This is an era of protest and, in the Selfridges salt beef bar, Howard Jacobson is talking about placards. He hates them because he is a novelist. “The human body holding a placard is a very ugly sight,” he says. “Even if what was written on the placard was, ‘I’m very Jewish, I believe in God, and I’m a Leavisite [Jacobson studied under the critic F. R. Leavis at Cambridge].’”
He tries another placard: “‘Sophisticated Jew neither puts on tefillin [a Jewish ritual object] nor rips off tefillin. And f*** off. Oh, and by the way, I too, like everybody else, am opposed to genocide, just in case you wonder. Sorry, The Genocide.’” It still doesn’t work. Too few words.
