Jewishness in contemporary England functions as visible bodily otherness rather than belonging

Evidence

The successful immigrants are not Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal but the Chalfens, upper-middle-class, liberal, and the very definition of “English.” “Marcus and Joyce, [are] an aging hippie couple both dressed in pseudo-Indian garb” who are very outspoken at the meeting of parents in the school attended by all of the children (110). They are successful: “the father is something of an eminent scientist and his mother is a horticulturist” (252). We are very slowly introduced to their son Joshua Chalfen. At first sight he is “pasty, practically anemic, curly-haired, and chubby” (226). He is very white. But he is also revealed to be “Josh-with-the-Jewfro”(247). He is a Jew if only by the very definition of his body. He too is a hybrid: “a cross pollination between a lapsed-Catholic horticulturist and an intellectual Jew” (258). Being Jewish is being a misfit. Joshua is a “smart Jew,” an outsider, who immediately identifies Irie as “one of his own” (247). His “own” is a collection of physical misfits with whom the very bright but very tall Irie seems to belong. She is more or less adopted into the Chalfen clan as a sign of their social commitment to racial equality. Liberal, English, and yet visibly different, Joshua and his parents are the cosmopolitan insider as outsider. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 760

Categorization

• QUESTION: The claim that Jewishness is a bodily rather than religio-cultural marker of difference in white Englishness deserves more unpacking than this chapter gives.
• XREF: connects to: Jewish social alienation differed from class alienation in being inescapable across generations — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 17