Book Review: Comic take on woke antisemitism recalls Roth and Jacobson

The Very Annoying Jew, by Michael Kretzmer

(Envelope Books, £15.95)

Award-winning TV producer David Britton has offended most of his staff, his wife wants a divorce, he’s getting hate mail, and he’s being harassed by religious freaks. It’s not the best time to be trying to sell his media company.

Britton is a worthy heir to Nathan Zuckerman, Philip Roth’s immortal hero who found himself “a Jew among Gentiles and a Gentile among Jews” in Roth’s masterpiece The Counterlife.

Britton is the protagonist of Michael Kretzmer’s The Very Annoying Jew (Envelope Books), a stunning comic novel that comes out blazing at wokeness, digital media and post-modern antisemitism. In this timely, funny, searing critique of modern memedom, Philip Roth meets Howard Jacobson meets Blind Faith, Ben Elton’s prophetic takedown that foresaw the deeply anti-social underbelly of social media,

Britton is losing his family, livelihood and sanity to a rising generation of digital natives, online influencers and gender fluid corporate raiders who cannot tell the difference between transition and terrorism.

First-time author Kretzmer, a veteran journalist and documentary filmmaker for the Sunday Times, BBC and Channel 4, brings the shortcomings of click-bait new media into sharp focus. Attempting to navigate a dystopian landscape of transactional relationships and fake images, Kretzmer’s hero finds his experience, skills and achievements trampled underfoot in the stampede for algorithmic dominance.

The Very Annoying Jew ripples with colourful characters. Meet Angela, the looming star who has renamed the company from David Britton Films Ltd to Mee!Zee! She created the “idiot series” Crip Trips!  on the sex lives of people with disabilities that topped all the charts and is now coming for David’s company with her “Youth Genius Dividend.” Meet Killa-Jah, “a white man pretending to be a black man, who has taken the name Killa-Jah, and who wrote a music track called ‘Me Wanna Splat Da Whiteboy Popo’ to accompany a sequence in which his tiny son dances around with a loaded gun.” Meet Ronny the Runner, an illiterate, violent ex-con who has graduated from his starring role in an early Britton documentary to become his eyes and ears among the youngsters plotting to sweep his company from under his feet. And meet Menachem Katz, one of several annoying Jews in the novel, who has taken up residence alongside Britton’s dying father in hospital—who Britton had always known as a committed atheist.

But it is Olivia, Britton’s wife, to whom the novel is addressed, who takes the leading role and lands the knockout punch against mindless wokeness at a dinner party where Israeli wine from the Golan Heights is served to a table of liberal guests, an “assault” that leaves them “offended.”

Olivia, who has watched the reaction in silence, rises to her feet:

“You all work in the media and education,” she tells the group, which she has known since student days. “and the rest of us rely on you for your balance and impartiality—and yet, when it comes to Israel, you become an echo chamber of cliché and cynicism. There’s not a flicker of doubt in your minds, not a spark of scepticism about all the excitable little rumours that you swap between you, the journalistic morsels, the falsities and deceptions that Israel’s sworn enemies put out and that you gobble up. The mere repetition of the things you repeat turns them into incontrovertible truths, and they must be truths because your friends all repeat them, and you couldn’t not repeat them because that would make you deeply suspect.”

Not since Roth’s The Counterlife or Jacobson’s Booker Prize-winning The Finkler Question has British antisemitism been so skillfully dissected. Kretzmer has performed an enormous service by updating the critique into a model fit for 2025 with its creeping dismissal of Israel’s very right to exist and the growing acceptance that being “openly Jewish” is a contributory negligence that invites legitimate hatred.

It’s also damn funny.

‘The Very Annoying Jew’ by Michael Kretzmer is available from Envelope Books, Amazon, Waterstones and other stores.