A Barrister Loses His Temper
Daniel Clarke-Serret’s Pure Jewish Anger is rude, it’s funny, and I think it’s wrong about one of its defendants. We published it anyway.
Daniel is a barrister, and he’s put the world on trial. There are eighteen indictments and three defendants. Defendant A is the Middle East. Defendant B is what he calls the “Far (W)est”: the red-green alliance, the universities, the BBC, and the Palestinian flags on the balconies of the Basque Country. Defendant C is “Us.” The first line sets the terms: “The world is taking the f—king piss.”
Yes, it’s poetry. Daniel knows what you’re thinking. His preface agrees that poetry is “inaccessible and pompous,” then promises “the path of the blunt,” and he keeps the promise. Decoding isn’t strictly necessary. Most of it wants to be read out loud, ideally to somebody who deserves it.
I should say I’m the last person you’d want reviewing this — I’m in it, on a list of people Daniel feels he knows from a distance: “Seen once in person, then disappeared in the wave of a foreign flight.” That once was about four hours in a grey Windsor, with Modi, Daniel’s wife, and his daughter. So discount all of this however you like.
What He Gets Right
The best argument in the book is “Palestinians Are Human Beings, Therefore…” He takes the phrase everybody uses and holds them to it. Human beings make choices. “They decide in the present; and they always decide badly.” Then he turns it on the rest of us. Where’s the Palestinian peace plan? Nobody asks. “We don’t ask for one because we don’t think of Palestinians as real people.” I’ve been trying to make that argument in prose for a long time, and he does it in a few pages.
The funniest is the opening statement, a list of everything a Jew is accused of being at once. “I’m an olive-skinned white supremacist; I’m a subhuman non-aryan.” It goes on like that until the whole thing falls over.
“First They Called It Racism” is the one that made me stop and look at the page. He runs the same verse four times, and each time the words come back more scrambled, until there’s almost no sentence left: “Communication being impossible, the time had come to take power.” That’s something poetry can do and an essay can’t.
And then there’s the BBC. I’ve never had Daniel’s problem with the BBC, since I wouldn’t trust them with a weather report. But “The Great Betrayal” opens on a boy collecting Doctor Who videos, scouring HMV, and sitting in front of the set every Saturday. “How much? All I had.” It ends with a grown man looking at a licence fee letter and asking, “Do I pay?” I didn’t expect a poem about a television licence to be quite so relatable and entertaining.
Where I’d Cross-Examine
Defendant C opens with a preface called “Time to Remove Netanyahu’s Likud.” Daniel says this government has been “hell bent on overturning the rule of law and destroying the separation of powers.” I’m not Likud. It’s a political party, and politicians are sometimes less than credible, which goes for plenty of them whether I agree with their politics or not. I’m politically homeless in multiple countries myself, which gives me some sympathy for his “The Liberal Jew Is Officially Homeless.” But I still think he’s wrong about the reform. It’s a correction to a court that gave itself far more authority than a country with no written constitution ever handed it. He’s also fairer than the people he gets lumped in with. “He was right to warn about Iran.”
And give him this: he spends thirteen indictments defending Israel and the Jews against the world, then goes after his own side for five more. I haven’t seen many pro-Israel books do that.
The other one I can’t really cross-examine at all. “Matrilineal Descent Has Gotta Go” calls Orthodox conversion “one of the most hostile immigration policies ever conceived.” I converted Conservative, and the Orthodox don’t think I know what halacha is, though they’d be wrong. But my father’s mother, Leah, had a Jewish father, Yaakov, and a Christian mother. Under the rule Daniel’s attacking, she wasn’t Jewish and neither were her sons. She fed those sons matzah for a week every spring and never told them why. They just thought it was odd crackers. So when the poem has his daughter asking, “If I am not a Jew, what am I?” I have a lot more than some sympathy. Raised Jewish by a Jew should count for at least Jewish-ish.
The Stranger
The Hebrew word that gives the imprint its pun is ger, and the book’s epigraph glosses it three ways: convert, foreigner, stranger. Daniel means the last one, about himself. I’m the first.
The book gets to it in “Ha’Ger,” the last indictment, after all that shouting. A man who’s spent seventeen of them taking the world apart finally stops, and this is how he ends:
To those who sit alone,
I sit with you.
And together we are home.
I told Daniel I thought it was moving, and I do. I also think he’s wrong about a good third of Israeli politics. If it makes you angry, he’d say, good.
Pure Jewish Anger: Eighteen Indictments of Our Corrupted World, by Daniel Clarke-Serret, with a foreword by Andrew Fox, is out on 17 November from Guerre and Shalom, an imprint of Mitzpe Press. It’s $16.99 in paperback, $24.99 in hardcover, and $9.99 as an ebook, which is on Kindle pre-order now.
Guerre and Shalom is an imprint of Mitzpe Press, and Daniel is a Founding Fellow of the Mitzpe Institute.
Uriel Zehavi is Managing Director of the Mitzpe Institute. The Mitzpe Institute, an educational program of the Atlanta Israel Coalition, publishes the Israel Brief for more than 10,000 subscribers in more than 95 countries, and has six books in print from Mitzpe Press, with No More Alibis forthcoming.
