Nadia Valman

Remembering Cable Street: fascism and anti-fascism in British society

This collection presents research on the 1939 confrontation between the police, fascists and anti-fascists in Londons Jewish neighbourhood, and its impact on British society. The collection includes chapters on the political, social and cultural history of Cable Street, looking at the diversity of Jewish responses in London and Manchester, fascist perceptions and representations of Cable Street, the role of gender and the cultural memory of the Battle of Cable Street.

The East End Bildungsroman from Israel Zangwill to Monica Ali

While Chanu’s question suggests the uncertainty at the heart of the migrant experience, his history lesson invokes the potent myth of immigrant self-betterment */ a myth that has been especially attached to Spitalfields, the East End neighbourhood of London through which successive waves of newcomers have passed onwards and upwards over three centuries (Kershen). Since the heyday of Victorian liberalism, this passage has been seen to be facilitated by cultural transplantation, fostered by the support of a close-knit community and fuelled by the tensions particular to the environment of the East End. The myth of immigrant ascendancy, meanwhile, has been both replicated and contested in the East End novel, a genre inaugurated by Israel Zangwill’s best-selling account of Anglo-Jewish life, Children of the Ghetto (1892) and continued through the twentieth century (Valman 45 /53). In this essay, I explore the striking narrative and thematic resonances between Zangwill’s and Ali’s texts, both of which use a gendered perspective to complicate the story of the immigrant’s route out of the East End towards prosperity and assimilation. Transnational Spitalfields

‘Barbarous and mediaeval’: Jewish marriage in Fin de Siècle English fiction

There is another kind of Jewish criticism of Jews which has begun to be unpleasantly frequent recently. Jewish litterateurs, finding a ready interest in descriptions of Jewish life among the general novel-reading public, have gone to the point of renewing their acquaintance with Jewish society for a few weeks in order to obtain local colour. On the strength of this, they produce superficial sketches of the aspects of Jewish manners that strike them unpleasantly. In non-Jewish authors this might be innocuous, especially as want of sympathy invariably results in faulty art not likely to win belief. But with the outside world the effect of such performances by Israelites is the more deleterious as it is impossible for the general public to know on what superficial knowledge of Jewish society such ill-natured sketches are founded. 1

British Jewish Literature and Culture: An Introduction

This article traces the historiographical evolution of studies in and of British Jewish literature and culture, and identifies new directions currently animating this field of research. It describes the development of a body of work exploring the complex ambivalence of Semitic representations and challenges more regressive tendencies that regard representations of Jews exclusively as evidence of an enduring and hostile anti-Semitic tradition in Britain culture.

Women Writers and the Campaign for Jewish Civil Rights in Early Victorian England

In the parliamentary debate of December 1847 on the admission of Jews to Parliament Lord Ashley, later Earl of Shaftesbury, articulated what was at stake in the question of Jewish emancipation. Hansard reports his speech: Some years ago they stood out for a Protestant Parliament. They were perfectly right in doing so, but they were beaten. They now stood out for a Christian Parliament; and perhaps they would have a final struggle for a male Parliament. His noble Friend [Lord John Russell, who had proposed the motion to remove Jewish disabilities] was too candid to conceal his ultimate intentions; but he would just ask him, before he proceeded much further, to consider that, according to the principle laid down by him, not only Jews would be admitted to Parliament, but Mussulmans, Hindoos, and men of every form of faith under the sun in the British dominions. [Cheers].1 Ashley, evidently supported by a good number of MPs, considered opposition to the principle of Jewish emancipation as crucial to the preservation of a white, male, Christian Parliament. In opposing constitutional reform in these terms he was also constructing a particular version of English national identity. Indeed, the public debates on Jewish civil rights in mid-nineteenth century England were an occasion for the contestation of the future relationship between religion and the state, during which a number of models for understanding the place of the Jews in the polity were articulated by both Jews and non-Jews, politicians, clergymen and novelists.