“STRANGE country, this,” I thought, as my Scottish boyfriend and his family snored loudly in front of Annie Hall, and I fell off the sofa in giggles. They’d not seen the movie before; I knew it by heart. It struck me then that Jewish culture is at the edge of British society, an opinion confirmed by my long tenure here. There is no British Philip Roth or Saul Bellow, not even a Mel Brooks. Of course I’ve realised that, despite the miserable time I had when I arrived here years ago, looking for delis and listening for Yiddish, there are plenty of Jews in London, though they keep a rather low profile.

I believe this isolation is the darker subtext of the charming British comedy Suzie Gold; and it also explains the media kvetching that the film inspired. Here’s a movie that does Jewish humour, and does it quite well. So why the huffy reaction? “So paper-thin it makes My Big Fat Greek Wedding look like Schindler’s List,” opined Nicholas Barber; while the New Statesman sniffed, teetering close to anti-Semitism, “the allegedly snappy dialogue sounds like it was translated . . . from ancient Aramaic”, and the BBC's website proclaims “like Bend It Like Beckham before it, Suzie Gold deals with second-generation immigrants struggling to make their own way in multicultural Britain.” Spare me. No Jew would like to see himself as an “ethnic minority” — after all, Disraeli was a Jew, the Rothschilds are Jewish, what does is say about the centuries of Jewish prominence in Britain if they are still compared with recent immigrants?

Given this sort of condescending dismissal, it’s no wonder, then, that the characters in Suzie Gold seem rather more insular and self-conscious than their American counterparts. “My Polish family didn’t die in the gas chambers so you can marry out,” wails Suzie’s aunt, at the Shabbat table, fleeing in floods of tears. (One guesses this is her set piece.) Suzie, naturally, falls for a goy — else there would be no story — and has to choose between him and a self-satisfied, lethally boring, but parentally approved, caterer.

Though I chortled at the film’s sayings, including my grandma’s favourite bid for modesty — “Who’s going to buy, when they can sample the merchandise for free?” — and at the guilt trips, the drama, the volume, the Yiddish — boy was I surprised at the closed mentality. Then I realised I have experienced it myself. I come from New York, and have just returned from a trip to Israel. But it is in London — this open-minded, tolerant city — that my relationship with a non-Jewish man raises the most eyebrows.

In America Suzie Gold could have been made 30 years ago; not now. Even Annie Hall is open to the appeal of pretty shiksas; and Kissing Jessica Stein (2001) deals with the shanda of being a lesbian, without batting an eyelash that the girl ain’t Jewish. By contrast “if you marry out then Hitler’s won” is the view of Suzie Gold’s uncle, displaying all the worries of an American Jewish family, circa 1960. Or, as my great aunt yelped when my dad walked his blonde shiksa (Mom) down the aisle: “If your grandfather were alive today, he’d roll over in his grave.”

So I’m not quite kosher. Like everyone else in New York, I’m only half-Jewish, and the wrong half at that, but I’m all Jewish American Princess. Mine is, after all, the only city that could be dismissed with a racist epithet — Jesse Jackson’s “Hymie-town” — and embrace said slur, applying it gleefully at any occasion. In Hymie-town, which sets the cultural agenda for elite America, even Italians have passable Yiddish and there ’s a synagogue every fifth block. There’s no need, then, for New York Jews to cling to each other, to fret about marrying out. There is no out — Jews have influenced and been accepted by urban American culture: take Broadway’s most popular show, the Jewish-fest, The Producers. Of course, mothers still nag: “It’s just as easy to fall in love with a Jew, as a shaygetz,” but their world doesn’t end if the boy’s a goy.

Only over here do my Jewish friends ask me if my parents “mind” (they don’t). Only here do I hear from atheist, rather “right-on”, Jewish friends that, when push came to shove, they’d never marry “out”. My great-aunt’s anxieties — and my grandmother’s, who whispered at the altar, “it’s still not too late!” — belong to an America where Jews weren’t accepted into Harvard; interesting, that they still pervade Suzie Gold.

Notwithstanding half-Jewish Michael Howard, Jewish culture is still quite hidden in Britain. It could be the legacy of T. E Laurence-style Arabism, or a culture clash between gentlemanly amateurism and the “may you grow up to be a doctor” Jewish work ethic. But the less open a society, the more closed and protective its Jewish culture will be. You can understand why Jewish parents are nervous about their children marrying out in Britain when you see the way in which this fluffy, likeable little film has been accepted — or rather not.

The author is a senior fellow at the think-tank Civitas

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