The London-based writer and sociologist issues a captivating call for more of the mundane
It was on a Jewish heritage tour of Poland in Spring 2023 that Keith Kahn-Harris had a revelation. Though he was interested to visit the camps, ghettos and places where his ancestors had once lived, he became very irritated by the way the trip failed to connect with “everyday Polish life”. It was implicitly seen, he says, as “a backdrop to the real story, our story, an extraordinary and terrible story, a story that marked us out and made us irreducibly different”. It was only when he took a day off and went to meet a “nice old Polish man” who had established a major baseball centre that he felt once again engaged: “Life in all its mundanity and strange beauty; life as ordinary, routine, yet somehow extraordinary.”
Everyday Jews is a striking, paradoxical hymn to ordinariness. Kahn-Harris wants us to pay more attention to the kind of “Jewish doing” seldom celebrated or studied by social scientists: the mundane, often boring work that keeps synagogues, burial societies and other communal organisations going. He takes similar pleasure in the many faces of “Jewish musical mediocrity” (he's long been a fan of the Eurovision Song Contest), synagogue supper quizzes and “stick-to-your-ribs dishes” such as cholent (stew). He loved the Israel of his childhood, when it wasn’t “a place of intimidating excellence” but “a country of congealing institutional buffets, turgid gravel-voiced balladeers on the radio, the smell of cockroach spray, half-built apartment blocks and awkward TV programmes filmed on shaky sets”.
At the end of Daniel Finkelstein’s memoir, Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad, his parents emerge from the horrors of the Gulag and the concentration camps to find “freedom’s reward…in Hendon, eating crusty bread rolls with butter in the Tesco café near the M1”. “Freedom’s reward”, Kahn-Harris points out, turned out to be “dull suburban life”. The synagogue he grew up in “seemed to embody the mediocrity of British Jewry, with our dull building, lousy communal meals and stolid membership”. Yet, their rabbi was one of the first women to be ordained in the UK Reform movement and she energised the congregation with her feminism, challenging sermons and commitment to nuclear disarmament. A community many would dismiss as parochial, in other words, could still be “vibrant, alive, self-critical and beautiful”.
What distresses Kahn-Harris is that most Jewish writing ignores such everyday “doing” and focuses on the threat of antisemitism and “bombastic statements of our tragic significance”. Indeed, he doubts whether “the seriousness, the world-historical importance and the omnipresence that Jews are accorded is actually good for us”. He cites, for example, an agonised article by Howard Jacobson claiming: “We Jews need to find other ways to make our harrowing history compelling.” It is a great pity, argues Kahn-Harris, that “we cannot even conceive how our ‘harrowing history’ might be received as one among other harrowing histories. Nor does the idea that we might be able to make alliances with those who feel nothing for our history seem to cross Jewish minds… Given that politicians are some of the most cynical people in the world – they have to be – are we really saying that Jewish survival is dependent on them caring?”
Whether or not Kahn-Harris convinces Jews to embrace their own insignificance, his stimulating polemic contains much to entertain and provoke.
By Matthew Reisz
Everyday Jews: Why the Jewish People are not Who You Think They Are by Keith Kahn-Harris is out now (Icon Books, 2025, £10.99). kahn-harris.org