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Unchosen: The Memoirs of a Philo-Semite
What if your first love was not one person but an entire culture? This is a loud and heartfelt celebration of one woman's relationship with the Jewish people. Growing up as a blonde, popular, West Country schoolgirl, Julie Burchill was the unlikeliest convert to militant Zionism but learning of the cruelty the Jewish people faced throughout history turned her into their biggest champion. From her marriage to a 'not Jewish enough husband' to drunken holidays in Israel, arguments with lesbian rabbis to being banned from her local synagogue, this is a brilliantly funny and unflinchingly honest account of a philo-Semite that will shock and delight in equal parts. Join Julie as she examines her 40-year obsession with the Jewish people and recounts a love affair that is as hedonistic, passionate and outspoken as its author. This is a frivolous book about a serious subject that is now more important than ever. It's An Education , but with more sex, more violence and a lot more Jews.
- GenresNonfictionJudaicaJewish
258 pages, Kindle Edition
First published April 17, 2014
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34 people want to read
About the author
Julie Burchill
31 books56 followersJulie Burchill is an English writer and columnist known for her provocative comments. Beginning as a writer for the New Musical Express at the age of 17, she has written for newspapers such as The Sunday Times and The Guardian. She is a self-declared "militant feminist". She has several times been involved in legal action resulting from her work. She is also an author and novelist, her 1989 novel Ambition being a bestseller, and her 2004 novel Sugar Rush being adapted for television.
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November 1, 2014(Haaretz, 31.10.14)
Unchosen: The Memoirs of a Philo-Semite, by Julie Burchill
Unbound Books, 192 pages, £13 (hardcover), £10 (e-book)
Julie Burchill has a theory about philo-Semitism. “Philo-Semites are as wildly disparate as Cicero and Lindsay Lohan, but I can’t help noticing that, over the centuries, a disproportionate number of attractive, kind, clever people are drawn to Jews,” she writes in her new memoir, “Unchosen: Memoirs of a Philo-Semite.”
To drive her point home, she helpfully supplies a sample of other well-known admirers of the Jewish people: “Marilyn [Monroe], Ava [Gardner], Liz [Taylor], Felicity Kendal, Martha Gellhorn, Martin Luther King, me – what a sumptuous banquet of radiant humanity we look upon.”
Tongue in cheek or not – and it is genuinely difficult to tell, one way or the other – some context is needed to understand why Burchill seems so cocksure about the matter of philo-Semitism.
Unfortunately, that background is only sporadically evoked in her book, the latest addition to an oeuvre that includes monographs about Princess Diana and the footballer David Beckham; a bonkbuster called “Ambition”; a best-selling YA novel; and one other memoir, simply entitled “I Knew I Was Right.”
For a while in the 1990s and the first decade of this century, Burchill was probably – no, certainly – the most controversial journalist in England. Her entire professional career up to that point had prepared her for this role: Right from her first journalistic break – as a 17-year-old staff writer on the influential music weekly NME in the late '70s – Burchill has consistently wielded the authorial “I” like a sledgehammer, in columns, criticism and feature writing. The detritus she left behind is substantial: lawsuits, enduring feuds, abruptly terminated professional engagements.
There is a body of high-quality, opinionated writing amid the carnage, but all the same, Burchill’s career is primarily defined by disdain for the weakness of contemplative uncertainty. Taking this into account, readers of a gentle disposition might do well to put “Unchosen” aside unread. When Burchill declares that she is going to explain “Just why I love the Jews so much,” it’s only fair to expect fireworks.
For the rest of us, though, it’s reasonable to ask: Why, Julie Burchill, do you love “the Jews”? She says it started in the early '70s, when she was a precocious teenager outgrowing provincial Bristol and looking to escape. “The World at War,” a 26-part television history of World War II, was the broadcasting highlight of English television over the autumn and winter of ‘73-‘74.
Burchill didn’t watch the 20th episode, simply entitled “Genocide,” as it happens. It was only later, leafing through the partwork (weekly subscription) magazine that accompanied the series, that she discovered the photographs and words that tried to describe the horror of the Final Solution.
It’s not quite as facile as it might seem, querying the connection between the Holocaust and Burchill’s path toward philo-Semitism. If nothing else, the act of genocide actually says nothing about its victims but everything about its inflictors.
Burchill, however, frames the moment as a personal awakening. “I remember going into the bathroom and staring at my blank, big-eyed face in the mirror … and being surprised that I hadn’t changed on the outside, when the rest of me was so different.” And in this sentence, perhaps, lies the problem with Julie Burchill, with her philo-Semitism and indeed with the whole of “Unbound”: It’s all about her.
Her real favorite topic
True, we had been warned. Even so, “Unbound” feels retrofitted, personal history adjusted to fit the contours of her claims to life-long philo-Semitism. There’s nothing at all unusual about this – most memoirs are, to a greater or lesser extent, exercises in wish fulfillment – but this after-the-fact reevaluation comes across as awkward and incomplete.
It’s not just that there should be no points to be won for one’s philo-Semitic longevity; it’s also that Burchill takes it as a given that the reader already knows all about her and her turbulent career. “Unbound” charges along, only lightly mediated by the exigencies of chronology and thematic development, an unstoppable melange of partial reminiscence that assumes everything but serves to explain very little, even if you happen to be particularly clued up about Burchill’s favorite topic, herself.
She does come up with evidence of something, if not quite philo-Semitism. As a young journalist on the make in London, she simpers embarrassingly over a much older colleague, partly because she believes that he is a Jew. For a while, she passes herself off as a Member of the Tribe, insinuating (no, lying) that her mother was Elizabieta Grynszpan, apparently a cousin of Herschel Grynszpan. You know, the young man who assassinated German diplomat Ernst von Rath in Paris in 1938, providing the pretext for Kristallnacht, etc. Yes, that Grynszpan. Even then, it seems, Burchill had an intuitive knack for chutzpah.
There are also moments of admirable display of principle. In 1978, a year into her stint at NME, Burchill reviewed a new album by punk darlings Siouxsie and the Banshees. A mainstay of Siouxsie’s energetic live set at the time was a song containing the obnoxious line “Too many Jews for my liking.” Burchill didn’t hesitate. “I, self-righteous square than I am, consider [this] to be the most disgusting and unforgivable lyric line ever written,” Burchill’s review observed. “[Siouxsie] is well into her twenties, so ignorant youth is no excuse, however lame. Therefore she must be either evil or retarded.”
Calling out a bigot when everyone else seems to be cool with her takes guts, one must acknowledge. Groupthink, especially in journalism, can be both insidious and impossibly restrictive. Still, something in Burchill’s outspokeness suggests a concurrent agenda, one that becomes a little clearer in the last line of the review: “Well, take your shocking song and stick it up your rude white ass, Sioux, because here’s a review that doesn’t believe in running with the pack.”
One thing we do learn about Burchill from “Unbound” is that she is actually a tribal animal by nature, the real issue being the pack she chooses to run with. The working classes, the unfairly excluded, the honest everyday folk marginalized by the smug bourgeoisie: These are her people. Sticking one up Siouxsie, one feels, was as much thumbing her nose at the middle-class writers and tastemakers who had by then appropriated punk as their own, as it was a simple statement about the vileness of anti-Semitism.
Charles Saatchi wonders
This isn’t to say that Burchill took up championing the Jewish cause simply because it helped establish outsider credentials. There are much easier ways to go about that, after all. (Charles Saatchi, the advertising guru and patron of the arts, once made much the same point to Burchill, she reports. “Why are you doing this – siding with the Jews?” Saatchi asks her. “Do you really need to go looking for trouble that much!”).
But any good intentions are undercut through her insistent, limited characterization of her chosen people. Jews, in her estimation, are hyper-clever working-class boys and girls, of superior stock to the gentiles around them, who have transcended humble immigrant roots and institutional discrimination to become very successful and very rich, very quickly. (I paraphrase only very slightly.) This is much as Burchill imagines herself, one suspects, the inconvenience of her non-kosher birth aside.
But so what? None of this makes her brand of philo-Semitism a bad thing, merely vapid and shallow. Still, there is a problem. Having established an entertaining but essentially lazy stereotype of the plucky underdog, she now uses it as a cudgel with which she beats her opponents into the ground.
Turning an ostensibly affectionate sentiment into something so bilious takes some doing, but Burchill manages it with ease. Burchill has made many enemies over the years; I’d guess that every single one who has said anything that could be construed as unsympathetic to the Jewish people makes an appearance here. There are ex-husbands and in-laws, ex-colleagues and ex-acquaintances, anyone who makes the mistake of mentioning Muslims sympathetically in her presence. (Burchill isn’t very keen on Muslims. Her call. But I’m not entirely sure what this has to do with loving Jews. She certainly never deigns to explain.)
Along the way, her love for the Jewish people is cemented by visiting Israel, getting drunk on the local vintage, visiting Yad Vashem, and reflecting on how proud she is “to have chosen her side so unconditionally.” Strange that -- anyone would think she was talking about a football match, rather than the rich tapestry of culture and tradition stretching back thousands of years. Unsurprisingly, she frequently conflates philo-Semitism with philo-Zionism (and yes, while there is significant overlap in personnel, they are far from being the same thing). It’s all the same to her.
I, for one, don’t think that philo-Semitism is in itself a bad thing. Perhaps it isn’t always thoughtful or intelligent or curious or inquiring. But neither are Anglophilia or Francophilia, to name but two parallel sentiments. And you don’t find proponents of either being accused of walking in step with xenophobes, as Burchill reminds us repeatedly.
Still, the reactionary solipsism of “Unbound” is far removed from the affectionate warmness that a love of the Jewish people can be. It is Burchill’s right to write about herself as much as she pleases, and if she can find people to pay for this, good luck to her. But to dress a hundred and ninety-odd pages of dyspeptic abuse up as a paean to philo-Semitism simply won’t do. Haven’t the Jewish People suffered enough?
Unchosen: The Memoirs of a Philo-Semite, by Julie Burchill
Unbound Books, 192 pages, £13 (hardcover), £10 (e-book)
Julie Burchill has a theory about philo-Semitism. “Philo-Semites are as wildly disparate as Cicero and Lindsay Lohan, but I can’t help noticing that, over the centuries, a disproportionate number of attractive, kind, clever people are drawn to Jews,” she writes in her new memoir, “Unchosen: Memoirs of a Philo-Semite.”
To drive her point home, she helpfully supplies a sample of other well-known admirers of the Jewish people: “Marilyn [Monroe], Ava [Gardner], Liz [Taylor], Felicity Kendal, Martha Gellhorn, Martin Luther King, me – what a sumptuous banquet of radiant humanity we look upon.”
Tongue in cheek or not – and it is genuinely difficult to tell, one way or the other – some context is needed to understand why Burchill seems so cocksure about the matter of philo-Semitism.
Unfortunately, that background is only sporadically evoked in her book, the latest addition to an oeuvre that includes monographs about Princess Diana and the footballer David Beckham; a bonkbuster called “Ambition”; a best-selling YA novel; and one other memoir, simply entitled “I Knew I Was Right.”
For a while in the 1990s and the first decade of this century, Burchill was probably – no, certainly – the most controversial journalist in England. Her entire professional career up to that point had prepared her for this role: Right from her first journalistic break – as a 17-year-old staff writer on the influential music weekly NME in the late '70s – Burchill has consistently wielded the authorial “I” like a sledgehammer, in columns, criticism and feature writing. The detritus she left behind is substantial: lawsuits, enduring feuds, abruptly terminated professional engagements.
There is a body of high-quality, opinionated writing amid the carnage, but all the same, Burchill’s career is primarily defined by disdain for the weakness of contemplative uncertainty. Taking this into account, readers of a gentle disposition might do well to put “Unchosen” aside unread. When Burchill declares that she is going to explain “Just why I love the Jews so much,” it’s only fair to expect fireworks.
For the rest of us, though, it’s reasonable to ask: Why, Julie Burchill, do you love “the Jews”? She says it started in the early '70s, when she was a precocious teenager outgrowing provincial Bristol and looking to escape. “The World at War,” a 26-part television history of World War II, was the broadcasting highlight of English television over the autumn and winter of ‘73-‘74.
Burchill didn’t watch the 20th episode, simply entitled “Genocide,” as it happens. It was only later, leafing through the partwork (weekly subscription) magazine that accompanied the series, that she discovered the photographs and words that tried to describe the horror of the Final Solution.
It’s not quite as facile as it might seem, querying the connection between the Holocaust and Burchill’s path toward philo-Semitism. If nothing else, the act of genocide actually says nothing about its victims but everything about its inflictors.
Burchill, however, frames the moment as a personal awakening. “I remember going into the bathroom and staring at my blank, big-eyed face in the mirror … and being surprised that I hadn’t changed on the outside, when the rest of me was so different.” And in this sentence, perhaps, lies the problem with Julie Burchill, with her philo-Semitism and indeed with the whole of “Unbound”: It’s all about her.
Her real favorite topic
True, we had been warned. Even so, “Unbound” feels retrofitted, personal history adjusted to fit the contours of her claims to life-long philo-Semitism. There’s nothing at all unusual about this – most memoirs are, to a greater or lesser extent, exercises in wish fulfillment – but this after-the-fact reevaluation comes across as awkward and incomplete.
It’s not just that there should be no points to be won for one’s philo-Semitic longevity; it’s also that Burchill takes it as a given that the reader already knows all about her and her turbulent career. “Unbound” charges along, only lightly mediated by the exigencies of chronology and thematic development, an unstoppable melange of partial reminiscence that assumes everything but serves to explain very little, even if you happen to be particularly clued up about Burchill’s favorite topic, herself.
She does come up with evidence of something, if not quite philo-Semitism. As a young journalist on the make in London, she simpers embarrassingly over a much older colleague, partly because she believes that he is a Jew. For a while, she passes herself off as a Member of the Tribe, insinuating (no, lying) that her mother was Elizabieta Grynszpan, apparently a cousin of Herschel Grynszpan. You know, the young man who assassinated German diplomat Ernst von Rath in Paris in 1938, providing the pretext for Kristallnacht, etc. Yes, that Grynszpan. Even then, it seems, Burchill had an intuitive knack for chutzpah.
There are also moments of admirable display of principle. In 1978, a year into her stint at NME, Burchill reviewed a new album by punk darlings Siouxsie and the Banshees. A mainstay of Siouxsie’s energetic live set at the time was a song containing the obnoxious line “Too many Jews for my liking.” Burchill didn’t hesitate. “I, self-righteous square than I am, consider [this] to be the most disgusting and unforgivable lyric line ever written,” Burchill’s review observed. “[Siouxsie] is well into her twenties, so ignorant youth is no excuse, however lame. Therefore she must be either evil or retarded.”
Calling out a bigot when everyone else seems to be cool with her takes guts, one must acknowledge. Groupthink, especially in journalism, can be both insidious and impossibly restrictive. Still, something in Burchill’s outspokeness suggests a concurrent agenda, one that becomes a little clearer in the last line of the review: “Well, take your shocking song and stick it up your rude white ass, Sioux, because here’s a review that doesn’t believe in running with the pack.”
One thing we do learn about Burchill from “Unbound” is that she is actually a tribal animal by nature, the real issue being the pack she chooses to run with. The working classes, the unfairly excluded, the honest everyday folk marginalized by the smug bourgeoisie: These are her people. Sticking one up Siouxsie, one feels, was as much thumbing her nose at the middle-class writers and tastemakers who had by then appropriated punk as their own, as it was a simple statement about the vileness of anti-Semitism.
Charles Saatchi wonders
This isn’t to say that Burchill took up championing the Jewish cause simply because it helped establish outsider credentials. There are much easier ways to go about that, after all. (Charles Saatchi, the advertising guru and patron of the arts, once made much the same point to Burchill, she reports. “Why are you doing this – siding with the Jews?” Saatchi asks her. “Do you really need to go looking for trouble that much!”).
But any good intentions are undercut through her insistent, limited characterization of her chosen people. Jews, in her estimation, are hyper-clever working-class boys and girls, of superior stock to the gentiles around them, who have transcended humble immigrant roots and institutional discrimination to become very successful and very rich, very quickly. (I paraphrase only very slightly.) This is much as Burchill imagines herself, one suspects, the inconvenience of her non-kosher birth aside.
But so what? None of this makes her brand of philo-Semitism a bad thing, merely vapid and shallow. Still, there is a problem. Having established an entertaining but essentially lazy stereotype of the plucky underdog, she now uses it as a cudgel with which she beats her opponents into the ground.
Turning an ostensibly affectionate sentiment into something so bilious takes some doing, but Burchill manages it with ease. Burchill has made many enemies over the years; I’d guess that every single one who has said anything that could be construed as unsympathetic to the Jewish people makes an appearance here. There are ex-husbands and in-laws, ex-colleagues and ex-acquaintances, anyone who makes the mistake of mentioning Muslims sympathetically in her presence. (Burchill isn’t very keen on Muslims. Her call. But I’m not entirely sure what this has to do with loving Jews. She certainly never deigns to explain.)
Along the way, her love for the Jewish people is cemented by visiting Israel, getting drunk on the local vintage, visiting Yad Vashem, and reflecting on how proud she is “to have chosen her side so unconditionally.” Strange that -- anyone would think she was talking about a football match, rather than the rich tapestry of culture and tradition stretching back thousands of years. Unsurprisingly, she frequently conflates philo-Semitism with philo-Zionism (and yes, while there is significant overlap in personnel, they are far from being the same thing). It’s all the same to her.
I, for one, don’t think that philo-Semitism is in itself a bad thing. Perhaps it isn’t always thoughtful or intelligent or curious or inquiring. But neither are Anglophilia or Francophilia, to name but two parallel sentiments. And you don’t find proponents of either being accused of walking in step with xenophobes, as Burchill reminds us repeatedly.
Still, the reactionary solipsism of “Unbound” is far removed from the affectionate warmness that a love of the Jewish people can be. It is Burchill’s right to write about herself as much as she pleases, and if she can find people to pay for this, good luck to her. But to dress a hundred and ninety-odd pages of dyspeptic abuse up as a paean to philo-Semitism simply won’t do. Haven’t the Jewish People suffered enough?
June 3, 2016
Julie Burchill doesn't so much kick against the soppy middle-class pricks and prigs as slap them on their heads like Benny Hill used to do to Jacky Wright. Unchosen is a serious and quite touching book but is also full of great lines and genuinely funny moments, the best of which is the chapter Too Cool For Shule where she encounters a creepy 'trendy' lesbian rabbi who is more than somewhat reminiscent of the Graham Norton character in Father Ted.
September 7, 2020
Odd....not sure what I was expecting but it wasn't this. I struggled with a book where the author claims to be philo-semitic, championing the case of the eternally oppressed Jewish people but doing so at the frequent expense of another people, namely Muslims. Perhaps I missed some deep irony as the reviews on the back cover describe Julie Burchill's writing as "...funnier, witter and more memorable than any of her alleged rivals"....or perhaps they were referring to her other ✍
May 3, 2015
Whilst there is no doubt she's a talented writer this book had me spitting chips in places. Fine she loves the Jews and Israel, not got a problem with that at all and found her discussion of why very interesting. However the vitriol she poured consistently on Islam did not sit well with me at all. Plus the needless swipes she made at ex husbands, colleagues, other random people just felt like being a bitch for the sake of it. Hard to believe she is in her 50's not 15!
November 1, 2014
Julie Burchill doesn't so much kick against the pricks and prigs as slap them on their heads like Benny Hill used to do to Jacky Wright. Unchosen is a serious and touching book but is also full of great lines and genuinely funny moments, the best of which is the chapter Too Cool For Shule where she encounters a 'trend'y rabbi reminiscent of the Graham Norton character in Father Ted.
May 9, 2017
Not my favourite Burchill book but still rip roaringly funny, passionate and thought provoking.
December 4, 2023
This book is about JB and her love of the Jews and Israel (very much in that order.) By about 2/3 of the way through this book I decided that she had become the worst possible thing, irretrievably silly. By the end I was reminded that we do need people who care about things and are willing to make themselves unpopular serving barbecue from sacred cows. But taking her sincerity as genuine, I still worry that either she simply can't help herself or has no idea what might be needed. Unconditional support for Israel is just as fatuous and harmful as unconditional condemnation because these views can never compromise. When she was just being witty and catty about David Beckham as a cultural icon, it was fine because that doesn't matter either way but Israel and anti-semitism are both far too serious for kiddy level debate. One of her favourite "arguments" is "... anyone with two brain cells will agree ..." (count them up): "Oi, Jools, get out of the playground! You're over fifty!" Her email spat with India Knight is toe curling (as is the lack of awareness of how it might look unless cat fights turn you on.) I'm getting pretty bored with being told how witty and polemical she is. I think maybe that was true at some point in the past but both wit and argument backed by anything more solid than blogs (the bibliography is hilarious, carefully referencing the equivalent of "that conversation I overheard on the bus between that bloke with the big ears and the woman in the tight dress") are getting to be in short supply. I bought this in an Oxfam shop and it was pretty much published by subscription so her ability to do harm by arguing offensively about difficult issues like a surly schoolgirl may be self-limiting. It is vital that we recognise that you can fully support the Jews and Israel and abhor anti-semitism without giving Israel a blank cheque in regard to their treatment of Palestinians. The UK had a big part to play in the mess in the Middle East and the treatment of the Jews historically is abominable so no wonder they feel the need to defend themselves but countries agreeing to international law and systems needs to be above special pleading. JB makes much of the "double standard" in reporting and she may well be right: I can easily believe there is anti-semitism in both the media and the UN. But to show that you need careful analysis of evidence rather than ranting and pouting. And she ruins her credibility by either not knowing (or not mentioning) that, loathsome as the consequence may be, what we can do about the way a country treats its _own_ citizens is different from what we can do about how they treat _other_ national groups. I suspect that she would spot a mile off, if someone applied the same argument to the Jews, that lumping all Muslims or "Islam" together is illegitimate and pernicious but the hobby horse is just going too fast (and has won too many lucrative races) to dismount. But if you demonise others you can't really kvetch if others demonise you. I'm just about hanging on as a JB reader but I really wish she would use what remains of her talent to do things which wouldn't just muddy already filthy water (or go back to stuff that doesn't matter like Beckham). If you love something, the object of your love should benefit from what your love offers. I'm not sure all Jews or Israelis would feel like that about JB's "support". Certainly I'm glad she isn't helping me.
May 2, 2016
If I spent time with Julie Burchill in real life, I would probably enjoy her company, and find her witty. But in print - her forte, she says - I find her deadly. It may be I don't much get the humor genre. Without the effective pauses of spoken humor, I just don't think it's funny. Furthermore, Burchill's style is so overladen with British slang it is almost offensive, like a conversation you overhear in a bar at Heathrow, the kind where you wonder, how can these people stand each other?
The book took me over a year to read. I finished at last, the final two thirds of it in recent days, because it was a gift, and as a gift it must have some purpose - it must be going somewhere. Where it goes, indeed, is into the the overwhelming of Europe, chiefly Britain, by people from the Middle East, whose minority outrage hospitality by setting bombs, trying to establish Sharia law enclaves, and insisting their hosts adapt to them, rather than the other way around.
It's not so much I disagree with what she says, although I think she has moments of blind incomprehension, but I find her adherence to positive Jewish stereotypes embarrassing. I do not wish to be loved for the number of Nobel Prizes among my fellow Jews, or for surviving the Holocaust, or for behaving rationally, i.e. Jewishly. Jew that I am, I want to be loved for myself.
I notice Unchosen is self-published, or, the money put up by a short list of friends of the author, even though in Britain Julie Burchill is a name. To my mind, it means regular publishers rejected the book, perhaps for some of the reasons it annoyed me.
The book took me over a year to read. I finished at last, the final two thirds of it in recent days, because it was a gift, and as a gift it must have some purpose - it must be going somewhere. Where it goes, indeed, is into the the overwhelming of Europe, chiefly Britain, by people from the Middle East, whose minority outrage hospitality by setting bombs, trying to establish Sharia law enclaves, and insisting their hosts adapt to them, rather than the other way around.
It's not so much I disagree with what she says, although I think she has moments of blind incomprehension, but I find her adherence to positive Jewish stereotypes embarrassing. I do not wish to be loved for the number of Nobel Prizes among my fellow Jews, or for surviving the Holocaust, or for behaving rationally, i.e. Jewishly. Jew that I am, I want to be loved for myself.
I notice Unchosen is self-published, or, the money put up by a short list of friends of the author, even though in Britain Julie Burchill is a name. To my mind, it means regular publishers rejected the book, perhaps for some of the reasons it annoyed me.
September 4, 2015
Before I read this book, I had no idea that benevolent anti-Semitism was a thing. It is. This is probably a canonical example.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews