Jason Isaacs (June 6, 1963)

You may know the actor Jason Isaacs only through his most famous role: Lucius Malfoy in the Harry Potter films. How interesting that a Jewish actor should play the one character with what I would call serious meaning for secular Jews. Malfoy of course is a wizard aristocrat who – along with arch-villain Lord Voldemort – is obsessed with “pure blood.”

If there is any political allegory in the Harry Potter books, it lies in the way author J.K.Rowling (as well as the writers of the film scripts) dealt with the snobbery and fixations of wizards like Malfoy and how their obsession lures them into the worst evil and power madness. The entire treatment points to the way that English aristocratic obsessions have affected English Jews, as well as darker hints about a comparison to the Nazis. Isaacs' creation of the Malfoy role has seemingly underscored this comparison. I can't help comparing the Malfoy theme with themes of English-Jewish life, as presented by authors like Linda Grant and Howard Jacobson.

Isaacs has had many other roles as well as Malfoy. For example, he played Maurice in the film "Good." In the film, according to an article in the Forward, Maurice is a secular Jewish psychiatrist in pre-war Nazi Germany. "He’s the film’s moral center, despite the fact that — or perhaps because — Maurice is a secular Jew (who doesn’t like Jews) who is also an unapologetic bon vivant. As a self-proclaimed 'Jewish man who does almost nothing Jewish in his life,' Issacs said he could relate."

Linda Grant: "We Had It So Good"

Time goes by. You're young and have no serious plans. You establish something: a marriage? A job? A life? Suddenly you are aging, or just plain old. Strangers clearly see that you aren't you. But you know you are really the same person you have always been.

Fleeting perceptions that current reality isn't reality are indescribable. But in her latest novel We Had It So Good Linda Grant perfectly captures this sense of time flying by, of change and permanence in conflict. She describes Stephen Newman, her main character in the 1950s: a child in Los Angeles playing in his father's fur-storage business. It's the 60s/70s: Stephen goes to England on a Rhodes scholarship, meets a group of hippie types, is "sent down" from Oxford for making LSD in a research lab. He lives in a "squat." Before he can think, years pass and he and his wife -- one of the girls from the group -- have a beautiful house, children, and a better-than-middle class lifestyle. His wife becomes a psychoanalyst; he becomes a BBC producer. How has he stayed in England so long?

Stephen, the displaced American, has a Jewish immigrant father who came through Ellis Island and a Cuban mother who regrets the way her native land must have changed. His main sense of them is of their great love for him: the English girls he meets have no similar family memory. His mother never goes back to Cuba, but his father at age 90 takes him on a trip to the village in Poland where he lived 80 years before; eventually his father shares a long-concealed truth about his origins and the story he's always told, but not with Stephen, rather with his wife.

Historic events that we readers recognize take their toll. It's the 90s: a man that Stephen once met on the way to be a Rhodes scholar is President of the US. It's the 00s: he thinks his friends have all escaped the terrorist bombing on the London tube, but his daughter is devastated by its effect on her secret lover. His friend from hippie days is a very rich man thanks to an investment guy in New York that never loses money. At the end of the book we can see what's coming to him. We can see so much.

Linda Grant -- already one of my "heroes" -- does it all through her wonderful characterization of Stephen, his wife, their friends, their two children, their parents, and the world that they live in. The whirl of time flying by is remarkably portrayed. Her book When I Lived in Modern Times captured a historical moment effectively and vividly, and she's now done it again.

Antisemitism in High Fashion

A lot of Europeans still seem to hate us Jews. John Galliano the fashion designer is the most recent. Like many others, he seems to need a lot of drink and drugs to become really nasty and antisemitic, at least to do so in public. So some people are bound to say Jews are just touchy if they think it's real antisemitism. I think that many things inhibit sober antisemites, but in vino veritas and all that. After all, Galliano's outburst was vile enough to break the law in France, though I'll be surprised if he ever goes to trial since he's left the country and seems to be a British citizen.

Linda Grant, a writer who has covered both high fashion and antisemitism, wrote a very enlightening article in the Guardian, "Galliano and the taste for transgression." She pointed out that Galliano's strong suit is transgression, and thus:

"If you are breaker of taboos, then antisemitism is only another taboo, no different from any other. It's the saying of the unsayable. It has become the last frontier for those demanding freedom of speech, for whom everything, even the Holocaust, is fair game. Is Galliano an actual antisemite who hates Jews? Who knows what passes through his mind, but by invoking the name of Hitler and gloating about the gas chambers, he is only doing what others have always paid him to do: shock."

"Fashion's obsession with transgression, its demand that Galliano shock us even more each season, has played its own part in the drunken bar rant. It has lost sight of women, of our desire to dress well and to be beautiful. It has given us the increasingly desperate and exhausted tactic of taboo-busting instead of our wish to cover our imperfect bodies as pleasingly as we can."

Other writers on the Galliano affair have chosen different approaches, for example providing long lists of Jewish fashion designers and trend-setters as an alternative for Jewish women who loved what Gallino produced but now have to reject it if they wish to maintain their self-respect. I think Linda Grant has the best approach: personally I can't imagine why anyone wants to follow the trends or dictates of such designers even if they are not in the least antisemitic.

Linda Grant (February 15, 1951)

Linda Grant has written several books that I find fascinating, especially:

• When I Lived in Modern Times, a historic novel about the Israeli war of independence, winner of the 2000 Orange Prize.
• The Thoughtful Dresser, a book about clothes that has a very interesting description of how a Holocaust survivor became a fashion expert in Canada.
• The Clothes On Their Backs: A Novel 
• The People on the Street: A Writer's View of Israel 

I enjoyed all of them, especially because of her perspective as a British Jew, which is just different enough from my American Jewish viewpoint to be really enlightening. Her new novel, We Had It So Good is about to be published.