So as they saw it, their choice was between condemning him for being bad, or showing a liberal understanding of why he turned out so bad. Feelings - especially 'negative' feelings; feelings as framed by modernity/history, technology, literature, art, film and psychoanalysis. For anyone who has experienced, contemplated or rejected it, On Marriage offers a fascinating exploration of an institution that, for better or worse, “continues to shape and carry our human story”. Because it looks as though what I’m saying is that feeling Jewish means to feel: guilt, envy, self-hatred, paranoia – come and get it!

She is the author of three books: On Marriage (Hamish Hamilton/Penguin Random House; Yale University Press; CITIC; others) which came out in 2023, Feeling Jewish: a book for just about anyone (Yale University Press) and The Jewish Joke: an essay with examples (less essay, more examples) (Profile), which came out in 2017. With Josh Appignanesi, her spouse, she is both co-director and performer in the documentaries The New Man and Husband. That really impressed me, because, you know, you read something about feelings, and that was a complete turn-over in my head. The feeling of being European has arisen, I think, in particular amongst Jews in this country, partly because some of them, since the Referendum, have discovered that they can go and get passports – from Germany, Poland. So, all the feelings I’ve selected are ones that have a kind of ‘bad’ reputation that I wanted to overturn: I don’t wish to say that they’re bad feelings, though I do admit that they are or can be painful.And for me also it’s about the shared nature of feelings – they’re not private, and they shouldn’t be bound up with an ideology of privacy and property. It’s an argument about feelings and a sort of warning, I think, as well – that to misread or misunderstand feelings can be a dangerous thing.

I consider all feelings to have a potentially blocking, and a potentially motivating, or moving, impulse inside them. Why, then, she wonders, has there been so little serious intellectual engagement with the idea of marriage? There’s almost nobody I meet these days where I can’t very quickly detect the form their resentment takes – that is, the way in which they feel they’re not being heard, as if they’re being somehow silenced or marginalised, or as if their case isn’t permitted.I think there’s a tendency, when you use words like ‘resentment’, to adopt a severely moral, judgemental tone.