ABSTRACT
Perceptions of Israel have decisively shaped literary negotiations of British Jewish identities in particular since the mid-1980s.1 Since the mid-1990s, a ‘postcolonial’ and highly (self-)critical paradigm for Jewish identities both in Britain and in Israel has been developed from the historical encounter of Britons and Jews in Mandate Palestine.2
Finally, since the mid-2000s, a number of mostly younger British Jewish writers have turned their attention to Britain, away from Israel, or the diaspora.3 In fact, as suggested by Ruth Gilbert, the extraterritoriality identified by Bryan Cheyette as a distinctive feature of British Jewish writing of the last three decades of the twentieth century seems to have been superseded by a renewed focus on the particulars of British Jewish life.4
Affirmative, rather than apologetic,5 much of recent British Jewish literature challenges traditional and frequently ossified markers of Jewishness, especially ‘the Holocaust’ and ‘Judaism’, and offers potentially contentious readings of British and Jewish constructions of the past and the present.6 Obviously, these developments need to be considered in the larger context of British Jewish cultural creativity and should not be rendered in terms of absolutes. Nevertheless, the inward gaze appears to indicate a trend which, at a time when Israel has become increasingly entrenched in the wake of global criticism of its policies, may reflect the search for detachment, the desire to remain aloof from the political and ethical dilemma posed by Israel and to reject moral liability by association. It may, however, also signal a process of normalisation, the overcoming of the compulsion to feel culpable and, instead, to view the Middle East conflict as one among many, as an Israeli concern and not a Jewish one.
