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Oct. 7 changed Howard Jacobson. But his new novel is as defiant as ever.
Howard Jacobson is a rarity in British public life: vocally, unabashedly Jewish.
Jews have made fine contributions to British society, of course, but typically they haven’t done so with their Jewishness front and center, preferring to stow it away in the service of a vaguely-defined Britishness that still sees outward expressions of ethnic or religious identity as verging on indecorous.
For British Jews remain a tiny minority, just 400,000 or so in total. With nothing like the profile of, say, American Jewry, most Brits continue to view the British-Jewish community as little more than a small, faith-based group.
Yet Jacobson’s funny and discursive fiction has probed the relationship between Britain and its Jews so successfully that it’s earned him the nickname the ‘British Philip Roth’. (Jacobson has said he’d rather be known as the ‘Jewish Jane Austen’.) Often, he’s been the lone British representative of a kind of Jewishness organized not around superstition and routine, but humor and creativity — in short, the secular, cultural model. In 2010, his novel The Finkler Question, about, loosely, a non-Jew so fed up of being mistaken for a Jew that he decides to carry out a sweeping survey of Jewish identity, won the Man Booker prize.
Since Oct. 7, Jacobson has made no secret of both his anguish at the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks and his anger at what he sees as the excesses of the pro-Palestinian coalition. He has come out especially forcefully against some of the rhetoric at the London demonstrations that have been the centerpiece of the UK’s anti-Zionist movement. (A couple of his op-eds and interviews were perhaps more controversial than he had intended; in one piece for the Guardian, for example, Jacobson suggested that continued coverage of dead Palestinian children was a new form of ‘blood libel’ against Jews.)
His latest novel, Howl, gives vent to these same frustrations while adding the usual Jacobsonian literary flourishes: a prickly and well-read male Jewish protagonist; a long-suffering, non-Jewish spouse; frequent references to Jewish history; fizzing dialogue; and a darkly comic tone.
Howl — the title is a nod to the Allen Ginsberg poem — charts the descent into madness of Ferdinand Draxler, a Jewish headmaster at a primary school in leafy, diverse north London, who quickly unravels in the face of growing anti-Israel sentiment after Oct. 7. Though Ferdinand is certain that anti-Zionism is antisemitism repackaged, most everyone around him disagrees, including his colleagues, his wife and his brother, who after decades living in Israel as an Orthodox Jew has returned to England newly secular and left-wing. Most galling of all is the conduct of Ferdinand’s Oxford-educated daughter, Zoe: she’s become a regular attendee at pro-Palestinian demonstrations, and is on one occasion caught on live TV tearing down posters featuring photos of Israeli hostages.
As Ferdinand casts about for explanations — is it the universities? Identity politics? A lack of Holocaust education? Plain old Jew-hatred? — his behavior grows ever more erratic, and his ordered, rather British existence crumbles.
I spoke with Jacobson about the re-emergence, to his mind, of an ancient hatred after Oct. 7; the importance of Zionism as an idea; whether he and Ferdinand Draxler are kindred spirits; and why British Jews are typically happy with what he described as “self-abridgment.” The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
You said in an interview with The New Yorker last year, and I’m paraphrasing slightly, that when people denied that children were killed and women were raped on Oct. 7, that made you a different kind of person. So in what ways does this altered person, so to speak, show up in Ferdinand?
I certainly was a different person. The world changed the day after, and in many ways, it’s remained that different world now. A world in which people rejoiced in the pain and the suffering and the murder and the rape of other people, was not one I knew. I knew people didn’t like Jews much, but the degree to which they didn’t like Jews, the degree of it I only learned that day. Call me naive, but I didn’t know it was as bad as that. So that day was the new day.
I knew I had to write about it, because otherwise I would have gone mad. But I was in such a rage that the novel I started to write was a kind of madness. So I had to find a character who was a bit more lost, a bit less angry, a bit more confused, even more surprised than I was, and sweeter than me — a kinder, nicer me. One that still had to be astonished by what had happened, maybe even more astonished than me, but somehow or other in the way one could write about him, funnier about it, or gentler about it. That was how I felt I had to go.
Ferdinand repeatedly criticizes the reductive-ness, to his mind, of the protests. Their lack of nuance baffles him. At the same time, his beliefs are rigid and unbending. What would acceptable protest against the war look like for Ferdinand? And is the reader supposed to conclude that there are two, almost competing kinds of madness, Ferdinand on the one hand, the protests on the other, and that something more middle-of-the-road is impossible today?
The protests are madder. That has to be said. The protests are more mad because they are not perturbed or changed at all by any glimmer of light or any glimmer of argument with themselves. Ferdinand is. He’s battered as the novel goes on.
But he’s not happy with himself. And maybe the marchers aren’t happy with themselves. I tried very hard, the more I wrote this book, and the more time goes by, not to argue about the rights and the wrongs of war, because the rights and wrongs of war are, more often than not, evenly spread. And the minute you start defending one side, you look pretty foolish, because in a war the other side is rarely kind, the other side is rarely magnanimous. I don’t think there are any heroes in this war.
Still, why does Ferdinand never so much as attempt to get to grips with his daughter’s beliefs, much less those of the protest movement at large?
Let’s put that down as a failure of his, if you like, and it is a novel, and the character is allowed to have failings. It might be that I, as the novelist, have a greater failing than him in that I didn’t nudge him enough. I nudged him a bit: I had his wife try to encourage him to think about Zoe more, and she [his wife] introduces him to an Italian academic at one point, who says, ‘Never mind the rights and wrongs of it, you’re not making it any better calling them antisemites all the time, that’s going to do no good.’
But he can’t do anything about that because all he hears from their mouths is antisemitic gibberish. This is the problem for my kind of educated hero. Once you hear the gibberish, you can’t get past it. I found sympathy very hard to find for the protesters, and I’m afraid my hero suffers for being so close to me at that moment. So I’ll give you that.
‘Mutti,’ Ferdinand’s Holocaust-survivor mother, has, it turns out, embellished some of her experiences as a prisoner at Bergen-Belsen — notably in her best-selling memoir. What informed how you decided to depict Mutti?
I’ve met one or two female survivors, and they’re who I thought about when I was writing Mutti. Because whenever I’ve met a Holocaust survivor, I’ve wanted to fall in love with them. To feel swallowed up in pity for them. But bad experiences don’t necessarily make a good person. I didn’t want to make a bad person, but I wanted to make somebody who was not just a quivering heap, who does what real people do, and that is she embellishes a bit, lies a bit, she forgets a bit. I wanted a little bit of murkiness around it. I didn’t want anybody to be just a hero or a heroine of anything — on any side.
One of Howl’s more interesting contrasts is Ferdinand’s impassioned defense of Israel on the one hand, and his never having set foot there on the other. What was the rationale for creating a passionate defender of the Jewish State who’d never been there?
I wanted the idea. I wanted him to sort of be naive. I wanted his Zionism to be inexperienced, because I wanted it to be a love of the idea. So much of Zionism is an idea, and it’s very cruel when an idea has to be tested against actuality, because actuality is a swine like that.
Actuality will kill many of an idea, and I wanted him to have a kind of purity about it, an innocence about it, which doesn’t mean he’s right about it. And that’s what his brother laughs at and destroys. So I think I would have ruined it had Ferdinand gone to Israel. But I was very pleased when I came up with the idea, quite late in the novel, to have the brother come back.
Midway through the novel, there’s the following summary of British Jewry: “There’s an air of self-abridgement about them, as though being Jewish were a serious accident that had befallen them and about which they would rather not talk.” Why has Britain produced this kind of Jewishness?
The way we were brought up, we were few in number, and though we did not go around in terror we did go around with the consciousness of keeping a low profile. My father, who actually was not capable of keeping a low profile, because he was an old-fashioned Ukrainian, he was out of Dostoevsky, but he always said to the family, ‘schtum, you stay schtum.’
That was how we were brought up. Don’t make a noise. Don’t run around the streets waving flags. Keep it quiet. I think Philip Roth came over at one point and kind of looked around at English Jews and said, ‘This is the worst, most undistinguished, least forceful bunch of Jews I’ve ever met.’ [It’s worth noting that Roth had a long and often tumultuous relationship with English, Jewish actress Claire Bloom.]
We are still very, very quiet, and even, dare I say it, compared to the American Jews, I think quite Philistine. Because to make art, however quiet the art, is to put yourself forward. It’s to color yourself on the canvas. It’s to announce yourself on the page. “Look, we are here.” You can’t write a Jewish novel and not announce yourself on the page.
And it wasn’t just my dad who thought, schtum, schtum, it’s still British Jews today. Most of the Jews I went to school with went on to become doctors, went on to become lawyers. And they chose those safe careers not just because they were lucrative — and you can make the usual jokes — but because they didn’t need to declare themselves as Jewish within them. Very few went where I went. Almost nobody.
Ferdinand is fairly pessimistic about British Jewry’s future. Do you share this view? How will the current tumult, for lack of a better word, shape us?
I think it will make us less quiescent. I think it will make us realize we really do have to stand on our own feet. A lot of Jews I know have gone to Israel. But I have a feeling that, in the long-term, just as Trump has taught the Europeans that NATO has to defend itself, that Jews will feel they’ve got to defend themselves, and maybe Israel can’t help them. Israel never offered to come over with tanks. But maybe the idea of Israel as a bolt hole, that’s gone.
And how do you want this novel to be remembered?
I hope that my own contribution is the laughter. My contribution in this novel is not the truth I tell about Zionism and the rest of it. That’s not it. It’s the comedy. And I think I can say that some people have loved, or are loving, the book, and it’s the jokes. It’s that strength of mind that says even the worst things that are visited upon us, we will find a way of making funny.
Funny is a big and complex thing, a little word for a very complex thing. Comedy is understanding, it’s grasping, it’s an intellectual act as well as everything else. And that’s what we’ll do. We’ll become even better intellectuals, and let them do their worst.
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They met on a Birthright trip then married. Now this American Israeli couple’s internet fame has turned to infamy.
Ethan and Hila Klein first met at Yad Vashem — Israel’s Holocaust museum — in 2007, a meet-cute they recounted, giggling, years later for their millions of YouTube followers.
“I think I went up to her and said something like, ‘They had it coming, don’t you think?’” said Ethan, known for his edgy humor and infamous internet trends, including Vape Nation and Papa Bless. “No I didn’t say that. I wonder if you would have laughed though.”
They were on a Birthright trip, Ethan an American and Hila an Israeli soldier on leave to join the group. Soon after the trip ended, Ethan moved to Israel to be with Hila, and the two began making videos under the name H3H3 Productions (the H for Hila and the 3 standing in as an E for Ethan). They married, moved to America, and started a popular podcast.
A Jewish love story, until Thursday, when Hila, now mother to their three children, accused Ethan publicly of having a months-long affair.
“The betrayal I feel is immeasurable,” Hila said in an Instagram post. “My only family on this side of the world. How do I even begin to make sense of this?”
Ethan reposted her statement.
Their podcast is run by a handful of crew members who often chime in and participate in various skits and bits. The crew also shared a statement saying they stand with Hila and refuse to work with Ethan, though they added they don’t know what this will mean for the future of the show.
A couple roiled by Oct. 7
The left-leaning, secular couple’s videos and podcasts focused primarily on pop culture, internet drama and general politics, not Jewish or Israeli issues.
Both Ethan and Hila would make statements sometimes when tensions in Israel flared, and they would occasionally speak out against IDF actions that upset them.
In 2021, Ethan started a podcast with political commenter Hasan Piker, a controversial left-wing influencer, called Leftovers, a nod to their leftist politics.
Then came Oct. 7.
Ethan, an American Israeli dual citizen like Hila, was horrified by the attacks but quick to call the IDF genocidal in the aftermath. In their first episode together after Oct. 7, Ethan and Piker said the show would continue through their disagreements. The episode was tense, and it was their last.
As Piker’s rhetoric on Israel intensified and became at times antisemitic, the two began a nasty internet feud, culminating in a nearly five-hour livestreamed debate.
Piker posted about the news of the affair on X, sharing a video of Ethan and expressing disgust for men who cheat.
“Now this is a high caliber man [with] good morals,” Piker said sarcastically. He also posted “Judge me by my enemies” after sharing Hila’s statement.
Hila, who owns a makeup and clothing company, increasingly came under scrutiny by Piker and others after Oct. 7 for her service in the IDF. Artists refused to work with her. One model she hired publicly disavowed her after finding out she was Israeli.
The couple was harassed, sometimes online, sometimes in-person, as they attempted to take what they viewed as a nuanced stance in the aftermath of Hamas’ attack on Israel and the ensuing war in Gaza. The united front seemed to fortify their relationship, as Ethan, ever outspoken, routinely came to his wife’s defense.
Their show lost thousands of subscribers, but loyal fans stuck with them — fans who now say they are gutted and confused by the news of the affair. Many in disbelief noted that Ethan had Hila’s face tattooed on his arm less than two years ago as a surprise for her.
“The greatest thing a man can do for his children is to love their mother,” says the quote surrounding the tattoo.
The Forward attempted to contact the Kleins through their work emails and did not immediately hear back.
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These Jewish college students have some ‘nonnegotiables’ for El-Sayed
At the University of Michigan, first-year student Robert Kashan, 18, and sophomore Jacob Reich, 19, sat behind a large blue sign. “Some things are nonnegotiable,” it declared in all caps.
The sign laid out their requirements for any candidate seeking their support: a commitment to Jewish safety, “including for Zionist Jews,” and supporting Jewish statehood in Israel, among other positions.
“Zionism is a legitimate part of the Democratic coalition, and a lot of us are feeling less represented by the Democratic Party,” Kashan told the Forward.
The students are part of a broader “Nonnegotiable” movement in Michigan, a coalition of Jewish Democrats who are spelling out their dealbreakers for candidates ahead of the Senate election between Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed and Republican nominee Mike Rogers.
The movement has attracted national attention, with hundreds of rabbis across 34 states signing on to the “Nonnegotiable” demands. Meanwhile, about 20 students at the University of Michigan have publicly signed, while hundreds more offered support anonymously, according to Reich.
The “Nonnegotiable” supporters aren’t saying whom they’ll vote for if their concerns aren’t addressed — or whether they’ll vote at all. But they are pushing back against the assumption that Jewish voters will, as the saying goes, “vote blue no matter who,” urging El-Sayed to engage with their demands if he hopes to earn their support.
That’s in contrast with two other Jewish political camps, including a group called Michigan Jews for Democracy that endorsed El-Sayed. Their petition, which has garnered almost 1,000 signatures, notes that some signatories hold reservations about El-Sayed but are voting for him nonetheless as a check on President Trump.
“We understand that a vote is not a valentine; it’s a strategic chess move,” the petition reads.
A competing petition, dubbed “Michigan Jews Against Extremism,” has drawn hundreds of signatures from Michigan Jews who plan to vote for Rogers. That petition similarly emphasizes that Rogers voters may still have reservations about the candidate: “Our vote for Mike Rogers does not require that we agree with him on every issue or that we support President Trump,” it reads.
“Nonnegotiable,” meanwhile, rejects the idea that Jewish voters would have to choose between Zionist and Democratic values. Some have criticized the nonnegotiable movement for ignoring the reality of the electoral choice at hand. Others have called it “a veiled attempt to excuse the actions of Jewish Democrats who want to feel validated about voting for Mike Rogers.”
But Kashan and Reich, who met at Hillel and plan to major in political science, said the “Nonnegotiable” movement was the only way they could see themselves engaging in the election, as they felt increasingly pulled between their identities as Democrats and as Jews.
Some Michigan Jews have expressed alarm at El-Sayed’s questioning of whether Israel should exist as a Jewish state and his decision to campaign alongside controversial Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, who has been accused of antisemitic rhetoric. Rogers, who Trump has endorsed, earlier this week called El-Sayed “anti-Jew.”
In a letter to Michigan Jews, El-Sayed has vowed to “stand up against antisemitism and take the threat of violence against our Jewish community incredibly seriously.” He has also hired a Jewish liaison in the final weeks leading up to the election.
This will be the first election when Kashan, who just turned 18, is eligible to vote, and Reich’s first national election after voting in a local primary in his hometown of Palo Alto, California. For both, voting Democratic in their first major election had once seemed like a given.
“I’m a Jewish Democrat, and I want Democrats to take the Senate,” Reich said. “I want to vote for a Democrat in my own state.”
They’re still holding out hope that will happen — and that, with less than two weeks until the Nov. 3 election, El-Sayed will sign on to their petition.
And if he doesn’t? Neither student is ready to say.
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Does anyone in Jerusalem care what happens to us?
An Israeli think tank has put on paper what most American Jews know in their kishkas: Israel’s actions over there affect our safety here.
So here’s my question: Does anybody over there care?
The report, published by The Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), drew on the input of 20 Jewish leaders from five countries. It concluded that Israel’s actions since the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, 2023 have normalized hostility toward Israel, divided Jewish communities, sapped the political influence of pro-Israel organizations and fueled antisemitism.
Those actions include damaging statements by government officials, limits on humanitarian aid to Gaza at the height of the war, widespread damage to civilian infrastructure in Gaza and unchecked settler violence in the West Bank. The authors also cited as inflammatory “the proliferation of images of civilian death and suffering in Gaza” — though the actual civilian death and suffering has also alienated and enraged many outside Israel, including Jews.
“The conflict is not only over there in the Middle East, it is local all over the Jewish world now, and Diaspora Jewry has skin in the game,” said Theodore Sasson, one of the report’s authors, in an interview with JTA’s Andrew Silow-Carroll, who first wrote about the study.
To be clear, the report doesn’t excuse, exonerate or rationalize people who commit antisemitic acts. “Jews and Israelis are not to blame for antisemitism,” the report states.
“What we’re saying is that Israel is not the cause” of antisemitism, Sasson said, “but enlightened Israeli policy can seek to maintain robust Diaspora support for the state of Israel and can deny the antisemites the material that fuels their mostly spurious claims.”
This is not a novel connection. Three previous academic studies, in Belgium, Australia and the U.S. found statistically significant links between Israeli military operations that result in high Palestinian casualties and spikes in reported antisemitic incidents abroad. Not surprisingly, a Mellman group poll found that 56% of U.S. Jewish voters believe Israel’s policies have fueled antisemitism.
None of this means Israel shouldn’t act in its own interest and put the security needs of its own population first. Antisemites would continue to exist even if Israelis did nothing but play backgammon and sip arak. The report is not about eradicating antisemitism, but about Israeli actions that provoke and endanger Jews abroad — and what Israel can do about those.
I get the principled resistance to a report that seems to shift some of the burden of antisemitism onto the Jews. David Bernstein of the North American Values Institute told Silow-Carroll that American Jews aren’t agents of Israel, and that nobody would say an African country’s actions endanger African Americans. That’s not entirely true — the 9/11 attacks increased hate crimes against American Muslims and bigots targeted random Asian Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic. Pretending actions have no consequence even if the reaction is illegitimate is principled, but naive. If Israel can lower the temperature, it should.
But here’s the sad fact about the current Israeli government: it doesn’t even lower the temperature for its own citizens.
Exhibit A is Oct. 7. This is the government on whose watch that horror happened, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has never engaged in a full, independent accounting of what went wrong. How do you prevent future Oct. 7s when you don’t know the weaknesses that enabled it in the first place?
Exhibit B is the flydubai near-disaster, which we in the Diaspora have already mythologized as yet another example of Israeli courage and pluck. It was that, but also a result of a complete breakdown of government responsibility. Israel’s rules should have kept the Omani pilot out of that cockpit, but, as Channel 12 reported, Minister of Transportation Minister Miri Regev took no action despite multiple warnings. Regev, a close ally of Netanyahu, remains in her job.
Finally, Exhibit C: Police under National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir have failed to curb violent crime in Israel’s Arab communities which recorded 252 murders in 2025 — and 2026 is on track to surpass that record.
Israel’s supporters often comfort themselves with the mantra that Israelis love life while their enemies love death. But this government has been pretty cavalier about life.
If that’s how Israel’s leaders treat their own citizens, is it so surprising they fail to be overly concerned about Jews abroad? Last year saw the highest death toll from antisemitic attacks in 30 years, while the agency Israel created specifically to deal with such calamities has been AWOL. The Ministry for Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism, a Tel Aviv University report found, has “not contributed in any meaningful way to the cause, and in some cases has been an embarrassment.”
All this is happening as the screws are tightening on Jewish communities in Australia, France, Italy, Canada and elsewhere. But Israel, established in part to keep Jews safe, has, under this government, too often increased or ignored the dangers. Zionism is supposed to be the Diaspora’s Iron Dome, but this government, by inexorably, deliberately foreclosing on the possibility of a democratic Jewish state, is functionally anti-Zionist.
The report listed several measures Israel could take to reduce the threat to Diaspora communities, among them controlling the incendiary rhetoric of government ministers and opening a diplomatic path with the Palestinians that stops the slide toward a single, non-democratic state.
One of the report’s recommendations is that Israel set up procedures to assess how its policies affect Jews abroad. In other words, the think tank is asking the government to start caring, formally.
It’s hard to imagine any of that happening unless, on Oct. 27, Israelis vote the current government out.
“Netanyahu cannot be part of the healing process. It is Netanyahu from whom we must be healed,” David Horovitz, the far-from-radical founding editor of The Times of Israel, wrote this week in an editorial titled, “For Israel’s Sake, Netanyahu Has to Go.”
As it turns out, it’s for all our sakes.
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