‘Hands across the tea'

The drawing of boundaries has always been a key part of the Jewish tradition and has served to maintain a distinctive Jewish identity. The increasing fragmentation of Judaism into competing claims to membership, from Orthodox adherence to secular identities, has brought striking new dimensions to this complex interplay of boundaries and modes of identity and belonging in contemporary Judaism. This chapter suggests that a re-imagining of Jewish identity, and of Britishness concurrently, entered a new phase in Britain with large-scale Jewish suburbanisation in the immediate post Second World War era. In contemporary Britain, Jewish identity means 'Jewish', it is enacted and performed, and indeed the parameters and environments of Jewish life itself have become more elastic than in the past. The literal and psychological abandonment of the urban ghettos and immigrant quarters in the inter-war and post-war period in favour of migration to the suburbs and provinces of British cities wore away at the rigidities that separated Jew from non-Jew.