‘Next time I criticise Israel I predict they will call me a self-hating Jew’

THOUGH my criticisms of Israeli policies towards the Palestinians have had me branded an anti-Semite in both correspondence and The Australian Jewish News, I’m more accurately described as a philo-Semite — someone totally in awe of the Jewish contribution to human civilisation.

This is out of all proportion to their small population around the world — a population greatly reduced by the Holocaust. Had that vast obscenity not occurred there’d be many millions more Jews, both religious and secular, in the diaspora. And far fewer in Israel.

As performers, the contribution of Jews to classical music is incomparable. The fiddlers on the roof became stars playing the Stradivarius at Carnegie Hall, the members of exalted string quartets and instrumentalists in the noblest orchestras. As composers, Jews have been pre-eminent — Mahler in the concert halls, Gershwin and Berlin on Broadway. And Jewish contributions to jazz are second only to the African American. Jewish people are equally conspicuous in literature. Like playing the violin, like dealing in diamonds, the ability to write a novel is portable — something very important to a people threatened for millennia by pogroms culminating in genocide. And it’s endless fear and suffering that get the words — and music — pouring out.

Comedy, too. Koestler described the Jews as “the exposed nerve-ends of humanity” — and the paradox of pain producing humour has given us many, if not most, of the world’s greatest humorists and comics. From Mo McCackie to the Marx Brothers and Mel Brooks, Lenny Bruce to Joan Rivers, Woody Allen, Peter Sellers, Jerry Seinfeld, Larry David, Sacha Baron Cohen, Jon Stewart. “Jewish humour” is so universally recognised that Chaplin, the most famous comedian who ever lived, was wrongly assumed to be Jewish and attacked as such by US anti- Semites. Knowing all too well the connections between misery and mirth, Chaplin declined to deny it. Hollywood itself was and remains a Jewish town, movies the Jewish industry — energised by great and glorious talents fleeing persecution in Europe. In the Dream Factory, Jews effectively dreamt America into existence.

Science? You can sum it up in one word: Einstein. Who, fearful that Hitler would soon have the A-bomb, urged FDR to build it first. Thus anti-Semitism hastened the nuclear age, the ultimate weapons created by Jews in the US. On the other side of the coin … medical science. Almost all the doctors, specialists and surgeons who’ve been keeping me alive are Jewish, many being exiles from apartheid South Africa.

Despite Hitler branding modern art decadent and something else to blame on the Jews, they’re under-represented in the visual arts. Not a lot of famous Jewish painters (notable exceptions being Chagall and Modigliani). Perhaps this is a consequence

of a religious prohibition shared by Jews and Muslims — the dogma disapproving of the depiction of God or Allah and of the “graven image” in general. And I can’t think of too many Jewish sporting heroes, if you leave out David’s gold-medal skills with the slingshot. Hard to think of a Jewish golfer on the US circuit — Jews weren’t welcome in the posh golf clubs.

Footnote. This atheist christened (pun intended) his firstborn daughter with a Jewish name. Twenty years later, aiming to join that most Jewish calling of psychoanalysis, Dr Rebecca Adams travelled to the US and converted to Judaism in a progressive synagogue. Whereupon my second daughter Meaghan discovered, in an old family Bible, that her dad seems to have had a Jewish great-great-grandmother on his mother’s side and is, as a result, almost certainly Jewish. Now that this is public I predict my next criticism of Israel will have me called a “self-hating Jew”. Shalom.