It is open season on Jewish life and culture on British TV with a host of programmes featuring the community.
Chicken soup has become one of the hippest dishes in the UK. However it’s not playwright Arnold Wesker’s “Chicken Soup with Barley” being spooned out of the nation’s bowls, but a celebratory broth infused with chutzpah and served up by Jewish mums on prime- time British television.
Channel 4’s four-part “Jewish Mum of the Year” competition has just drawn to a close. It attracted an average of one and a half million viewers per episode.
The eight finalists began by battling it out to organise the best Bar Mitzvah, one of the contestants, a single-mother from Ireland, was eliminated for baking the all-important cake from supermarket cake mix. Further tasks included Jewish style matchmaking, organising a fun trip to the English sea side for a group of sullen, hard-to-please Jewish pensioners, and hosting a traditional Friday Night dinner for a party of sixteen.
The contestants ranged from a North London orthodox mother of six to a perma-tanned, midriff-bearing Yummy Mummy of five from Radlett.
Strictly Kosher – Jews in the UK
The Anglo Jewish Celebrities
In the end a twice divorced 65-year-old granny from Leeds walked away with the coveted prise – an all-expenses paid kosher cruise and the chance to be the first ever resident Agony Aunt for the UK’s “Jewish News”. Its editor Richard Ferrer is pleased because, he explains, they wanted someone who is “modern, but thoroughly traditional.” A contradiction in terms?
Not so, according to the spin-off series “Jews at Ten.” Billed as a “wry, funny romp through Jewish culture,” it features a host of Anglo Jewish celebrities including David Baddiel, Edwina Currie, Vanessa Feltz and Uri Geller. They all agree that it is cool these days to be a Jew and this because of the tradition and not in spite of it.
They reveal how having a self-deprecating sense of humour is just as much a part of this tradition as the clingy, bolshy, neurotic and ever-present Jewish mother whom they have all experienced first-hand.
Jewish culture in many guises
The celebrities pepper their romp through Jewish culture with words like Shmendrick, Shabbes and Shomer, compelling the Channel 4 Website to put up a “Little Jewish Dictionary” to give the gentile audience a fighting chance to understand what is going on. And while they are there, they can download recipes for favourites such as chopped liver and spiced salt beef from the website.
“Jewish Mum of the Year” is only one of the latest small-screen offerings pushing Anglo Jewish life further into the spotlight. Just recently, ITV broadcast its second series of “Strictly Kosher”, a documentary about the Orthodox Jews of Manchester. And BBC 2 weighed in with its “Two Jews on a Cruise,” a reality show featuring a bickering ultra-Orthodox couple from North London holidaying on a down-market Israeli cruise liner.
There have also been shows about Hasidic weddings and several sitcoms like “Grandma’s House” and “Friday Night Dinner”. The latest offering from BBC 2 is “Hebburn,” a comedy series about a working-class Newcastle family whose son marries a middle-class Jewish girl.
Jewish stereotype of the year?
Is all this media exposure a fun way to familiarise the British public with one of its smallest communities (there are approximately 250,000 Jews in the UK making up less than one percent of the population)? Or does it just perpetuate existing stereotypes?
Reaction from commentators and critics to the latest TV offering Jewish Mum of the Year is mixed. A.A. Gill of the Sunday Times writes that the mothers “ticked every single cartoon prejudice and racial truism…this was laughing at, not with.” The cultural commentator Norman Lebrecht is more relaxed about it all, asking “Is it any more pernicious than the way Italian- Americans were portrayed in The Sopranos?”