Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

If Ed Miliband can’t be our first Jewish prime minister, he can still be our first atheist Jewish prime minister from Primrose Hill

The immigrant experience changes you, as well as where you move to

(Photo: Getty)

Last weekend, in a small New Jersey suburb, I found myself in a liquor store. Never been anywhere like it. The walls were lined with single malts of rare and impressive varieties, and the clientele both knew their whisky and spoke of little else. Yet they were all, also, to a man (and they were all men) ultra-orthodox Jews.

Properly ultra, as well. There’s a website you might have come across called ‘Amish or Hipster’ and it shows pictures of young folks in beards and hats and braces, and asks you to vote on which particular cult you reckon you are looking at. This lot were like that. The beards were full and bushy, the shirts were all white and tieless and the top buttons were all done up. I remember once seeing a documentary about a very trendy counter-cultural magazine you also might know called Vice. As this lot stood around a barrel taking shots, it could have been one of their editorial meetings.

I bought myself a couple of bottles, anyway, and wandered away feeling quite charmed. At first, I amused myself by thinking that it was impossible to imagine the opposite; a bunch of men in kilts in an inexplicably Judaic store in Inverness, perhaps, nudging each other, and saying ‘Och, aye, it’s a fuhkin’ barry Kiddush wine, this, Jim.’ But then suddenly it struck me that they and I were not actually so very different.

I, too, am Jewish, as you probably know. Go back to the 1880s, and their ancestors and mine could have lived in neighbouring shtetls. We weren’t Hassidim and I think they were, but that’s by the by. Same sort of ethnic stock. So the sole thing that makes it more incongruous for them to be drinking Talisker than me is that for the past 12 decades I’ve been keeping my Yiddisher DNA somewhere else.

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