And As Long As We're Discussing Anti-semitism...

From an exchange of letters in the New York Review of Books:-

...I stand by my reading. Although I am of course willing to entertain Professor Strawson’s implication that generations of British authors have been the victims of a dire “prejudice” on the part of Jewish readers such as myself, I am emboldened to suggest that the burden of sensitivity lies on the other side. It is true that Hollinghurst’s work contains a “huge cast of characters”; indeed very few of them have recognizably Jewish surnames (even fewer than I’d thought, if Professor Strawson is right). For that very reason, I wished that the arriviste duchess in The Line of Beauty (who, when we first meet her, is the object of another character’s mimicry—a “thoughtless social dynamo” who is the heiress to a “vinegar fortune”) hadn’t been a Feingold; that the money behind the morally bankrupt Thatcherite politician at the center of that same book hadn’t been the Rothschild-like Kessler heiress (she seems “distantly foreign” to the protagonist); that the pushy intruder into the Valances’ marmoreally aristocratic existence hadn’t been Jerry Goldblatt. I cannot accept Professor Strawson’s startling claim that an author’s presentation of his characters—especially in a work of biting social and political satire such as The Line of Beauty—does not ask its readers to “conclude anything.”

To be sure, “principles of realism” must guide a novelist’s pen, but after rereading all of Hollinghurst’s work in preparation for my review, I was (as I wrote) dismayed to find what struck me as an unrealistic lopsidedness: the only recognizably Jewish Englishmen I encountered in it were either vulgar, filthy rich, or vaguely foreign—those age-old clichés of the Jew in British literature. (With one exception: one learns that Simon, the long-dead lover of the protagonist in The Spell, had a very nice bum.) My regret, in any event, was not a weary pose, it was genuine, and I framed my observation as an aside precisely because I didn’t want it to dominate my otherwise admiring and, I think, nuanced assessment of this worthy writer. You would think from Professor Strawson’s indignant references to insults and slurs and apologies that I had made an ad hominem attack on Alan Hollinghurst. I did not. I am a critic, and what I did was to offer a critical observation about a (small) aspect of the author’s oeuvre. My readers may judge the validity of this interpretation for themselves...

That exchange was about

“an old British literary habit”—that habit being the use of Jews as exotics and symbols of un-Britishness.

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