The vote she lost. The vote he lost. The vote neither wants to give us

Exciting times!

First there was the vote she lost. Theresa May denied MPs a vote on her Brexit deal in December for fear she’d lose by upward of 100 votes. Then in January she held it and lost by upward of 200.

Then there was the no confidence vote in the government. Jeremy Corbyn wouldn’t propose it in December for fear he’d lose. Then he put it down in January and duly lost it.

Now there’s the vote neither of them wants us to have. Another referendum to ask the people whether they still want to go ahead with Brexit, after all this mess it’s landed us in. And May and Corbyn don’t want that, for fear they might lose it too.

They both denounce a new referendum as an affront to democracy. An interesting position. I mean, if it confirmed the result of the previous one, in favour of Brexit, I think us remainers would just have to bite our tongues. We might think the decision wrongheaded, boneheaded even, but with two popular votes going that way, we’d just have to put up with it.

Fun following the debates from Italy
A cartoon by Giannelli in the Corrriere de la Sera
Theresa May is asking 'Redo-rendum?'

But May and Corbyn still don’t want another vote. And why not? Because there’s a chance it might reverse the previous decision. And though both made a bit of a show of campaigning against Brexit last time, deep down they both want Britain to leave the EU. 

Actually, not that deep down. May keeps talking about her goal being to deliver Brexit. As for Corbyn, he told the Guardian on 21 December that Brexit would go ahead if he were elected. So they offer different flavours of Brexit, but no relief from Brexit in either case.

So, they don’t want a referendum for fear they’d be denied their Brexit.

In other words, in declaring it anti-democratic they’re using a special but not unusual definition of democracy. To them, democracy is obeying the will of the people when it gives them what they want in the first place.

You may feel that’s not terribly honest. And you’d be right. But spare a thought for Corbyn. His own dishonesty is particularly difficult.

See, his fans point out that his is a fresh take on politics since he wants, insists even, on policy being made by members. Unfortunately, he heads a party in which three out of four members want a new referendum, and four out of five want to stay in the EU.

How do you handle that situation if you’re a Brexiter and the party leader?

A conundrum. But Corbyn, such a traditional politician however much his zealots say he’s an innovator, has simply adopted the ‘listen and ignore’ stance.

In line with party policy, he wants a general election and only if he can’t get one will he consider other possibilities. At that point, all options including a second referendum, would still be on the table.

That’s listening.

Here’s where the ignore bit comes in.

His reaction to defeat in the no confidence motion, his only route to forcing an early general election, wasn’t to say, ‘ah, well, we’d better consider another approach’. It was to say ‘we’ll keep bringing in no-confidence votes’.

Brilliant, isn’t it? Of course, it makes you wonder why he bottled proposing a no-confidence vote in December, given he’s happy to keep bringing them in. And you might think it odd that he’s OK with holding repeated no-confidence votes until he gets the result he wants, but won’t countenance repeating a referendum.

That, though, is to miss the cunning of his stance. While he keeps proposing no confidence motions, he doesn’t have to consider any alternative. A second referendum is an option on the table, but that’s just where he chooses to leave it: on a table he won’t go near.

Again, not necessarily all that honest a way of following party policy, you might feel. A bit Jesuitical. Like crossing your fingers when you make a promise. But it allows him to say he’s doing what he’s been told, while being able to keep his Brexit.

Trouble is, it may not be that safe. For the rest of us, of course. But even for him

Because, as the saying has it, if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.

Call my Agent. And enjoy

France has been slow in building itself an international reputation for producing TV series. In fact, it wasn’t until … that it released the first series to win a major following outside France, was Engrenages, translated into English as Spiral, a gripping and entertaining thriller series, though one that sometimes pushed credibility rather beyond the limits of plausibility.

Since then, they’ve made several, including under the Netflix name, of greater or lesser quality. None, however, had come close to rivalling Spiral until Call my Agent or, to give its original title, Dix pour cent, from the Netflix stable. The French title is for the fee a theatrical agent will charge a client for finding him or her roles in theatre or films.

The agency is a great setting for all the tensions and poisonous relationships that we’ve come to expect from office-based soaps. This series, though, handles them particularly well: the clever plots and manipulations often blow up in their perpetrators’ faces, and the games that the powerful play sometimes succeed but sometimes fail against a smart counter-move – or simply bad luck.

The cast of Call My Agent: ready to entertain us a lot.
And even surprise us a little
l to r: Liliane Rovère, Stéfi Celma, Grégory Montel, Camille Cottin,
Nicolas Maury, Laure Calamy, Thibault de Montalembert,
Fanny Sidney,  Assaad Bouab

That, indeed, is the great charm of the series: every single episode has an obvious ending that one can predict from the beginning, and hardly any actually ends that way. That makes even the ones that do end the way you’d expect surprising, since it’s so unusual for any of them to do so.

The acting, too, is superb, to the highest level of comedy. We have the female assistant (Laure Calamy) who will occasionally fly into a rage or a panic attack with superb contortions of her body – almost clinical seizures – or the gay male assistant (Nicolas Maury) who makes no secret of his wounded and hurtful feelings, while also proving frequently the smartest person present, with clever suggestions expressed in a gloriously camp voice.

We have the adulterous agent (Thibault de Montalembert), we have the agent who can’t keep a girlfriend (Grégory Montel), we have the old agent who had her glory years decades ago, out of which at least one old flame will appear for our amusement (Liliane Rovère), we have the driven Lesbian who falls in love but can’t help straying, not always with a woman (Camille Cottin), and we have the young ingénue who gives us our protagonist and our benchmark of normality while remaining charming and likeable (Fanny Sidney). And even she has a secret that will dog her for many episodes…

All this is excellent enough but then there’s the structure adopted by the series. These agents have clients and those clients are actors. Some, indeed, are stars, and the producers decided not to use ordinary actors playing stars, but real stars playing ‘themselves’. The quotation marks around ‘themselves’ are there because these are fictional versions of themselves – I don’t think, for instance, that Monica Bellucci would have to spend long in an enforced singleton existence in Paris, unless she truly wanted to.

Juliette Binoche getting ready to open the Cannes Festival

Bellucci is far from the only star we meet. There’s at least one in every episode, and many of them are of the same calibre: Isabelle Adjani, Fabrice Lucchini, Guy Marchand, Juliette Binoche, Isabelle Huppert, to name but a few of the major figures of the last few decades of French cinema who appear in the series.

For the moment, there are just three seasons of six 45-minute episodes each. Perfect binge watching. And much to be enjoyed…

Personality cults: toxin of our times

One of the benefits of having dogs is that you have to go for walks. It may be cold and wet, or oppressively hot, but the dogs always know that what you really need is another walk.

And they’re right.

Now, and I hesitate to write these words, in case they read them, but even with the company of two charming dogs, I find those walks not entirely exciting. So I take earphones, and an audible book downloaded to my phone. That passes the time satisfactorily, while Luci and Toffee hunt around smelling any patch of ground that seems potentially interesting, or playing with small dogs and running away from large ones.

Luci with Toffee behind her.
Great fun but walks need a little more...

Currently, I’m listening to a book I previously read, Ian Kershaw’s biography Hitler. I seem to be getting more from it this way than from reading it. Perhaps it’s the intimacy of a voice speaking directly into my ear. But what perhaps 
makes the book more vivid to me now is that it feels so much more topical. 

Whether on the first or second time through, the picture that emerges is of a Hitler who was not unintelligent, but hopelessly limited. Perhaps one could describe him as selectively stupid.

For instance, he warned the Jews before the war that if they dragged Germany into another world war, they would pay the price, through the annihilation of Jewry. 

He then invaded Poland, and found himself at war with France and Britain.

Two years later, with Britain still undefeated, he invaded the Soviet Union, convinced the German army could strike a knockout blow in a matter of months, leading to a complete collapse of the Soviets. So now he was in a major European war.

A few months later, Hitler’s ally Imperial Japan attacked the United States and he declared war too.

So now he was in a world war.

The Jews had absolutely nothing to do with any of those steps. Indeed, they had been increasingly victimised as each military adventure got under way. Even so, this was the point at which Hitler, claiming that the Jews had indeed dragged the nation into this terrible conflict, decided that his warning was about to be verified, and Nazi Germany launched its programme of Jewish extermination.

As Kershaw points out, there’s little doubt that Hitler believed what he was saying, however contrary it was to any real evidence. That’s what I mean by blinkered. It’s also what I mean by selective stupidity. It allowed him to delude himself into adopting a series of views with no basis in reality.

It wasn’t, however, the only form of stupidity at play. Or the only form of delusion. Much more widespread was the poisonous beliefs that formed the bedrock of Hitler’s power: the personality cult that developed around him and which meant that any statement he made had to be true, simply because he’d made it.

Hitler was a self-deluded limited man, and profoundly dishonest, but he came to be thought of in Germany as incapable of error.

No attitude is more dangerous. Because if a man is infallible, to question him isn’t merely an error, it’s a lie. To disseminate such a lie is nothing short of treason.

If such questioning is by someone powerful, say the newspapers, then the treason is particularly deadly. The damage is done not to the revered personality – he is above such damage – but to the people who may read or listen to the lies. To protect them, not the leader, it’s necessary to shut down the purveyors of these distortions. Indeed, it may even be necessary to punish the people who produce them.

This is a crucial step to take. Because democracy itself is based on suspicion of its leaders. We elect people to power, but then we surround them with institutions designed to monitor them and question their actions. We never give way to unqualified faith in leaders but expect them to be, like any human, fallible and therefore likely to have to be replaced at some stage.

Personality cults represent an opposed point of view and, consequently, tend to lead to authoritarianism.

Now in long-established and deeply-rooted democracies, such as the United States or Britain, there are mechanisms in place which may be able to prevent that decline into autocratic rule. It may be possible to remove the personalities at the centre of a cult from power before they can consolidate their hold. The great question of our time is whether they are strong enough. Because, and this is why Kershaw is so topical, personality cults are back with a vengeance.

Donald Trump in the US is the head of a personality cult, that sees him as infallibly right, a view he shares. So anyone who questions him is not merely incorrect, but an enemy. Again, the media, or the mainstream media to use today’s dismissive term, are the among the most dangerous. 

Trump would not, I think, launch a Holocaust as Hitler did. However, I’m convinced that he would have no hesitation in locking up opponents if he could. He’d be sure he would be serving the people by doing so.

It’s no accident that the cry of ‘lock her up’ rings out at his rallies.

Not so different as one might think
as both lead personality cults

We have a similar problem in Britain. The Labour Party has been invested by a personality cult. Jeremy Corbyn is seen by his supporters as incapable of error. I’ve been told that I need to show ‘faith’ in the leader, the most dangerous attitude towards leaders. I’ve been told that he is being ‘savvy’ when he refuses to back either side of the Brexit debate, though that merely strikes me as dishonest. And I see in him the same self-deluding tendency to believe that he cannot err: he’s a man of the left so that all his positions are left wing, even when he is pandering to hard right Brexiters whose support he feels he needs, to win office.

As with Trump’s followers, Corbyn’s also loathe the ‘mainstream media’.

Corbyn is no Hitler, of course. However, he necessarily embodies the same tendencies towards authoritarianism that mark all personality cults. Equally, by their unqualified faith, his supporters encourage and reinforce that trend.

Forget the man. Forget his policies. It’s the qualities of a cult themselves that are toxic and need to be resisted.

I’m indebted to Kershaw for reminding me of that vital lesson. And to my dogs, of course, for obliging me to listen to him again.

A little humour, a little much-needed bloody-mindedness

Many years ago, I enjoyed watching the French film Ridicule, which focuses on how the court of Louis XVI – yes, the one who ended up losing his head on the guillotine – had made a cult of wit, deemed to be fiendishly clever though it was often also fiendishly cruel. 

The film contrasted such wit with a more British quality, which it called  ‘humour’, and clearly viewed as greatly superior.

At one point, the protagonist, a celebrated wit, meets the King who asks him to say something funny, there, immediately, on the spur of the moment.

“Be witty this minute!”

But on what subject could he be spontaneously witty? The King has a suggestion.

“Use me, for example.”

The wit has the perfect answer.

“Sire, the king is not a subject.”

I thought that was brilliant, but I suppose you could argue that it is perhaps spoiled by a deferential quality verging on the obsequious.

The contrast is emphasised at the end of the film by a French aristocrat, by then in exile in England while the revolution is running wild in his country, walking along a cliff path above a breath-taking seascape. A gust of wind takes his hat. He cries out.

“My hat! I’ve lost it.”

“Better than your head,” his English companion replies.

“Humour!” replies the Frenchman, “it’s marvellous!”

Ridicule: A hat is lost, but a head is spared

To me, that is as witty as the first rejoinder. But there is indeed a difference: it doesn’t establish any kind of hierarchy between the speakers, it shows neither deference to the other person or superiority over him, but merely shares a smile between equals. If that’s humour rather than wit then, yes, I too prefer it.

Sadly, in the last two or three years that famous British sense of humour has been a little scarce in public discourse. The leadership of both the Labour and Conservative parties take themselves far too seriously to allow of any smiles. So it was good to see something of the spirit reappear a little, even though it was  on the Tory side at the expense of Labour, and it felt more like wit than humour: the comments were designed to belittle opponents.

It seems that Environment Minister Michael Gove, even though he’s generally someone to laugh at rather than with, showed some elegance when he described MPs who hope Theresa May can get a better Brexit deal than she has so far, as swingers in their fifties hoping that Scarlett Johansson would show up at one of their parties. Quite amusing though I was glad to read that Amber Rudd, speaking up for the female side, suggested “or Pierce Brosnan”.

The Justice Secretary, David Gauke, went one further and described the official Labour Brexit position as hoping for Johansson to show up on a unicorn. Cruel but hardly unfair: Jeremy Corbyn keeps suggesting that if elected, he will somehow bring home a hugely preferable deal to May’s, with absolutely no evidence to suggest that he could do any such thing.

At least the comments were worth a smile, not something that marks British politics much these days.

But there’s another quality my compatriots regard as quintessentially British. It’s a certain cussedness, if not downright bloody-mindedness, which refuses to allow power to do just what it likes. “Over my dead body,” it seems to say, or even “over your dead body” – after all, we cut off our King’s head nearly a century and a half before the French more famously did the same to theirs.

It’s particularly welcome to see that spirit stirring again.

Twice in 24 hours, the May government has been defeated in the House of Commons by MPs across parties working to prevent a cliff-edge, no-deal Brexit. It is heartening, in this parliamentary democracy, to see parliamentarians asserting their right to resist the government.

What’s more, the initiatives came from the backbenches, not the party leaderships. Yvette Cooper, leadership candidate defeated by Corbyn led one attack. Dominic Grieve, ex-Tory Minister, guided the other. The leaders merely opposed, in the case of May who was defending her deal, or followed, in the case of Corbyn who is, well, Jeremy Corbyn.

The government was particularly angry over the second defeat, with the Speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow, who allowed the vote to take place. Precedent was against him, and it was a decision that seriously threatened the government’s usual prerogative to decide what gets discussed and what gets voted on. But what it showed was a Speaker intent on seeing all parliamentarians able to decide national policy, and not just the minority of them that form the government.

A refreshing notion.

The Speaker, though originally a Conservative himself,
getting right up Tory noses by asserting the authority of Parliament

And there’s a delicious irony to it, too. Brexiters keep saying that the aim of leaving the EU was to ‘take back control’. I don’t think this is what they had in mind, but I’m revelling in the spectacle of Parliament reasserting its authority over the Executive, which had been allowed to erode away far too far.

Now, that’s the kind of control I’m only too glad to see us taking back.

Especially as it’s so cussed. And gives us a lot to smile about.

Visiting the Infant Jesus

As you can imagine, I’m sensitive to the privilege I’ve just enjoyed. I’ve been visiting the Infant Jesus. Or, as they say in Rome where I’m writing these words, il Bambino Gesù. English or Italian, it’s an honour.

The colleague who met me there drove into town. That’s never easy. First, there are the dreadful traffic conditions (I saw two small accidents in just an hour – it made me almost nostalgic: clearly, Roman driving hasn’t improving since I was a child in the eternal city). And there’s the parking: as in most major cities, spaces are scarce.

My colleague solved the first problem by leaving home far earlier than one might have thought necessary. And she solved the second by leaving the car in the Infant Jesus’s own car park. That seemed fine to me, since why would a child need a car park? After all, children aren’t even allowed driving licences.

It felt particularly appropriate to be making the visit the day after Twelfth Night. That’s the feast of the arrival of the three kings to worship the Infant Jesus, in the manger where he lay. I wouldn’t have wanted to get there before the kings – that would have been disrespectful – so the day after felt about right.

Adoration of the Magi by Gerard David
Nothing like my visit

Still, there was no ox or ass, no manger with a baby, no Mary or Joseph. I didn’t even see any gold, frankincense or myrrh, however hard I looked. Not that I’d have a lot of use for frankincense or myrrh, but a little gold never goes amiss. But, given the financial pressure on hospital budgets, I wouldn’t expect gold to last long in any of them – it would be immediately invested in more care, or for paying down debt (certainly the latter, in the UK).

In fact, we saw no child at all. The place was full of them but none, to my knowledge, made any pretence to possess messianic qualities. Those are only claimed by the present occupants of the White House or Kremlin. Or, I suppose, the holder of the post of leader in the British Labour Party, though in his case the claim is only made by his worshippers, Corbynism having done away with the milksop notion of mere supporters.

No, Bambino Gesù is a world-class paediatric hospital. For very ill children. Which means the staff frequently have to deal with distraught parents too. So it was still a privilege to be there. As it was invaluable to meet some of the people who have to deal with those harrowing difficulties.

We weren’t there to sell them anything. They weren’t buying. We were listening and learning. About how they’re trying to involve patients in decisions concerning their care, though often that means the parents rather than the patients themselves. It means informing them of the options before them, the risks of each and the possible benefits, to help them reach a choice. Sometimes it means making every effort to disabuse them of certain alternative-medicine notions: no, for instance, cancer really can’t be fought by using the patient’s own energy.

It was a good meeting. Though I was amused by the name of the hospital. In England, we tend to be less inclined to wear a religion on our sleeves. Yes, there’s St George’s in London but the Pope doesn’t even regard George as a saint any more. Even in England he’s more of a figure in exciting tales for kids, riding around and fighting dragons.

And no one calls St Bartholomew’s that any more – it’s plain Barts. Like St James’s in Leeds, fondly known as Jimmy’s. More secular, you see. Perhaps more detached.

Anyway, I’m pleased with the visit. And, in any case, I was pleased to be in Rome again. What a great city, what a joy to have an hour to wander around it in the winter sunshine…

Rome: always a delight to visit

Nancy and Bobby: what leadership looks like

On 11 December 2018, Donald Trump tried to ambush the Democratic Party leaders, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, by turning a photo opp at the White House into a political debate in front of the cameras.

Pelosi was having none of it. In a few well chosen sentences she demolished the President, even mentioning the need to avoid a ‘a Trump shutdown’ of government. That riled the president who rose to the bait. If he didn’t get the funding for his precious border wall, he knew just what he was going to do.

I will shut down the government. I am proud to shut down the government. I will take the mantle.

She had entirely wrong-footed him.

Trump meeting his match

He has, as usual, changed his tune since. Far from taking ‘the mantle’, he now denies all responsibility for the shutdown, blaming the Democrats instead. But today Pelosi is the Speaker of the House of Representatives and she can keep the pressure on him. The first step has been to pass a finance bill with no money for Trump’s wall, putting the onus back on the Republicans to keep the shutdown going.

It’s wonderful to see such gutsy and principled leadership in a world that is sadly short of it. Let’s hope Pelosi stays as firm as she promises to. It’s time that Trump had a lesson in the kind of treatment he can expect from a real leader.

I felt for Pelosi and Schumer in that White House meeting. At my own far less exalted level, I’ve also had the experience of talking to a hostile audience. Funnily enough, I find those sessions the most exciting and the most memorable. Generally, I present to customers, and if one of them attacks me, there’s no question of responding in kind. I have to be strictly polite, even deferential. It’s a fascinating challenge to stay that way while giving absolutely no ground.

The best outcome from such a confrontation is to see the critic, or critics, change their position and end up supportive or at least neutral towards us. That isn’t always possible, in which case the aim has to be to win the support of the rest of the audience that is watching the debate. If they leave concerned – even apologetic – for their colleague’s behaviour, and open to my arguments, then I’ve done as much as I could in the circumstances.

Now, Pelosi wasn’t going to win Trump around. Or even the Trump cult followers watching on TV. But she could hope that her performance would consolidate the backing of her base and win the support of some neutrals. That is the way to beat Trump and at the moment she seems to be handling the campaign superbly.

Sometimes, though, as I’ve suggested, one can actually change minds in an audience. And thinking about that reminded of one of the most remarkable instances of leadership I’ve seen in my lifetime, which indeed changed the minds of many of those listening.

On 4 April 1968, Martin Luther King was murdered. That evening, Robert Kennedy, brother of the murdered President, who had not long previously announced that he was running for the Democratic nomination himself, was due to speak to a rally in Indianapolis. It was being held in a strongly African-American neighbourhood. Kennedy’s advisers and relatives, even the police, told him he should not go, such was the anger in particular amongst the black population. The police had even had reports of young black men with weapons seen near the venue for the speech.

But, as I’ve mentioned before, Kennedy went anyway. He spoke from rough notes he made in his car. And he made what is arguably the best speech of his career. He started, unhesitatingly, by going straight to the news he was breaking.

I have some very sad news for all of you, and, I think, sad news for all of our fellow citizens, and people who love peace all over the world and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight in Memphis, Tennessee.

Bobby Kennedy breaking the bad news

It’s worth listening to the speech, if only to hear for the visceral moan from the crowd when he spoke those words.

Kennedy had made a point of not speaking about his brother’s death in public before. But that night he made an exception.

For those of you who are black and are tempted to fill with hatred and mistrust of the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man.

Abie Washington, a young man in the crowd, then only 26, told the Washington Post fifty years later:

I was upset, to put it mildly. I was pissed. Something needed to be done and I wanted to do it.

But as he listened his feelings changed.

My level of emotion went from one extreme to another. He had empathy. He knew what it felt like. Why create more violence?

That night, there were race riots in 100 cities across the United States. In Washington DC alone, a dozen people were killed. But in Indianapolis, there was nothing. The crowd went home after Kennedy’s speech.

That’s the leadership we need today. I hope Pelosi can provide it. And others too, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the youngest woman elected to Congress, or indeed Beto O’Rourke who ran a barnstorming campaign for the Senate in Texas, coming closer than anybody might have expected to unseating Ted Cruz.

In Britain, we need it in the Labour Party, but that’s going to need a major change at the top.

Still, at least we can admire Pelosi. Or that extraordinary speech in Indianapolis. And hold up as a model the leadership offered by Bobby Kennedy.

Who was dead, himself the victim of an assassin, only 63 days later.

People are people

It’s an odd paradox, but not at all unusual, that people with completely opposite views can end up taking strangely similar positions on certain questions.

One such question is what it is to be a Jew. On that, anti-Semites will give the same answer as many Jews: they are a race. Being a Jew is something that is inherited by children from their parents, summed up in the expression Jewish blood. That’s why Jews feel it’s enough to have a Jewish mother to be a Jew. While it only needed a single Jewish grandparent to make someone a Jew in the eyes of the Nazis.

For others, however, being a Jew merely meant professing a particular religion. After all, you can convert to Judaism, and that makes you a Jew. But since you can’t convert your DNA, that rather suggests that being a Jew is nothing to do with physical inheritance, and instead, ultimately, a matter of choice.

Did I say DNA? Because that’s the central theme of an article from Time that Danielle pointed out to me.

It seems that a Jewish couple in Pennsylvania decided, more or less on a whim, to send off for DNA tests. She, Dani Shapiro, felt there was little need for a test, since she knew exactly who she was and where she came from. She was Ashkenazi Jew whose parents had emigrated from Central Europe.

And then the results came back.

It turned out that she was at least half wrong. It seems her parents had been having trouble conceiving. So they’d called on the services of a fertility clinic, which used a curious technique of mixing semen from different donors with that of their client. That meant, of course, that it was a bit of a lottery who the biological father of any successful embryo might be.

Dani Shapiro: perhaps not everyone’s idea of Jewish looks

In her case, it turned out it hadn’t been the man who she’d always regarded as her father. Who was, in fact, her father. Just not biologically.

Now her mother was certainly Jewish, so to the Jews she would certainly have been one of theirs. But the blood of a gentile also ran in her veins – as she established when she tracked down her biological father and discovered how much they strangely had in common.

“When I met him,” she writes, “I understood, for the first time, where aspects of my very personhood had come from.”

Well, since she had been certain that Ashkenazy Judaism was a fundamental part of her personhood, that was quite some discovery.

The reality, of course, is that being an Ashkenazy Jew really is part of her personhood. As it’s part of mine, even though like her, my father was no Jew. As it isn’t part of my sons’, though to Hitler they would have been Jews too.

The reality is that it doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference who your parents are. Being a Jew or not being a Jew is neither a religious choice nor a genetic destiny. It is a cultural state that one enters or doesn’t, as one chooses.

But then the same is true for other ethnicities too. There may be a number of personal characteristics that are genetically determined, skin colour being the most obvious. But just as with Jews, most of what makes an ethnic group is a matter of culture: a series of shared notions and traditions which go far beyond genetics or faith (though faith can strengthen them).

Which makes the differences between groups interesting but superficial. A lesson both Jews and anti-Semites ought to learn. Jews aren’t better than anyone else simply by virtue of being Jews. Just as they aren’t any worse.

A race? A faith? Jews are just people. Which is the most important thing they, or anyone else, ever inherits from their parents.

As a DNA test easily proved. Though none ought to be necessary.