Abstract
This article analyses the ways in which British Jewish writing has responded to the watershed events of 2016: the vote to leave the EU in the United Kingdom, and the election of Donald Trump as President of the USA. It argues that such a response demands varied generic and narrative forms, as exemplified in three case studies. Tom Stoppard’s 2020 play Leopoldstadt is a historical drama about twentieth-century Austrian history, but the moment of its staging and its links to the playwright’s biography convey its cautionary relationship to the present. Linda Grant’s 2019 novel A Stranger City is set in a post-2016 London that has become unfamiliar to its inhabitants, while Howard Jacobson’s Pussy of 2017 is a satire aimed at Trump’s electoral success. In each case, cultural turmoil is represented in terms of Jewish history.
Highlights
This article analyses the ways in which British Jewish writing has responded to the watershed events of 2016: the vote to leave the EU in the United Kingdom, and the election of Donald
Cultural turmoil is represented in terms of Jewish history
I have chosen this date in acknowledgement of its status as a contemporary watershed, to enable an exploration of the effect on British Jewish cultural production of two significant and divisive events in the western world: the Leave result of the EU referendum in Britain on 23 June 2016, and the election of Donald Trump as the 45th president of the USA on 8 November of the same year
Summary
This article explores the ways in which British Jewish literature—meaning fiction and drama that addresses aspects of Jewish history, and written, as in the present cases, by Jewish-identified authors in Britain—has responded to events in the UK and USA since 2016. In each of these fictional worlds, aspects of Jewish history appear as a cautionary model for the dangers of the populist sentiment embodied by the Leave vote and Trump’s electoral success The invocation of such a history takes a different form in each case: while Stoppard’s play concerns the wartime fate of an Austrian Jewish family, Grant’s novel represents the immediate post-referendum state of multicultural Jewish and non-Jewish London, and Jacobson’s exposes the mechanisms of populist appeal in his fictional version of Trump’s America. My chosen examples more directly represent, or address, the implications for Jewish life of the contemporary upsurge in populist nationalism, and for the liberal values of pluralism and equality to which antisemitism traditionally embodies opposition In relation to these particular concerns, the works discussed here are distinct from other examples of post-2016 British Jewish literature, and from other non-Jewish-centred. Generic experimentation and hybridity of this kind registers the writers’ efforts to reflect on momentous occurrences even as the effects of 2016’s ‘establishment-rocking electoral results’ (Lawson 2017) are still making themselves known
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