Every other Wednesday, except for festivals and High Holy-days, an anti-Zionist group called ASHamed Jews meets in an upstairs room in the Groucho Club in Soho to dissociate itself from Israel, urge the boycotting of Israeli goods, and otherwise demonstrate a humanity in which they consider Jews who are not ASHamed to be deficient. ASHamed Jews came about as a consequence of the famous Jewish media philosopher Sam Finkler's avowal of his own shame on Desert Island Discs.
"My Jewishness has always been a source of pride and solace to me," he told Radio Four's listeners, not quite candidly, "but in the matter of the dispossession of the Palestinians I am, as a Jew, profoundly ashamed."
"Profoundly self-regarding," you mean, was his wife's response. But then she wasn't Jewish and so couldn't understand just how ashamed in his Jewishness an ashamed Jew could be.
That I know of, there is no Jewish media philosopher named Sam Finkler nor any anti-Zionist group meeting regularly at the Groucho Club. They exist only in the pages of my new novel... and any relation between them and real people or organisations is of course coincidental.
That's Howard Jacobson, whose new novel The Finkler Question has just been longlisted for the Booker Prize, writing in the Jewish Chronicle and on top form. Do read the piece. It has some very pertinent observations on the 'poisoned playlet' of Caryl Churchill; and also this statement of the obvious, one part of whose obviousness is regularly disregarded by those who embrace its other part:
Let's get something out of the way. I don't think that being critical of Israel makes anyone an antisemite. Only a fool would think it does.
But only a fool would think it follows that criticism of Israel can never be antisemitic, or that anti-Zionism isn't a haven in which antisemitism is sometimes given leave to flourish.