Nova kosher

Tish is a new grand café in Belsize Park, north London, but kosher. There are not really enough Jews to fill a kosher restaurant in London, and they tend to fall into dust, like the ten tribes, and the temple. 1701, the unwise and subtle restaurant by Bevis Marks synagogue, has gone; Bloom’s in Golders Green has gone, too. Most British Jews aren’t kosher because chicken without butter isn’t worth having, even if you do believe that bushes speak and people want to kill you. Mostly, the food will kill you. But not always.

The north London restaurant most favoured by Jews is Oslo Court, which is actually a specialist in seafood, plus cream cakes. Oh Jews! What do you want — really? Or we go to Fischer’s on Marylebone High Street which, although a pre-war Austrian tribute café without Nazis (and very good too), isn’t kosher either. But it does serve a wondrous Wiener schnitzel.

These are raging times. How many paragraphs should I give it before I call Jeremy Corbyn and his cohort of appalling child zombies anti-Semites? One? Two? Three? 0.5 of a paragraph?

For Jews, threat means, inevitably, renaissance. It is what comes next. Jews know their duty. Most Jews. Not Jewdas, the ‘radical voices for the alternative diaspora’, who invited Corbyn for Passover. They practise their cod shtetl schtick like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern trapped in Fiddler on the Roof, but they are really hack Marxists who have watched too many Tarantino films. We eat in our own defence, always, and we won’t be stopped now. Why would we, when the glory of being Jewish is really the extent to which it annoys people? (I never said it wasn’t insane.)

So, you can’t get a table at Tish for solidarity.