Source : On Being a Jew-ish Schoolboy
There was a sketch performed by the comedy troupe Beyond the Fringe many years ago, in which Jonathan Miller (still with us, thankfully) said that he wasn’t a Jew, but that he was “Jew-ish.” That got a laugh in the 1960s; a shocked laugh, perhaps, but that was what was aimed for. Whether it would get a laugh these days, I am not sure. Every single Jew I know, and I know plenty, observant or not, confesses nowadays to being suddenly very aware of their Jewishness, and alive to the potential reaction it can provoke. If someone like me, with only the haziest notion of what the Torah or the Talmud are, can be a target for anti-Semitic abuse, I wonder at how much hatred is out there, waiting to boil over again.