His involvement, though, is only half-hearted.

The chance for a new kind of celebrity, coupled with his casual British anti-Zionism, leads him to head a group called “ASHamed Jews” who take every opportunity to protest Israel’s actions toward Palestinians. That or be born and brought up a Nazi.” He nonetheless becomes ever more passionately, if ineffectually, philo-Semitic in his impulses. When he begins to get into the details of Anglo-Jewish Culture - Who Was and Who Was Not, Who Had Changed His Name, Who Had Married In or Out - Julian’s lover realizes it may be beyond him: “you would have to be born and brought up a Jew to see the hand of Jews in everything. He teaches himself Yiddish endearments and learns about Jewish food. In a romance predicted by a fortune-teller, Julian becomes involved with a Jewish woman - the founder of a Museum of Anglo- Jewish Culture, no less. Finkler’s Jewishness also seems superficial at first, combining conventional political opinions with an offhand sense of specialness. His marital infidelities and selfimportant careerism represent other kinds of shallowness.

He has become wealthy and famous as a popularizer of philosophy through books like The Existentialist in the Kitchen and The Little Book of Household Stoicism. Sam Finkler, Julian’s friend from schoolboy days, lives in an imposing house on Hampstead Heath and employs a driver for his big black Mercedes. He comes to envy the specificity of Jewishness, the references that Jews seem to share among one another, the “confidence, the surety of right.” His idea of romantic love comes from operas like La Bohème and La Traviata where the heroine dies in the hero’s arms. Apart from his serial ineptitude with women, Julian has so few distinguishing features of his own that he earns his living as a stand-in for movie stars he resembles. Protagonist Julian Treslove uses the name “Finkler” as his personal euphemism for “Jew” the “Finkler question” is the Jewish question.

Moreover, for all his wit and acuity, Howard Jacobson has achieved something even more enduring: a deeply moral reflection on the implications of identity and the consequences of loving ideas, fame, and other people. The winner of the Man Booker Prize in 2010 is above all a brilliant social comedy that crackles with quotable dialogue on practically every page. Despite what you may have heard, The Finkler Question is not a political novel about opponents of Zionism.

The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson