On Marriage

Product Information

JA: But again, not as much as in America – the cool, young, sort of ‘hipster Judaism’ that is huge in America. DB: The humour that I’m describing is a response of people who feel language is slippery, because they feel both inside and outside the culture they live in and the language they speak. For better or worse, for richer for poorer, till death us do part – we’ve always done it and we’re still doing it. Devorah Baum is the author of Feeling Jewish and The Jewish Joke: an essay with examples (less essay, more examples). DB: Feelings are contagious – you can be a winner in a society, and still be caught up in envious feelings.

Of course, Jews have done what they have done everywhere also in the UK – which is to transcend class. Because when you’re feeling hopeless, really hopeless and despairing, if something manages to make you laugh, your gratitude for that is overwhelming – like a kind of prayer. I was one of the only Jews around and I had a very strong sense of my Jewish identity for that reason. Particularly when it becomes tyrannical, when you really can’t afford not to be witty – then we know something must be up, right? It’s the plot that drives much of western literature and drama; it is presented to successive generations (especially women) as both the highest goal and a yoke of oppression.But the answer isn’t that everybody gets to have power, but that everybody gets to feel the degree to which power is a fantasy. And both my books regard that situation as becoming increasingly common to all people who feel themselves the subjects of a globalised world. Joking, then, is a form of common language that can also offer its speakers a degree of privacy, by creating a kind of outsider discourse within the dominant discourse, one that speaks for the jokers’ own lack of definition or certainty. Baum brings this sharp self-awareness to her book; as she reflects with the analytical eye of an academic on different iterations and meanings of matrimony, she also frequently illustrates her points with scenes from her own marriage. So, everyone thought he was such a loser… you know, the one good thing that ever happened to the family….

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. I consider all feelings to have a potentially blocking, and a potentially motivating, or moving, impulse inside them.

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. At this seminar we welcome authors Lisa Appignanesi and Devorah Baum to talk about loss and grief, love and laughter, and being Jewish. For anyone who has experienced, contemplated or rejected it, On Marriage offers a fascinating exploration of an institution that, for better or worse, “continues to shape and carry our human story”. But my case studies are predominantly American because Jews did really go for it there, culturally, in the post-war period – in a way that they never have here. I think there’s a tendency, when you use words like ‘resentment’, to adopt a severely moral, judgemental tone.

The feeling of being European has arisen, I think, in particular amongst Jews in this country, partly because some of them, since the Referendum, have discovered that they can go and get passports – from Germany, Poland. Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Guardian View image in fullscreen ‘Marriage is unknowable to anyone outside it’: Devorah Baum and husband Josh Appignanesi with their children in 2016. So, the notion – that we had 27 other countries we could go to, and now we don’t – feels absolutely existential for many Jews in this country. Because in comedy you can only get away with it by virtue of the fact that everybody thinks you’re ‘only joking’. 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.Because it looks as though what I’m saying is that feeling Jewish means to feel: guilt, envy, self-hatred, paranoia – come and get it! The low level or unconscious prejudices are the most common I’ve encountered, and the most interesting. Feelings - especially 'negative' feelings; feelings as framed by modernity/history, technology, literature, art, film and psychoanalysis.