions clear. Their slogans were blunt: “Death to Israel,” “Death to America.” Israel, like much of the West, preferred to believe these words were exaggerations, not literal plans.
And so life went on. Gaza was tolerated as a hostile enclave, and every so often Israel “mowed the lawn.” Hezbollah, entrenched on Israel’s northern border with tens of thousands of missiles, was considered a threat that would never fully materialize. Iran, distant and absorbed in its own problems, was seen as dangerous but manageable.
The hope was that monitoring, occasional strikes, persistent warnings about a nuclear Iran, and deterrence would prevent catastrophe.
Then came October 7. The brutal massacre on Israel’s southwestern border shattered those assumptions. The belief that terror groups and their backers could be contained collapsed overnight. The idea that economic incentives or agreements might moderate radical regimes suddenly looked naïve.
Israel — and under President Trump, the United States as well — realized something fundamental: you cannot coexist with movements or regimes whose very purpose is your destruction. The rules of the game have changed.
The new doctrine is simple: if terrorists and radicals are running for their lives, they cannot threaten yours. When those plotting your destruction are forced onto the defensive, their ability to act collapses.
Over the past two years, the consequences of this shift have been dramatic. Hamas’s military structure has been dismantled and its leaders eliminated. Hezbollah’s leadership was taken out, and much of its vast missile arsenal destroyed.
And now, in a stunning development few would have imagined possible even a month ago, the Iranian regime itself has suffered devastating blows — its supreme leader eliminated in a precision strike and the IRGC crippled.
For decades Iran acted as the conductor of the anti-Israel, anti-America orchestra, funding and arming terror movements across the region while feverishly pursuing a nuclear weapon. The regime assumed it could operate safely behind its proxies, directing violence from afar while remaining immune to consequences at home. That illusion has now been shattered.
What Israel has finally rediscovered is an ancient truth: when there is a serious threat, delay is dangerous. It must be confronted quickly and decisively. This principle is not only a lesson from modern security doctrine; it has deep roots in Jewish tradition, vividly illustrated in Parshat Ki Tisa.
The central drama of this portion is the catastrophic episode of the Golden Calf. After forty days of waiting for Moses to descend from Mount Sinai, something shifts in the Israelite camp. Egged on by the pagan hangers-on who joined the Israelites during the Exodus, the people demand a replacement leader, and within hours they have constructed a golden idol.
Interestingly, most of the nation did not actively participate. They stood on the sidelines as this shocking desecration of the covenant with God unfolded before them. Perhaps they assumed it didn’t really affect them — that life could continue as normal as long as the upheaval remained confined to a relatively small group.
But when Moses descends the mountain and sees what has happened, the Torah describes an extraordinary sequence of events. Moses does not attempt to “mow the lawn.” He does not deliver a carefully calibrated response. He does not negotiate with the idolaters or seek a diplomatic compromise. Instead, he acts with stunning decisiveness.
First he shatters the tablets. Then he completely destroys the calf, grinding it into powder and scattering it on water. Then he confronts the people and demands that they make an immediate choice (Ex. 32:26): מִי לַה׳ אֵלָי — “Whoever is for God, join me.”
No equivocation, no wishy-washy middle ground: you are either with me or against me. The tribe of Levi rallies to him, and the rebellion is crushed before it can spread any further and cause irrevocable damage.
Commentators emphasize that Moses’ actions were not impulsive rage but deliberate leadership. The Ramban explains that breaking the tablets was meant to shock the nation into grasping the gravity of the situation.
Rav Hirsch observes that Moses’ call eliminated ambiguity: in moments of existential crisis, neutrality is impossible — one must choose. The Sforno adds that swift punishment of the instigators prevented the sin from becoming normalized. Moses understood what history repeatedly confirms: some crises must be confronted decisively.
Had Moses hesitated, what began as a limited aberration — serious though it was — might have metastasized into something far worse. If he had attempted compromise, or even hinted that the problem could be contained, the rot would have set in, and before long everything might have collapsed.
Instead, decisive action restored clarity. The Golden Calf was destroyed. Those who built it were eliminated. And then the covenant was renewed with a second set of tablets. The lesson is unmistakable: destructive forces must be confronted with overwhelming force before it is too late.
That pattern — crisis, decisive response, and renewal — recurs throughout Jewish history. In our own time there have been painful moments of reckoning. As a result, both the Western world in general and Israel in particular have had to rediscover the necessity of strength.
For far too long, the United States and Israel hoped that a cautious approach toward Iran and its proxies would stabilize the region. But peace and tranquility are not built on illusions. When a regime like Iran spends decades arming itself and its proxies while openly proclaiming genocidal ambitions, those ambitions cannot be ignored. If they are not confronted, the threat only grows — and eventually leads to disaster.
The war against Iran — aptly codenamed “Epic Fury” — may well be seen as a turning point. It marked the moment when the strategic assumptions that shaped the Middle East for decades were finally set aside.
The Jewish people learned long ago that survival demands difficult decisions and decisive leadership. For a time Israel drifted away from that mindset. But the ancient lesson still resonates — and has now returned with renewed conviction.
The lesson is clear: when those who threaten your destruction are confronted with resolve and strength, they can be defeated.
The author is a rabbi in Beverly Hills, California.
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Mahmoud Abbas Gave Direct Orders to Name Hall After Palestinian Hitler Ally
The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, meets with Adolf Hitler in 1941. Photo: German Federal Archives via Wikimedia Commons.
During World War II, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin Al-Husseini was a Nazi ally and an associate of Hitler, living in Germany from 1941 until the war’s end — and receiving funding from the Nazi government.
The Mufti also led the lethal 1936-1939 Arab Revolt, in which at least 400 Jews were murdered.
Now the Palestinian Authority (PA) has built and named a public hall after Al-Husseini — and none other than PA leader Mahmoud Abbas himself instructed PA officials about the naming, thereby making a public statement about which historical values the PA chooses to uphold.
When laying the building’s cornerstone, PA officials stressed that the naming of the hall is “out of loyalty to the great figures of our people”:
Text on sign: “Under the auspices of His Honor President
Mahmoud Abbas, may Allah protect him
President of the State of Palestine
His Honor Jericho and Jordan Valley District Governor Dr. Hussein Hamayel
And His Honor Jericho Mayor Mr. Abd Al-Karim Sidr
laid the cornerstone for the Mufti Haj Amin Al-Husseini Hall”
Under the auspices of [PA] President Mahmoud Abbas, yesterday, Sunday, [Feb. 15, 2026,] Jericho and Jordan Valley District Governor Hussein Hamayel and Jericho Mayor Abd Al-Karim Sidr laid the cornerstone for the Mufti Haj Amin Al-Husseini Multi-Purpose Hall …District Governor Hamayel emphasized that the laying of the cornerstone was done out of loyalty to the great figures of our people, and according to direct instructions from President [Abbas] regarding the need to commemorate the memory of the leaders and fighters. [emphasis added]
[Official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Feb. 16, 2026]
Deciding to put a specific person’s name on a public building is a deliberate statement of values. By elevating an individual like Nazi ally Al-Husseini, Abbas and the PA aren’t just labeling a hall — they are officially endorsing Al-Husseini as a hero for the entire community.
Haj Amin Al-Husseini was also featured at a PA event held under the auspices of PA Prime Minister Muhammad Mustafa, with numerous PA and Fatah officials in attendance, during the marking of the 150th anniversary of the private, coeducational Catholic school Collège des Frères in Jerusalem.
On a huge screen, organizers displayed an image of Al-Husseini. Al-Husseini was on Yugoslavia’s list of wanted war criminals, and was responsible for a Muslim SS division that murdered thousands of Serbs and Croats. When the Nazis offered to free some Jewish children, Al-Husseini fought against their release, and as a result, 5,000 children were sent to the gas chambers.
The author is a contributor to Palestinian Media Watch, where a version of this story first appeared.
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I First Experienced Antisemitism at Six Years Old; But We Must Never Let Hate Win
An Oxford student is seen chanting hateful slogans at Jews, during a pro-Palestinian march in central London, an incident captured on viral video that has drawn widespread condemnation. Photo: Screenshot
When I was six years old, my father founded Carmel College, and moved the family into the English countryside west of London. My father’s school initially only took pupils of a certain age. So, I was sent to a local Church of England village school with one teacher, located just outside the Carmel estate.
For the first time, I became aware of Christian antagonism when I was surrounded by other pupils, bullied, and told that I had killed Jesus. Even at six-years old, I had a mind of my own, and told off the other children. The teacher was furious, got in touch with my father, and insisted that he remove me from the school. Instead, he arranged for home schooling until I was able to join Carmel College.
Several years later, during school holidays, I would walk the three miles from the school to Wallingford, the nearest town, with enough pocket money to buy a ticket to the local cinema. When I got there, the manager told me that the price had gone up, and I didn’t have enough money to get in. I replied that I thought this was unfair and that as I had walked all this way, perhaps he could make an exception. But he replied that since I was a Jew, I should know all about money, because that’s all that mattered to Jews. It was another incident that reinforced my awareness that we were different and not very popular.
A few years later, when I was old enough to play on the school soccer team, we often went to play against non-Jewish schools. In almost every case, either our opponents or the local spectators would abuse us for being Jewish and often played rough either to test us or to express their antagonism. When I mentioned this to my father his response, surprisingly, was simply to tell us to repay them in kind.
The first debate I participated in at Cambridge University in the Union was on the biased subject of whether the Jews had any right to “take” the state of “Palestine” from the Arabs. I argued our case strongly and we won the vote. In those days, the voices of those who supported Israel’s right to exist were strong enough to win the argument.
I was always aware of anti-Jewish sentiment. But it was mainly low key, and I could hardly say that I suffered. Anyway, I had sufficient confidence in my Jewish identity not to let it get to me.
Later I became a rabbi in London and I accepted Chief Rabbi Jakobovitz’s invitation to become responsible in his cabinet for interfaith relations. For a few years I devoted myself to establishing good relations with the various Christian denominations and with Muslims, who at that stage were still relatively new to England and were grateful for the support and encouragement we gave them.
I enjoyed these interactions and conferences and the friendships, some of which I have to this day. But I soon became aware that the interfaith world comprised a small layer of intelligent, sensitive good men and women of all faiths. Although they got on well with each other, they seemed to have little impact on the vast majority of the members of their different religions who were still mired in prejudice and so I withdrew.
I mentioned all these little things because I am conscious of the fact that these small little things affected my sense of alienation, although I was also aware of how wonderful and rewarding the small acts of friendship and warmth were.
Many of our children will experience much more alienation than we had to. We have to fight more prejudice and one-sided information today, and indeed, there are many Jews who prefer joining our enemies. Despite everything, we must encourage good relations with other human beings — many of whom also fight against prejudice and discrimination. Little things can have a huge impact, both ways.
The author is a writer and rabbi based in New York.