On Marriage

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DB: Feelings are contagious – you can be a winner in a society, and still be caught up in envious feelings. DB: That’s very interesting… The notion that satire has somehow become the only plausible way of getting your news.

DB: In the introduction to my book I’m interested in whether there’s much of a difference, really, between a word that you whisper – which tends to be the British way – and one that you’re required to shout out – in a declamatory, American way. Because in comedy you can only get away with it by virtue of the fact that everybody thinks you’re ‘only joking’. It was left to me, therefore, to point out that Shakespeare’s Jew was an anti-Semitic stereotype and that Shylock was in fact not an accurate depiction of how I generally acted, nor how my family acted and nor how my ancestors acted, even when faced with persecution and prejudice.

AH: Also, making fun of yourself… At the conference “Contemporary British-Jewish Cultures” at Bangor University this month (March 2018) many speakers described this idea as something inherently Jewish, too. Because you see how Jews have prospered there, with that psychology that there is a chance to start anew. Just because if you read, for example, Nina Raine’s Tribes, there are the most hilarious jokes in there. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. I think there’s a tendency, when you use words like ‘resentment’, to adopt a severely moral, judgemental tone.

Feelings - especially 'negative' feelings; feelings as framed by modernity/history, technology, literature, art, film and psychoanalysis. It’s the plot that drives much of western literature and drama; it is presented to successive generations (especially women) as both the highest goal and a yoke of oppression. Because you feel out of control, and dispossessed, and you don’t know what you’re about to do, what you’re about to say. Because it looks as though what I’m saying is that feeling Jewish means to feel: guilt, envy, self-hatred, paranoia – come and get it!

The argument in the book is that envy is nearly always caught up with envy of expressivity, of another person’s ability to be creative, and to get their voice out.

In these movies, both partners offer what you suspect is an exaggerated version of themselves: Baum the straight woman, Appignanesi the butt of the joke. And, actually, during a period in British politics – when the word ‘Jew’ is trending on Twitter and people are googling the word ‘Jew’ and looking probably in all sorts of insalubrious places to find out what Jews are up to –, you have a very strong wish and desire to speak to other people going through the same thing, in a somewhat contained and close setting. Because when you’re feeling hopeless, really hopeless and despairing, if something manages to make you laugh, your gratitude for that is overwhelming – like a kind of prayer. I consider all feelings to have a potentially blocking, and a potentially motivating, or moving, impulse inside them. DB: I think perhaps one thing that I would say to that is that in the British culture, Jews are conspicuous by their kind of emotional incontinence.Some of our correspondents have described this as ‘feeling European’ – because the dominant backgrounds are Ashkenazi.

With Josh Appignanesi, her spouse, she is both co-director and performer in the documentaries The New Man and Husband.EV: I think it’s really interesting, this idea of feeling different, but also belonging, in a way, this double-bind. So, this is an extraordinary piece of family history – the survival of my family has to do with my ancestor being such a loser [laughs].