Mick Hartley

Howard Jacobson interviewed by Josh Glancy in the Sunday Times:

Howard Jacobson can still remember watching the Sydney Opera House being built. He was living in Australia at the time, lecturing at Sydney University as a young academic.

Perhaps this is why what happened there on October 9, 2023, sent him mad. Just two days after the October 7 massacre, a group of pro-Palestinian activists gathered outside the opera house to protest against Israel, and to celebrate what had just taken place. “Kill the Jews” and “Gas the Jews” were two chants reported that night (something that was later disputed)….

“I didn’t know how bad it had got,” he says. “I didn’t realise people would be dancing in the streets celebrating the murder of Jews. It was like a carnival. The world had turned upside down. That was what surprised me, dismayed me, and did turn me half-mad. I’m probably still half-mad.”…

He reads the news, and his madness returns again. Today he is angry about the anti-Israel effusions of the Green Party leader, Zack Polanski, whose father he used to babysit when they were neighbours in Prestwich, north Manchester, and whose grandmother he used to fancy from afar. “I mistrust his motives,” he says. “I see the old Jew not wanting to look too Jewish, too suburban, too religious. It’s a ticket to be free of all that. Anti-Zionism is your ticket to emancipation.”….

What really bothers Jacobson, ever the logophile, are the lies and manipulations, the twisting of language and meaning, the shifting of fiercely held positions based on the identity of those involved.

During and after October 7, he points out, there was “perfectly good” evidence of rape. “Yet one was hearing from some of the most famous feminists in the world. People who taught us that just to look at a woman wrong was a kind of rape — a microaggression. But now an actual rape wasn’t a rape if it happened to someone you’re allowed to rape. And it became clear that you are allowed to rape an Israeli or a Zionist or a Jew because they are settler colonialists and they deserve all they get.”

His new novel, Howl, is out this week.