Howard Jacobson

Howard Jacobson
Occupation	Novelist, columnist, broadcaster
Nationality	British
Period	1983–present
Genre	Biographical
Subject	Jewishness, Humour
Notable awards	Man Booker Prize (2010)

Howard Jacobson (born 25 August 1942) is a British author and journalist. He is best known for writing comic novels that often revolve around the dilemmas of British Jewish characters.

Background

Howard Jacobson was born and raised in Prestwich and was educated at Stand Grammar School in Whitefield, before going on to study English at Downing College, Cambridge under F. R. Leavis. He lectured for three years at the University of Sydney before returning to England to teach at Selwyn College, Cambridge. His later teaching posts included a period at Wolverhampton Polytechnic from 1974 to 1980.

Although Jacobson has described himself as "a Jewish Jane Austen" (in response to being described as "the English Phillip Roth"), he also states, "I'm not by any means conventionally Jewish. I don't go to shul. What I feel is that I have a Jewish mind, I have a Jewish intelligence. I feel linked to previous Jewish minds of the past. I don't know what kind of trouble this gets somebody into, a disputatious mind. What a Jew is has been made by the experience of 5,000 years, that's what shapes the Jewish sense of humour, that's what shaped Jewish pugnacity or tenaciousness." He maintains that "comedy is a very important part of what I do."

Jacobson's brother Stephen, born in 1948, is a noted artist who lives in Portishead, Somerset.[1] Stephen Jacobson was the guitarist in both The Whirlwinds and The Mockingbirds, which were the precursors of 70s art rock band 10cc. In 1986 Howard Jacobson and wife Rosalin were the subject for one of Stephen's paintings.[2]

In 2005 Jacobson was married for the third time to radio and TV documentary maker Jenny De Yong [3] "My last wife. I'm home, it's right".[4]

Views on the Middle East

Howard Jacobson has strong views on the Israel Palestine debate, which he regularly airs in the British media. Speaking in the Independent ( June, 2007 ) about his support for the partition wall, Jacobson states that "it serves a... practical purpose, which is to keep out enemies... As long as they ( the Palestinians) come into Israel primed as human bombs, that is how they will be viewed."

In the same Independent article, speaking about boycott and sanctions on Israel, Jacobson says it is "repugnant to humanity to single out one country for your hatred, to hate it beyond reason and against evidence, to pluck it from the complex contextuality of history as though it authored its own misfortunes and misdeeds... to deny it any understanding... and - most odious of all - to seek to silence its voices.For make no mistake, this is what an intellectual boycott means."

On the wider Middle East, and Arab attitudes towards Israel, Jacobson adds that "the existence of a militarily successful Israel remains so galling to Arabs whose daily lives are otherwise not incommoded by it."

Discussing Jews that criticise Israel ( Jewish Chronicle August 2010 ) Jacobson says “If you had to say in one sentence what being Jewish means, it is being able to make fun of yourself Jewishly....( but ) when it’s without the affection, I worry.”

Jacobson goes on to say that “one of the first things you notice about the anti-Israel stuff is that it is not funny. There’s none of the ‘on the one hand, on the other hand’ business that we do.”

Discussing his first visit to Israel ( Jewish Chronicle August 2010 ) Jacobson says , “when I first went to Israel,I saw soldiers pushing Palestinians around and thought, ‘I can’t stand this’. Then I’d meet somebody in a bar saying what wonderful people the Palestinians are."

In the same interview, Jacobson states his belief that the language anti Zionist Jews use is “pathological — I don’t need to know anything about Israel to know that there is something wrong with the way they are talking, something false about it. No place could be as vile as they describe it. No people so lost to humanity. Not even the Nazis were as bad as the Jews are accused of being. Which Zionism are they anti?"

Jacobson rejects the notion that 'Zionism equals colonialism' : “ when I hear a Jew saying Zionism was always colonialism, I say, no it wasn’t."

Dismissing Chomsky's scholarship on the Israel/Palestine debate as "drivel" , Jacobson has stated ( Jewish Chronicle August 2010), "what are some of them for? I am very sympathetic to somebody worrying about the Palestinians. But not spouting the Chomsky drivel."

Jacobson has tackled Jewish anti-Zionists and those Jews that reject Israel in his novel, "The Finkler Question." Amongst those he parodies and criticises is Gilad Atzmon : reviewing the book for the 'Scholars For Peace in the Middle East' journal, ( SPME, December , 2010 ) Professor Edward Alexander writes, "the novel’s Holocaust-denying Israeli yored drummer is in fact based upon one Gilad Atzmon, who is better known in England for endorsing the ideology of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and describing the burning of British synagogues as a “rational act” in retaliation for Israeli actions."

Writing career

His time at Wolverhampton was to form the basis of his first novel, Coming from Behind, a campus comedy about a failing polytechnic that plans to merge facilities with a local football club. The episode of teaching in a football stadium in the novel is, according to Jacobson in a 1985 BBC interview, the only portion of the novel based on a true incident. He also wrote a travel book in 1987, titled In the Land of Oz, which was researched during his time as a visiting academic in Sydney.

His fiction, particularly in the six novels he has published since 1998, is characterised chiefly by a discursive and humorous style. Recurring subjects in his work include male–female relations and the Jewish experience in Britain in the mid- to late-20th century. He has been compared to prominent Jewish-American novelists such as Philip Roth, in particular for his habit of creating doppelgängers of himself in his fiction. Jacobson has been called "the English Philip Roth", although he calls himself the "Jewish Jane Austen".

His 1999 novel The Mighty Walzer, about a teenage table tennis champion, won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic writing. It is set in the Manchester of the 1950s and Jacobson, himself a table tennis fan in his teenage years, admits that there is more than an element of autobiography in it. His 2002 novel Who's Sorry Now? – the central character of which is a Jewish luggage baron of South London – and his 2006 novel Kalooki Nights were longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Jacobson described Kalooki Nights as "the most Jewish novel that has ever been written by anybody, anywhere". It won the 2007 JQ Wingate Prize.

As well as writing fiction, he also contributes a weekly column for The Independent newspaper as an op-ed writer. In recent times, he has, on several occasions, attacked anti-Israel boycotts, and for this reason has been labelled a "liberal Zionist".

In October 2010 Jacobson won the Man Booker Prize for his novel The Finkler Question, which was the first comic novel to win the prize since Kingsley Amis's The Old Devils in 1986. The book, published by Bloomsbury, explores what it means to be Jewish today and is also about "love, loss and male friendship". Andrew Motion, the chair of the judges, said: "The Finkler Question is a marvellous book: very funny, of course, but also very clever, very sad and very subtle. It is all that it seems to be and much more than it seems to be. A completely worthy winner of this great prize." Jacobson – at the age of 68 – was the oldest winner since William Golding in 1980.

Broadcasting

He has also worked as a broadcaster. Two recent television programmes include Channel 4's Howard Jacobson Takes on the Turner, in 2000, and The South Bank Show in 2002 featured an edition entitled "Why the Novel Matters". An earlier profile went out in the series in 1999 and a television documentary entitled "My Son the Novelist" preceded it as part of the Arena series in 1985. His two non-fiction books – Roots Schmoots: Journeys Among Jews (1993) and Seriously Funny: From the Ridiculous to the Sublime (1997) – were turned into television series.

In 2010 Jacobson presented Creation, the first part of the Channel 4 series The Bible: A History.

On 3 November 2010, Jacobson appeared in an Intelligence Squared debate (stop bashing Christians, Britain is becoming an anti-Christian country) in favour of the motion.

On 6 February 2011 Jacobson appeared on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs. His musical choices included works by J. S. Bach, Amadeus Mozart and Louis Armstrong as well as the rare 1964 single Look at Me by The Whirlwinds. His favourite was You’re a Sweetheart by Al Bowlly with Lew Stone and His Band.

Bibliography

Fiction

• Coming From Behind, Chatto & Windus, 1983
• Peeping Tom, Chatto & Windus, 1984
• Redback, Bantam, 1986
• The Very Model of a Man, Viking, 1992
• No More Mister Nice Guy, Cape, 1998
• The Mighty Walzer, Cape, 1999
• Who's Sorry Now?, Cape, 2002
• The Making of Henry, Cape, 2004
• Kalooki Nights, Cape, 2006
• The Act of Love, Cape, 2008
• The Finkler Question, Bloomsbury, 2010 (Winner of the Man Booker Prize, 2010) ISBN 978-1-4088-0910-5

Non-fiction

• Shakespeare's Magnanimity: Four Tragic Heroes, Their Friends and Families (co-author with Wilbur Sanders), Chatto & Windus, 1978
• In the Land of Oz, Hamish Hamilton, 1987
• Roots Schmoots: Journeys Among Jews, Viking, 1993
• Seriously Funny: From the Ridiculous to the Sublime, Viking, 1997

External links

• Audio: Writing Lab interview with Howard Jacobson from open2.net
• Audio: Howard Jacobson in conversation on the BBC World Service discussion show The Forum
• Let's see the 'criticism' of Israel for what it really is, an essay by Howard Jacobson in The Independent