On Marriage

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But the answer isn’t that everybody gets to have power, but that everybody gets to feel the degree to which power is a fantasy. Because it looks as though what I’m saying is that feeling Jewish means to feel: guilt, envy, self-hatred, paranoia – come and get it! The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. But in terms of positive feelings to do with Jewishness, I’m a little shy of those [laughs], but I do have them.

But at the end of all her analysis, a definitive understanding remains elusive: “Having thought so much about marriage, the truth is that I still don’t know what I think about it.DB: In the introduction to my book I’m interested in whether there’s much of a difference, really, between a word that you whisper – which tends to be the British way – and one that you’re required to shout out – in a declamatory, American way. Feelings - especially 'negative' feelings; feelings as framed by modernity/history, technology, literature, art, film and psychoanalysis. With Josh Appignanesi, her spouse, she is both co-director and performer in the documentaries The New Man and Husband. I'm an Associate Professor in English Literature and Critical Theory at the University of Southampton. She is the author of three books: On Marriage (Hamish Hamilton/Penguin Random House; Yale University Press; CITIC; others) which came out in 2023, Feeling Jewish: a book for just about anyone (Yale University Press) and The Jewish Joke: an essay with examples (less essay, more examples) (Profile), which came out in 2017.

Boundaries, as we know, are vital, and people who have none are not people you normally want to hang around with [laughs], but it depends on the extent to which you understand them as being both provisional and constructed, and as a creative act. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Often you find they’re very funny, and then the moment they’re not being funny, you find that they’re awfully serious – a little bit too serious.The feeling of being European has arisen, I think, in particular amongst Jews in this country, partly because some of them, since the Referendum, have discovered that they can go and get passports – from Germany, Poland. Exploring her own marriage has given Baum a unique vantage point from which to investigate the private intricacies of other people's arrangements . But the way I’m understanding the term ‘Jewish’ there is that it’s a kind of experience of being both inside and outside – at the same time.

JA: But again, not as much as in America – the cool, young, sort of ‘hipster Judaism’ that is huge in America. I was one of the only Jews around and I had a very strong sense of my Jewish identity for that reason. Because you feel out of control, and dispossessed, and you don’t know what you’re about to do, what you’re about to say.And both my books regard that situation as becoming increasingly common to all people who feel themselves the subjects of a globalised world. Unlike her films, On Marriage turns away from the personal in pursuit of a more far-reaching understanding of marriage as a philosophical, cultural and political phenomenon. AH: It’s so funny, because what you just said, I was thinking about my generation, and it seems to be quite the opposite, they see all these stand-up comedians – Bill Burr, Louis C. EV: The point that you’re making in your book Feeling Jewish : A Book for Just About Anyone (2017), that Jewishness is kind of short-hand for urbanism, for modernity, in some kind of way.