5 Feet of Fury

Julie Burchill: ‘My first love was a whole race of people – the Jews’

Julie Burchill chats with The Times of Israel:

 “I took to brooding in my room for hours about the endless list of indignities and atrocities committed against the Jews, with a level of dedication I had previously only brought to brooding over the supreme unfairness of not being old enough to marry Marc Bolan.” (…)

At 17, she went to work for the New Musical Express, known as the NME, where as Burchill recounts there were three Jews working at the time.

“It’s so weird the first time you meet a dumb Jew,” she said. “It’s like meeting a gay man who can’t dance.”

She decided to try and pass as Jewish, dyeing her hair black. “And I’ll tell you what: I made a pretty good one, the way I look at it. I guess I thought, ‘If I’m going to be a whole new person, why can’t that person be Jewish?’ I got away with it for two years.”

(I wonder if Burchill’s hatred of The Clash stemmed in part from her frustration that two members were merely mischlings.)