What Julie Burchill’s ex-husband thinks of her new memoir

Unchosen is the journalist Julie Burchill’s account of how she — a bright and bratty working-class girl from Bristol — fell in love with the Jewish race. It’s an exhilarating and exasperating mix of the utterly brilliant and the totally bonkers.

Poor Julie — she thought that her teenage dream of marrying a Jewish man had come true when she married me back in the 1980s. Yes, she got her Jew, but the -ish bit was missing. My family and I earn a chapter in her book called ‘Meet the Perverts’ and all I can say is: Oy vey! You think you’re a smart and funny man to be married to — and then you read an ex-wife’s memoir and you wonder: was I that boring?

Today Julie describes her self as a philo-Semite — that is, an admirer or lover of the Jews. But as her book makes clear, there are plenty of Jews Julie doesn’t love: me, David Baddiel, the journalist Anne Karpf, the actress Miriam Margolyes, her local lesbian rabbi, Elizabeth Tikvah Sarah and millions of Jews around the world who have ever criticised Israel. Her love is blind, deaf and dumb to such an obvious contradiction.

When I was married to Julie she was not only a philo-Semite but a Stalinist who regarded the working-class as the chosen people. Nowadays she’s a Stalinist philo-Semite; anyone who doesn’t toe the party line of uncritical support for Israel is branded a ‘self-loathing Jew’.

Julie’s love affair with Judaism began as a teenager in Bristol when she discovered the horrors of the Holocaust. (Funny; the horrors of Stalinism never bothered her.) So why does she love Jews? She says it’s not for the usual cute reasons: the humour, the food, the feeling for family etc.