Jews Don’t Count: A Times Book of the Year 2021

* This is partly because American Jews are American, and British Jews are British. Which means the American ones are loud and confident, whereas the British ones are reserved and polite (generalisations: I know). Someone once said to me that the headline of the Jewish Chronicle, every week, is ‘They Hate Us’. I said, no, it’s ‘They Hate Us: And Let’s Not Make a Fuss About It’. British Jewishness has, for years, smacked of suburbia. Of Stanmore. The idea that Jewish, as an ethnicity, as an identity, can be cool, in the way that most others can be, still seems a bit absurd.