A world without Jewish artists

It’s Christmas, and the far left have a gift for us in their stocking: a cultural boycott of Jews. They don’t call it that, of course. Rather, they say it is a boycott of Israel, and that those who support Israel, and people who confuse Israelis with Jews – that is, most people – are anti-Semites. That peace-seeking, leftist Israelis and Jews (good Israelis and Jews) will be those boycotted (I can’t see Itamar Ben-Gvir turning to romance fiction) doesn’t seem to bother them any more than murdering good Israelis and Jews mattered to Hamas on 7 October 2023. It was, rather, the point of it all.

Hollywood Jews often hid their Jewishness. Sam Spiegel had a phase of calling himself S.P. Eagle

The poster novelists of the boycott are Sally Rooney, an Irish writer who can’t smile at cameras, and Arundhati Roy, who won the Booker Prize for The God of Small Things in 1997. In 1821, Heinrich Heine, a German-Jewish playwright, wrote: ‘Any society that burns books will ultimately burn people.’ The play was Almansor, and the burnt book was the Quran, but I doubt that Rooney and Roy know that. ‘What progress we are making,’ Sigmund Freud said of the Nazi book burnings, another boycott. ‘In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now, they are content with burning my books.’ His sisters died in Theresienstadt and Treblinka.

I’m not a novelist, but we can all dream, and I try to imagine a world without Jewish culture. What would it feel like? Can I even imagine it, since I would not exist to experience it? Would it matter if Leonard Cohen’s songs weren’t here, if I were also not here to love them? And – would Christmas even exist? This piece must be whimsy but I’m a journalist, and that’s my game.