In Britain’s Jews Freedman seems notably at ease with himself, and merely amused by the kind of contrariness and kvetching that means those working in Jewish communal organizations find “everybody else knows how to do their job better than they do, and nobody is afraid to tell them so”. The author explores everything from the plight of the “chained wives” unable to obtain a religious divorce to “the Jewish psychedelic movement” (which believes that “chemically assisted mystical encounters are a normative part of Jewish spirituality”), from the EcoSynagogue project promoting carbon neutrality to the Jewish schools in which the majority of pupils are Muslims. He cites the success of Jewish Book Week, the annual Limmud educational festival and the JW3 cultural centre on London’s Finchley Road. The last of these is modelled on the Jewish community centres that are a notable feature of American life. While British Jewish buildings “tend to be discreet, barely visible, blending in with the environment”, Freedman says, JW3 has “a large, unmissable, gaudy sign on its façade … It deliberately shouts, ‘Look at us!’ JW3’s brash building is an essential part of its brand. It wants to be noticed”.
Another theme is the way Jewish institutions now reach out well beyond their core constituency to apply “Jewish values” to broader concerns. Successive chief rabbis Immanuel Jakobovits and Jonathan Sacks were both prominent figures in wider ethical debates in the UK; although Freedman doesn’t specifically mention him in this context, the incumbent, Ephraim Mirvis, is too. The main Jewish charities no longer focus solely on relieving Jewish suffering. World Jewish Relief, for example, works in Rwanda, and its president argues that “We helped refugees in the 1930s because they were Jewish, and we help refugees today because we are Jewish”. According to Trevor Pears of the Pears Foundation, a philanthropic fund “rooted in Jewish values”, volunteers may still enjoy “gap year programmes in Israel”, but it is “just as empowering Jewishly” to “go on a fact-finding mission … to Ghana”. XR Jews, a group within Extinction Rebellion, “consider non-violent civil disobedience to be a religious duty”, Freedman reports, since “their actions in defence of the environment are rooted in the Jewish value that prioritizes the saving of life over everything else”. And the very existence of a lobbying charity called Nahamu, specifically designed to “speak out against harms systematically arising in the haredi community”, points to a “new, more open, even self-critical, attitude” among British Jews.
Even when it comes to antisemitism, Freedman suggests that “the situation is not as grim as it is sometimes portrayed”. He cites a range of views about the former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, from a woman who, despite having what she describes as a “ridiculous English schoolgirl accent”, “began to feel like an alien in my own country, like the mask has been ripped away” during the recent period of Labour’s antisemitism crisis to those who believe that Corbyn was unfairly targeted by the right-wing press. Freedman clearly believes there was room for serious concern during the Corbyn years, yet he also puts a positive spin on the way Jews responded so forcefully to the perceived danger. While there has long been talk of a “Jewish vote” in the US, it was hostility to Corbyn, Freedman argues, that meant that, during the 2019 general election, “there was clear evidence of a Jewish vote” “for the first time in British history”.
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