My Big Fat Jewish TV Dinner: Reflections on British Jewishness in Friday Night Dinner and Grandma’s House

A reading of contemporary British Jewish culture suggests that a conceptualization of “Jew-ishness” offers a fluid yet meaningful way with which to negotiate current Jewish identities. This article considers this proposition in relation to the recent British sitcoms Friday Night Dinner and Grandma’s House. It argues that the representation of what Jon Stratton has described as “Jewish moments” in these programs (ranging from the implicit, coded, and ironic to the explicit, overt, and stereotypical) taps into a sense of being both inside and outside of a cultural grouping which resonates both at a personal level and, I suggest, within a wider context of increasingly complex and diffuse British Jew-ish cultural identifications.