Where are all the young writers? David Herman unpacks his thoughts from Jewish Book Week 2020

This year’s Jewish Book Week was a huge success. Events were packed, Kings Place was buzzing and there was a terrific line-up of big names and fascinating subjects, from Simon Schama and Edmund de Waal to Einstein, Ben-Gurion and fashion designers from Weimar Berlin.

There were also some interesting and surprising lessons. Many of the people who can be relied upon to fill the big halls – Schama, Howard Jacobson, Norman Lebrecht, Frederic Raphael – are now in their 70s or 80s. Who are the younger writers and historians who can attract such a big audience? And why has this become such a big problem?

In the last few years, we have lost some of the most famous Jewish cultural figures: Jonathan Miller and George Steiner, historians such as David Cesarani, Martin Gilbert and Robert Wistrich. They were thrilling thinkers but also great speakers who could communicate big ideas and new research to a general audience. Many were experienced broadcasters, both on TV and radio. Take Steiner: he wrote 134 reviews for The New Yorker in 30 years and was the chief literary critic for The Sunday Times. During the 1980s and 90s he appeared on TV discussing TS Eliot’s antisemitism with Clive James and Christopher Ricks, Freud’s legacy with Bruno Bettelheim and whether tyranny produces great art with Joseph Brodsky and Elizabeth Hardwick. He appeared on Desert Island Discs and Start the Week on BBC Radio Four and gave the first Jacob Bronowski lecture on BBC Two. Miller was just as fluent and his range was formidable. He could talk on medicine and genetics or theatre and opera. Few Jewish writers and intellectuals in their 40s and 50s have that kind of range or that ability to electrify a crowd.

When I chaired an event at JBW on Sunday 1 March about Jewish writers, it struck me that while the panel consisted of writers based in Britain – Howard Jacobson, Eva Hoffman and Gabriel Josipovici – the writers they wanted to talk about were Jewish American, not Anglo-Jewish. For them the great contemporary Jewish writers were Bellow, Roth and Malamud, not Pinter and Wesker, Muriel Spark or Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.

This wasn’t to denigrate these British writers. The point was if you are trying to define what makes a Jewish writer Jewish, you look to the Jewish characters of Bellow and Roth, Herzog and Mr Sammler, Eli the Fanatic and Portnoy. You look at the rhythms of their speech and their writing; the Jewish worlds of Chicago and Newark.

On a more positive note, the great lesson of this year’s JBW was how successful it was. All that energy and vitality, and the range from rabbis and feminists to scientists and psychoanalysts. Mathematicians like Marcus du Sautoy and journalists like Tom Bower and Jonathan Freedland, classicists like Armand D’Angour and Simon Goldhill. There is concern about the future of a number of Jewish cultural institutions in Britain, such as the Jewish Museum London and the Jewish Quarterly, but Jewish Book Week reminds us that there is a huge appetite for debate, culture and ideas among the Jewish community.

By David Herman

Photos by James Deavin

Jewish Book Week 2020 took place Saturday 29 February – Sunday 8 March. Kings Place, N1 9AG & JW3, NW3 6ET. www.jewishbookweek.com