My Big Fat Jewish TV Dinner: Reflections on British Jewishness in <em>Friday Night Dinner</em> and <em>Grandma’s House</em>

Abstract

Sue Vice opens her reading of Jack Rosenthal's Bar Mitzvah Boy (BBC 1) by recalling the effect of first watching the play on television in 1976. She notes how exceptional it was as television play about Jewish life in Britain presented in an explicit and unapologetic way-Yiddish, Hebrew, lokshen pudding and all.1 Like Vice, I also remember watching that play, as Jewish child growing up in outer London in the 1970s. Alongside its presentation of recognizable suburban British Jewish family, Rosenthal's drama was nuanced exploration of class and the crises of adolescence. As Vice noted, it still remains significant as cultural document.2 I experienced an echoing sensation of being spoken to when the sitcom Grandma's House (BBC2, 2010 and 2012) was aired in 2010. In this presentation of lower-middle-class North-East London life, specifically the suburb of Gants Hill, I saw something I felt I knew; and that invoked number of complex internal responses. The feeling of recognition, in seeing aspects of my own cultural background being addressed on mainstream television, was in its own way also exceptional. However, sense of delight in watching mediated reconstruction of something that felt so particular and familiar was also subtended by certain tension. Since then I have been reflecting on what precisely invoked such reaction and what might be extrapolated in more general terms from that personal experience.The broadcasting of Grandma's House alongside the sitcom Friday Night Dinner (Channel 4, 2011 and 2012); documentaries such as A Hasidic Guide to Love, Marriage and Finding Bride (BBC2, 2011), Two Jews on Cruise (BBC2, 2012), and Strictly Kosher (ITV, 2011 and 2012); and the reality competition Jewish Mum of the Year (Channel 4, 2012) seems to attest to sense of increasing visibility for British Jews in recent years. This article takes that media moment as its starting point. Alongside this apparently heightened recent television pres- ence, British Jews have increasingly been foregrounded in literature, exhibitions, and journalism.3 Combined with the expanding profile of explicitly Jewish arts festivals, such as Jewish Book Week and the UK Jewish Film Festival, large-scale Jewish educational events such as Limmud,4 and the impact of something like the strikingly visible new JW3: Jewish Community Centre in London, British Jewishness seems to have reached new prominence.5 As journalist Jonathan Freedland put it, in an essay accompanying No Place Like Home, the London Jewish Museum's 2012 exhibition featuring Judah Passow's photographs of Jewish Britain, While once Jews whispered their identity-their voices literally falling in volume when saying the J-word in public place-today's Jews are much more out and proud.6 Indeed, for some cultural commentators, British Jewishness has now become a hip cultural talking point.7The underlying supposition of such claims is that British Jews have hitherto been somewhat timid and self-deprecating. This perception is routinely presented in terms of comparison to the more obvious confidence of Jews in the United States.8 As columnist for the Jewish Chronicle (the UK's oldest mainstream Jewish newspaper), Josh Glancy, put it:In cultural terms, Jews in the UK have had smaller national role relative to our co-religionists across the pond, even accounting for the difference in the size of the communities. Perhaps it is that we have far more European sense of Jewish identity-a desire to keep our heads down and get on with finding successful place in society with minimum fuss. Across the Atlantic, Jews emerged from the early 20th-century immigrant melting pot with proud and loud sense of identity. Here, Jews took their place somewhere in the middle of the UK's constrictive class system and got on with things quietly.9In similar vein, the British Jewish comedian David Schneider recalls pitching BBC1 sitcom in 2005 and being told it was too Jewish. …