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ABSTRACT
A reading of contemporary British Jewish culture suggests that a conceptualization of "Jew-ishness" offers a fluid yet meaningful way with which to negotiate current Jewish identities. This article considers this proposition in relation to the recent British sitcoms Friday Night Dinner and Grandma's House. It argues that the representation of what Jon Stratton has described as "Jewish moments" in these programs (ranging from the implicit, coded, and ironic to the explicit, overt, and stereotypical) taps into a sense of being both inside and outside of a cultural grouping which resonates both at a personal level and, I suggest, within a wider context of increasingly complex and diffuse British Jew-ish cultural identifications.
Sue Vice opens her reading of Jack Rosenthal's Bar Mitzvah Boy (BBC 1) by recalling the effect of first watching the play on television in 1976. She notes "how exceptional it was as a television play about Jewish life in Britain presented in an explicit and unapologetic way-Yiddish, Hebrew, lokshen pudding and all."1 Like Vice, I also remember watching that play, as a Jewish child growing up in outer London in the 1970s. Alongside its presentation of a recognizable suburban British Jewish family, Rosenthal's drama was a nuanced exploration of class and the crises of adolescence. As Vice noted, it still remains "significant as a cultural document."2 I experienced an echoing sensation of being spoken to when the sitcom Grandma's House (BBC2, 2010 and 2012) was aired in 2010. In this presentation of lower-middle-class North-East London life, specifically the suburb of Gants Hill, I saw something I felt I knew; and that invoked a number of complex internal responses. The feeling of recognition, in seeing aspects of my own cultural background being addressed on mainstream television, was in its own way also "exceptional." However, a sense of delight in watching a mediated reconstruction of something that felt so particular and familiar was also subtended by a certain tension. Since then I have been reflecting on what precisely invoked such a reaction and what might be extrapolated in more general terms from that personal experience.
The broadcasting of Grandma's House alongside the sitcom Friday Night Dinner (Channel 4, 2011 and 2012); documentaries such as A Hasidic Guide to Love, Marriage and Finding...