The Finkler Question

"Winner"

"This is a very funny book about middle-aged men fighting with each other and fighting to maintain their self-esteem in pathetic ways. It’s very accessible. Sam Finkler, a popular thinker, media personality, and bestselling author, and his friend Julian Treslove reconvene with their former professor, an older Jewish immigrant from the Czech Republic. The book is about how Jews are expected to cooperate with contemporary anti-Semitism. To be accepted, Finkler renounces and demonizes the state of Israel. This book came out in 2010; only in more recent years has the UK started to grapple with the open anti-Semitism in its society. Hanukkah celebrates the end of the Seleucid Empire’s tyranny over Ancient Judea. At first, that regime just insisted that the Jews eliminate certain practices and conform to others. Many Jews went along. In my book I talk about the importance of Greek games at the time of the Hanukkah story; athletics in the nude were part of a public religion. Teenage Jewish boys were urged to participate. Many had their circumcisions reversed to conform. They mutilated themselves to ingratiate themselves. What Howard Jacobson does brilliantly in this book is look at how Jews are asked to participate in contemporary forms of anti-Semitism. That was why I included it on this list. It’s an amazing book about human dignity."

"This book really took me by surprise. I had read others by Howard Jacobson before and I’ve read others since. I had actually not realized what an intensely serious humourist he had become. England has a very strong tradition of social satire and the book is in that tradition. The Jewish novel also began, in the 19th century, with a very strong tradition of social satire. But this book made me realize that one of the things that nobody likes to satirize is anti-Semitism, because Jews are always trying to accommodate to it. They’re so eager to be accepted by the very people who detest them the most that they don’t want to go around mocking and making fun of these things. It’s the Brits isn’t it? It’s not the Americans so much. It’s the Brits who have undertaken to do this and this book does it in a very clever way. Jacobson doesn’t so much go out against the anti-Semites as the Jewish anti-Semites. This is, in a sense, even more unique and it is also very shrewd. These are people who should be satirized. After all, it is kind of a comedy that here you have millions and millions of Arabs and Muslims, multiple countries that for 60 years have been waging a war against the Jewish state. It’s the most lop-sided war in history and one of the longest, and it’s become increasingly violent. Of course one of its main casualties are the people waging the war, because instead of dealing with their own societies they are organizing their politics against the Jews. All of that, and yet you have all these Jews who not only join the enemy in the assault against the Jews, but they want the moral credit for doing so. They say they’re not doing it because they’re anti-Jewish, but because the Jews are being so horrible to their enemies. This is such an inversion. Humour is made of incongruity, humour is made of inversions. How come no one has really exposed these inversions and incongruities before? Yes. The book is written from a non-Jew’s point of view who is trying to understand his friend Samuel Finkler, and why this Samuel Finkler should be so obsessed with being against the Jews. Finkler joins a group who call themselves “Ashamed Jews,” and they pride themselves on their shame. They’re ashamed to be Jews, they’re ashamed to be associated with Is-Ray-El, as they call it. Finkler says, very wittily, that he wants the Ashamed Jews to be called the ASHamed Jews and then he writes, “which might or might not, depending on how others felt, be shortened now or in the future to ASH, the peculiar felicity of which, in the circumstances, he was sure it wasn’t necessary for him to point out.” In other words, that those once reduced to ash are now reducing others to ash. This is precious and very clever. As I say, I just don’t know anything which is as penetrating on this subject. Yes, it is funny. That kind of tendentious social satire has its limits. It’s not of the ages: It’s funniest to people who can read it as roman à clef and recognize the characters whom he is making fun of. That will all disappear. The book isn’t Sholem Aleichem. Sholem Aleichem’s humour is not that kind of pointed satire, it’s much more philosophical and, in a way, detached. Yes I am. Kalooki Nights was really troublesome. It gave me sleepless nights, which it did to the author too. It’s really about the legacy of the Holocaust and what one does with it and how weird it is to have to live with that, to have to integrate it, how damaging it is. He makes fun of it, but it’s a book about the kinds of lingering damage that the Holocaust has done. To the individuals, to the Jews who have to cope with it and don’t really know how to do that effectively. That also comes into The Finkler Question , because one of the characters in The Finkler Question is building a Holocaust museum. So Jacobson doesn’t leave this subject alone. He shows a continuity between the war against the Jews of the past and the war against the Jews of the present. He shows that the Jews who are somewhere in this mix really are not yet in a position to understand where they stand, or how they should stand, and he makes comedy of it."