‘Hands across the tea’: re- negotiating Jewish identity and belonging in post- war suburban Britain

Abstract

In contemporary Britain, Jewish identity – what it means to be ‘Jewish’, how it is to be enacted and performed, and indeed the parameters and environments of Jewish life itself – have become more elastic than in the past. The fracturing of British Jewry into increasingly divided religious factions in the era after 1945 has gone some way towards forcing a confrontation between Ultra-Orthodox definitions of ‘What a Jew is’ and ‘What a Jew does’, and liberal classifications of Jewishness along ethnic or cultural lines (Hartman 2007: 1-3). These shifts, however, have been the consequence not only of ‘internal’ reconfiguration but also of the interventions of the non-Jewish world. The influence of liberal modernist principles across the twentieth century, for example, has to some extent facilitated cultural pluralism and greater tolerance from non-minority Britons towards expressions of ‘difference’. Ironically, however, the burgeoning of broad-minded attitudes has partially served to solidify the polarities of Jewish identity, hardening the boundaries around Jewish Orthodoxy whilst hastening the decline of a strong association with traditional Jewish life for the secularising majority (Lipman 1990: 242-243). Historic catalysts for these considerable changes within and challenges to British-Jewish identity can be understood in spatial terms. 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 nonJew. As strangers became neighbours, the intimacies facilitated by spatial proximity and a shared investment in ‘place’ altered notions of ‘Jewishness’ and indeed ‘Britishness’ in turn. Whilst, for many Jews, migration to the suburbs marked an important step in the path towards integration, for some non-Jewish residents it signified their first encounter with ethnic, cultural and religious diversity. However, spatial proximity did not necessarily equate to flourishing, uncomplicated and unburdened neighbourly relations. Instead, the process of suburbanisation facilitated a confrontation between competing minority and majority identities – ‘British’ and ‘Jewish’ – hastening an, at times, painful melding of the two. Whilst such frictions in the fusion process were most visibly incarnate at moments of severe international strain, such as the violent nascence that brought the State of Israel into being, relations within these newly forming,racially-mixed communities were also subject to crises of identity during ‘everyday’ encounters and transactions. Hence, local as well as global forces exerted pressure upon neighbourly relations. Moreover, the tentative formation of connections between neighbours – actual, virtual, imagined and typically enacted within the domestic sphere, from glancing eye contact across the garden fence, plans to invite a new neighbour to tea, to exposure to new food trends – could be further complicated by events happening on the world stage. 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. The two decades after 1945 heralded in a period of intense social, political and demographic change in Britain and to Britain in her foreign affairs and international standing. This provided a dynamic, fluid and often strained backdrop for the emergence of multi-ethnic neighbourhoods. Amidst this turbulence, the domesticity of suburbia acted both as a grounding force and the stage for greater ‘connectivity’: British-Jewish life in the urban peripheries came to exist in tandem and in fusion with non-Jewish life, the two connected together by a web of fine and fragile threads, producing an imagined local community of shared associations, achievements and traumas; mutual curiosity and, at times, mutual distrust. Whilst, as the first and third sections of this chapter suggest, the ordinariness of domestic acts such as the cooking and sharing of food could break down barriers between neighbours, more tangible incursions into suburbia (as is argued in the second section) through moves towards permanent residence, home-ownership and other forms of spatial ‘acquisition’ were, at moments of socio-political tension in particular, far less tolerated. Thus Jewish suburbanites in post-war Britain were frequently the recipients of conflicted messages about the extent of their ‘belonging’. An examination of seemingly commonplace relationships between suburban neighbours can shed light on the subtleties of changing relations between Jew and non-Jew in twentieth-century Britain; the constructed nature of identities, gender, places and boundaries; and the intersections between local, national and global contexts.