A detailed, grown up sort of book with a lot of knowledge about history, scripture and theology. Not for the casual reader, I'd say, but no less enjoyable for that. Some discussion about whether the Abrahamic religions really have a place for "holy places" at all in their theologies, and perhaps not enough consideration as to whether the idea of a sacred location is really a hangover from previous non-monotheistic religions.
There are weak signals that something bad in happening in the outside world - crackly radio reports of preparations for a major war, sudden unavailability of petrol. Then Moroccan soldiers arrive to evict the ravers, and the Spanish man and his son impulsively fall in with a small group who decide to drive deeper into the desert rather than wait in line to be repatriated.
Saying anything more than this would be a spoiler, but the film is tense, visually striking, and with a remarkable soundtrack. I think it had more of an impact on us because we've been in on the fringes of the world that it depicts - dancing with drug-addled people in the techno pit at We Out Here, attending the Nowhere festival in Spain in a tiny scrap of desert, and beginning to understand the power and attraction of that kind of music.
We watched this via a USB stick in our TV, having obtained it informally.
Part of the tension in the book comes from the fact that even for people in that separate world, there are points of overlap with the world that I know - wives who work as human rights lawyers, kids who go off to work on eco projects rather than into the city or the law.
For a while the pace of the plot and the series of unexpected twists got me more involved, but by the implausible and not very interesting denouement I was waiting for it to be over.
I think the response is mainly fair, and I agree with most of the points that it makes. For example, it is indeed odd that the document doesn't have any named authors, and that though it says the writers talked to lots of groups and individuals, it doesn't say who they are. There doesn't seem to have been much engagement with Jewish groups who are critical of Israel and Zionism, who might have been thought of as natural points of contact for Quakers. The Quaker Socialists mention Jewish Voice for Liberation, and I'm disappointed that there is no mention of my own group, Na'amod. The reading list, and the list of groups to learn from, is also somewhat partial. The discussion on definitions of antisemitism, which mainly focuses on the IHRA definition and the rival Jerusalem definition, is both partial and muddled.
But that's not my main criticism. There's a small section at the back that is labelled "How this guide came about", which says it started life as a advice to ecumenical accompaniers who spend time in Israel-Palestine. This really shows - it's too much about when it's OK and not OK to criticise Israel and Zionism, and how that might land with different kinds of Jewish people. Although there is some kind and thoughtful material about how to talk to and listen to Jews about their experiences and feelings, it's not grounded in a proper understanding of contemporary antisemitism.
There's a view among some progressive people that antisemitism is not really a big deal these days. Sure, it was nasty in the Middle Ages, and the Holocaust was really bad, but these days Jews don't face much racism - they're white, after all, and often privileged too. So how can they really be victims of racism? An addition to this is that responding to antisemitism somehow claims precedence, that there is a hierarchy of forms of racism where Jew-hatred is (wrongly) put at the top. And this is supplemented by a thread about how accusations of antisemitism are used to deflect criticism of Israel and Zionism - something that very much does happen, but surely shouldn't be the first thing to speak about when one speaks about hatred towards Jews. Though it often is.
What I felt was missing from the pamphlet is how absolutely fundamental antisemitism is to far right politics and ideas. This isn't always immediately apparent. The mobs that gather outside migrant hotels don't chant slogans about Jews. But if you look at how they talk about migrants to each others, and to their target audiences, theories about powerful Jews are never far from the surface - the so-called "Great Replacement" is allegedly a conspiracy by Jews to bring migrants in to replace "indigenous" white people. Almost any far right commentary on what's really happening in the world, from Covid to 9-11 to the financial crisis, quickly becomes a conversation about Jews. Curiously, the far right, and antisemites, are represented among the ranks of both pro-Zionists (like Tommy Robinson, and Victor Orban) and anti-Zionists (like Nick Fuentes, and British neo-Nazis including Nick Griffin and the Patriotic Alternative group).
I won't explain here why antisemitism is so important to the far right ideologically and intellectually. That deserves a separate, longer piece. But it's a big thing, and by omitting it the pamphlet makes it look like antisemitism mainly belongs to history and to conversations about Israel.
One more thing. For a pamphlet aimed at people in the UK it was rather thin on the special contribution that England has made to Jew-hatred - the first country to expel Jews, the place where the blood libel (the idea that Jews kill Christian children so as to obtain and use their blood) originated, the introduction of the first immigration controls to bar the entrance of Jews fleeing pogroms in the Russian empire.
So I'm grateful that the Quakers have had a go at addressing the subject, and I do appreciate some of the good parts of the report. I just wish it had been better.
I felt a bit annoyed by the violation of the convention that close third person narrative shouldn't switch between the inner lives and thoughts of multiple characters, but maybe that's a bit nit-picky.
.jpg)
Watched on Channel 4 online, with repeated breaks for annoying ads. The voice over explains that these are there, even in the premium paid for version "for commercial reasons", but most of the ads are for other Channel 4 content. Bah.
There's so much to say about the book - the clever structure, the narrative style, the characters real and invented, the texture of wartime Vienna - just get it and read it.
Everything is brought to a conclusion and pretty much everything is finished and tied up, in a mainly happy way. Still plenty of anachronistic jokes, which I continued to enjoy.
I was aware that my historical knowledge of this period, after the Restoration and the "Glorious Revolution", is really sketchy - I didn't realise how much I didn't know about the Hanoverian succession.
