LBC Senior Lecturer, DR Keith Kahn-Harris at Jewish Book Week

I shared my panel, on Sunday 8 March, with the Birmingham University historian Gavin Schaffer (it was ably chaired by Karen Skinazi, formerly of Bristol University and now of Hebrew Union College, Los Angeles). Gavin was at the event to promote his own book on British Jews, An Unorthodox History, which came out a few months before my own and that I reviewed here. Gavin and I share a desire to write about the British Jewish community in a way that doesn’t ignore the everyday ways in which Jewish life is lived. While both our books deal with ‘big’ issues, the way we deal with them is by approaching them ‘from below’. We also seek to offer counter-intuitive ways of writing about Jews – his book starts in Merthyr Tydfil, mine starts by talking about baseball in Poland. (If you are intrigued as to the reasons for these perversities, I suggest you read our books).

Perhaps we did our jobs too well, though. Sunday morning is a busy time at Jewish Book Week and our session was up against, amongst other things, a high-profile panel on the future of the BBC. Whether that was the reason why our audience was no more than respectable I can’t be sure, but I do know that a session entitled ‘Jews; surprisingly normal?’ doesn’t exactly fit with the Jewish zeitgeist. These aren’t normal times and Jews and non-Jews are both fascinated by the ‘big issues’ surrounding Jewish life today. Part of the argument in my book was that we need to recover a sense of the value of mundane Jewish life, even of boring Jewish life. However, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Gavin’s book and my own fill a niche that no one was demanding should be filled.

Yet the everyday pleasures of Jewish communal life were still to be had at Jewish Book Week. Before our session, Gavin and I discovered that we went to the same school and we enjoyed playing Jewish geography, working out who we knew in common. After the session I was introduced to Gavin’s parents, whose shul is close to the one I grew up in. On my way out, my mother, who had attended the session, introduced me to people from her synagogue and her writing group.

Despite the swanky location in King’s Place, Jewish Book Week always feels like home. While Jews who attend the festival may be drawn to the sessions on the big issues, it is before and after them that we remind ourselves of the pleasures of Jewish smallness.