We conclude this week our long interview with Daniel Mendelsohn. In this last part, he surveys the politics of our period: the rise of populism in the United States and Europe, the resurgence of antisemitism in the West, and Israel’s status as bastion. He also discusses the current war in Ukraine, a country that he knows intimately — he traveled often there in the course of writing The Lost. He strikes a pessimistic tone: “The only thing we can be sure of after studying history – and we know this as specialists in antiquity – is that history repeats itself. The gadgets get better, but human nature remains the same. I see it right here in my own country. Humans, fundamentally, are appalling.”
This week’s issue of K. also features another English-language writer, and one book in particular. George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, published in 1876, stands as a monument of British literature. Raised in an aristocratic household, Deronda longs to discover his origins. Who are his real parents? A fortuitous encounter leads him into the Whitechapel section of London and the world of British Jews… Josh Glancy looks back at the meaning and significance of this unique novel. In Daniel Deronda, Glancy discerns an empathetic parable on Jewish integration in Victorian England and Eliot’s Zionist overtones.
Finally, we also republish a report by Élie Petit: the outlandish tale of how Brexit almost cut off Belfast’s few remaining Jews from access to kosher food. Petit’s reportage, in which he records the herculean labors of state and communal authorities to obtain kosher meat in Northern Ireland, is a snapshot of a community that has long been vulnerable to the vicissitudes of politics in the United Kingdom. How long are Belfast’s Jews, for decades in numerical decline, to endure?
