‘The Jew has been persecuted because he is a Jew’: The discursive construction, disruption, and reconstruction of ‘The Jew’ in race relations legislation and situation comedy, 1965–1976

Abstract

This thesis examines constructions of Jewish ‘difference’ in two sets of sources produced between 1965 and 1976 in the United Kingdom—parliamentary sources produced during the passage of the Race Relations Acts 1965, 1968, and 1976, and two situation comedies, Till Death Us Do Part (1965–1975), and Never Mind the Quality, Feel the Width (1967–1971). It will demonstrate that while the construction of Jews as an ‘Other’ is evident, though not consistent, in parliamentary sources, the representations of Jews in Till Death Us Do Part and Never Mind the Quality, Feel the Width point to a disruption of ideas of Jewish Otherness and of the structures of power and thought that underpin them; concurrently these sources also demonstrate a competing construction of Jewish Otherness that rests on ideas specifically rejected in the parliamentary sources. Utilising Foucauldian-, Hallsian-, Bhabhaian, and Bakhtinian-informed ideas and methodology, this thesis offers a reassessment of the ways in which the Race Relations Acts’ constructions of Jews operated, not as a form of protection, but of power. This thesis further posits that situation comedy functioned as third space site of discursive hybridism to this. Consequently, this thesis extends the origins of Martin Barker’s ‘new racism’ and Etienne Balibar’s ‘neo-racism’ further into the past than previously understood. By exploring the four ‘criteria’ by which difference was defined in these statutes—
‘colour’, ‘race’, ‘nation’, and ‘ethnicity’—assessing the ways in which Jews were spoken about within each of these discourses in order to create the polyvalent discursive construct of ‘the Jew’, this thesis demonstrates: the artificiality of these four structuring concepts; a contemporary redrawing of the bounds of ‘Same’ and ‘Other’ to adapt the British State to changing social realities; and, through similar explorations in situation comedy, the emphasis on concretising the ‘Other’ as a consequence of this aforementioned domestic expedience in Parliament.

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