Howard Jacobson's Blog, page 3

Thought for the day: everyone disappoints you in the end. The only question is how quickly that end comes. I held out against Obama-fatigue for one whole term of his office – easy to do from this side of the Atlantic, I grant you – but his public response to the killings in a Jerusalem synagogue earlier this week finally convinced me he had become a disappointment even to himself.

There must, roars beleaguered Ed Miliband, mouse-like, on his Facebook page, “be a zero-tolerance approach to anti-Semitism.” Could be said better but depressing it needs to be said at all. Jew-hating is on the rise again. In Europe, murders; here, synagogues defaced, Jewish MPs abused, ancient libels invoked, Nazi crimes remembered fondly on our streets. The more we change, the more we don’t. Heil Hitler!

When Russell Brand uses the word “hegemony” something dies in my soul. When Miriam Margolyes sees the word “Jew” something dies in hers. Such accomplished clowns, both of them, it’s a matter of regret to those of us who like to be amused that they don’t stick to clowning. It takes from their comedy to discover they are fools in earnest. But it’s also on behalf of seriousness that we ask them to stay with what they know. For neither has the first idea what serious thought is. And these are dangerous times, when what looks like an idea is more likely to be attended to than what actually is one.

Good Shabbes. Unless it’s gone 6.44pm on the day this column is published, in which case it’s Shabbes no longer and I shouldn’t be wishing you a good one. Sorry to be punctilious, but that’s how it is with religious observance. You can’t be approximate.

Four years ago, in these pages,

Now that another Yom Kippur has been and gone without my being struck down for my sins – the biggest of them, in some eyes, being my failure to honour the Day of Atonement in the way a Jew is supposed to – I will unfold to you a tale. Call it an expiation for not adequately expiating.

In Venice with George Clooney. All right, not “with” exactly; more “at the same time as”. And even that is coincidental. The first inkling I had that something more than usually hyperbolic was happening here was an overheard conversation on a vaporetto about the city being struck by “Rooneymania”.

This week – the untold story of my life in dance. Clear your mind of Billy Elliot. Or, if you must, think Billy Elliot in reverse – a boy who infuriated his father by refusing to dance and wanting to have boxing lessons instead. Of the dances my father urged on me, I most dreaded the conga, the Russian kazatzka, and the last waltz with whichever great-great-grandmother was still standing. I was too shy to try any of them. Girls might  see. Or worse, join me.

Of the reasons there are to dread death – and no stoic or holy man has yet convinced me there are reasons not to – the most compelling is the shame of it. I don’t just mean the shame of illness and bodily deterioration, helplessness, loneliness, reliance on the care and kindness of others, the end of you as a self-determining agent, I mean the simple shame of being mortal, the disgrace of not being able to do a little better than that.

Falling in love was something Kevern Cohen did from time to time, but he was never able to stay in love or keep a woman in love with him. Nothing dramatic happened. There were no clifftop fallings-out. Compared to the violence with which other couples publicly shredded one another in Port Reuben, his courtships – for they were rarely more than that – came to an end with exemplary courtesy on both sides.