ABSTRACT
In her memoir The War After, Anne Karpf writes about her mother’s habit of asking whether or not people were ‘English’, which was ‘her euphemism for non-Jewish’,1 as if the two were mutually exclusive. In this article, I will consider whether such a polarity still obtains, and how the relationship between Britishness and Jewishness is represented in a wide range of twenty-first-century texts, including television series and plays as well as Howard Jacobson’s Booker-Prize-winning novel The Finkler Question. While ‘Englishness’, in the sense of a mythical cultural affiliation, may seem harder to accede to than the ‘Britishness’ of citizenship, both kinds of identity are placed in an uneasy relation to Jewishness in the texts under discussion here.
