Jenny Diski was a distinguished British Jewish novelist, essayist, and critic. A long-time contributor to the London Review of Books (LRB), her career spanned four decades, and she was widely regarded as one of the most original and fiercely independent voices in contemporary English literature.
Diski was famous for her refusal to offer easy consolations. Her work in the LRB combined personal history—including mental illness and her terminal cancer diagnosis—with profound social critique. Books like Skating to Antarctica and Stranger on a Train redefined travel writing by focusing on the interior landscape of the mind rather than external sights. In her final memoir, In Gratitude, she examined her complicated relationship with her mentor, Doris Lessing, with characteristic dry wit and intellectual rigor.
As an early supporter of Independent Jewish Voices, Diski asserted that Jewishness should not be conflated with reflexive support for the Israeli state. She used her platform to dissect the logic of Zionism, arguing that tying Jewish identity to territorial exclusion was a betrayal of the universalist values inherent in the Jewish diasporic tradition. Drawing on her own life on the margins, she was acutely sensitive to the dehumanization of Palestinians in political rhetoric, warning that a society loses itself when it defines its security through the erasure of another people.
The following passage aptly illustrates her views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:
The Liberal Democrat MP for Bradford East, David Ward, has been under pressure and finally apologised for saying at a Holocaust Day ceremony: “I am saddened that the Jews, who suffered unbelievable levels of persecution during the Holocaust, could within a few years of liberation from the death camps be inflicting atrocities on Palestinians in the new State of Israel and continue to do so on a daily basis in the West Bank and Gaza.”
……He was wrong; he shouldn’t have conflated ‘the Jews’ with ‘Israel and its supporters’ – or, to put it another way, me with Netanyahu. But that doesn’t mean he didn’t have a legitimate point, that the memory of what the Jews went through ought to give Israeli politicians pause for thought before subjecting other groups to persecution.