On Marriage

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We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. But in terms of positive feelings to do with Jewishness, I’m a little shy of those [laughs], but I do have them.

In these movies, both partners offer what you suspect is an exaggerated version of themselves: Baum the straight woman, Appignanesi the butt of the joke. We were so interested in the idea that this book, Feeling Jewish, at least for me, seems to say a lot of things about a kind of structure of feeling that might be British-Jewish. With Josh Appignanesi, her spouse, she is both co-director and performer in the documentaries The New Man and Husband. So, all the feelings I’ve selected are ones that have a kind of ‘bad’ reputation that I wanted to overturn: I don’t wish to say that they’re bad feelings, though I do admit that they are or can be painful.I had approached the book with a measure of doubt, wondering whether – being of an age with the author but never married – I would find myself excluded from its thesis. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. I think there’s a tendency, when you use words like ‘resentment’, to adopt a severely moral, judgemental tone. This is not so much a cop-out as a recognition of the fact that marriage, for all its legal and social connotations, remains the ultimate subjective experience. And, actually, during a period in British politics – when the word ‘Jew’ is trending on Twitter and people are googling the word ‘Jew’ and looking probably in all sorts of insalubrious places to find out what Jews are up to –, you have a very strong wish and desire to speak to other people going through the same thing, in a somewhat contained and close setting.

I don’t like this increasing focus on identity – to demarcate who you are, what you are… and that you can’t transcend these boundaries. It’s an argument about feelings and a sort of warning, I think, as well – that to misread or misunderstand feelings can be a dangerous thing. I consider all feelings to have a potentially blocking, and a potentially motivating, or moving, impulse inside them.With Josh Appignanesi she is co-director, producer and performer of the films The New Man and Husband , which investigate the intimate dynamics of the filmmakers' own marriage. DB: Feelings are contagious – you can be a winner in a society, and still be caught up in envious feelings.

EV: We wondered if this idea of the joke in your book The Jewish Joke (2018) could be linked to theatre. I think it implies that people feel there’s a danger in humourlessness, which shows just how much savagery there can be in humour. DB: I think perhaps one thing that I would say to that is that in the British culture, Jews are conspicuous by their kind of emotional incontinence. There’s almost nobody I meet these days where I can’t very quickly detect the form their resentment takes – that is, the way in which they feel they’re not being heard, as if they’re being somehow silenced or marginalised, or as if their case isn’t permitted.

JA: But again, not as much as in America – the cool, young, sort of ‘hipster Judaism’ that is huge in America. And that’s the familiar Jewish stereotype, but it’s also the product of a specific social situation, and I think it’s quite extreme in some ways, in a culture like this one – in particular where there’s a strong class system, where everybody knows their place, and you’re the people who don’t seem to have one. Pretty much all the positions I’ve encountered on the subject seem to me to have a great deal of validity. EV: I think it’s really interesting, this idea of feeling different, but also belonging, in a way, this double-bind.