'Hands across the tea': Renegotiating Jewish Identity and Belonging in Post-war Britain

Abstract

In contemporary Britain, Jewish identity – what it means to be ‘Jewish’, how it is to be enacted and performed, and indeed the parameters and environments of Jewish life itself – have become more elastic. This chapter suggests that these changes can, in part, be understood as a consequence of Jewish suburbanisation across the twentieth century. As strangers became neighbours, the intimacies facilitated by spatial proximity and a shared investment in ‘place’ altered notions of ‘Jewishness’ and ‘Britishness’ in turn. However, as an examination of the period 1945-1966 suggests, the inter-play between and melding of minority and majority identity was rarely straight-forward.