In his debut novel, Shibboleth, Thomas Peermohamed Lambert satirizes how the madness that has beset higher education across the Western world came to Oxford University. And that madness is never aroused to such heights as when its subject is the Jews.
Recommended Stories
- Cassidy suggests increased oversight for education funding, teacher training programs to boost K-12 outcomes
- Stanford student paper self-censorship prompts lawsuit against Trump over deportations
- Georgia touts progress on getting chronic absenteeism post-COVID-19 back on track
Our protagonist, Edward, is a white(ish — it’s complicated) Anglo-Zanzibarian undergrad of Muslim descent who is attracted to his classmate Rachel, a German Jew. All of the other characters in the book have strong opinions about the impropriety of Edward getting too close to the Jewess. “Has she spoken about the crimes of her people in Gaza? The West Bank? Lebanon?” asks Edward’s friend Youssef, a posh Egyptian Muslim. Another character, Liberty, a beret-clad American black radical angling for a high-paying diversity, equity, and inclusion job after graduation, tells Edward to interrogate Rachel about her views on Israel. “Ask her how she spent her vacation, and where. Ask her why she and Said broke up. Ask her. Ask the Jew girl.”
When Lambert is on target, the book is sharp. In one of the best scenes, Youssef takes Edward to a reception at the “Mixed Heritage Society,” where Youssef, who alone seems in on the joke, plucks out lapel badges from a buffet of ethnic and racial labels: “He was enjoying himself. Berber had been joined by a smattering of other African ethnicities (Balanta, Dogon) that Edward at least would never have the temerity to question — but also, improbably, Samoan, and, in a final moment of daring as he turned to face Edward, Cherokee.” But even as the book makes fun of the Elizabeth Warrens and Zohran Mamdanis of the world for, so to speak, inflating their ethnic credentials, it also is trying to ask serious questions about identity, and particularly Edward’s relation to Islam, to Israel and Jews, to women, to academic life, and to Oxford itself.
The trouble with Shibboleth, however, is that, as satire, it’s muddy. On the one hand, Lambert successfully skewers the absurd excesses of identity politics with all of its tedious vocabulary and slogans (“allyship,” “doing the work”). On the other, things seem to get very serious when the topic turns to Israel and Jews.
One problem is that Edward is pretty dull, in both senses of the word. “I don’t know” seems to be his most common refrain of dialogue, even as everyone around him takes deep and immediate interest in every step of his social life. Another is that the social circle he is attempting to insinuate himself into consists of tiresome, bigoted political activists. Something about Oct. 7, something about the Gaza war, something about Israelis and Palestinians, something about Jews themselves simply fits into too many of the categories of critical theory, “social justice,” and grievance politics for a certain kind of keffiyeh-clad campus lefty to resist going camping on the quad. I won’t spoil the finale, but it involves an antisemitic assault on Rachel that, if it happened in reality, would make international headlines and result in lengthy jail time for the perpetrators.
It came as sweet relief halfway through the novel when Edward gets dragged along to a night out with the rugby team and then on to the pitch the following morning. I found myself rooting for Edward to abandon his nasty, Jew-baiting, identity-politics obsessed “friends” and have a politics-free pint with the lads down the pub. Alas, he breaks his leg during the match and immediately goes back to arguing about Zionism and Jewish identity with Rachel.
Though Oct. 7 isn’t explicitly mentioned in the book, the final act centers on a calamity in the Holy Land and Rachel’s decision to speak at “a comradely symposium” about Israel and Palestine at a thinly veiled version of the Oxford Union. So, in case it was not already clear, know that this is a very Oxford novel. Lambert gets a lot of good material out of the particular absurdities of the place, with its extremes of class, politics, and daunting academics. Part of the appeal of any such fiction about Oxford or the other place going back at least to Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall (1928) and continuing through Tom Sharpe’s Porterhouse Blue (1974) and the 2023 film Saltburn is that it’s fun to see the well-heeled toffs, scholarship students, and future masters of the universe all behaving badly in the city of dreaming spires.
But here, the badness of the behavior is less of the hedonistic kind and more of the moralistic kind. For instance, after finding that one of the activists has vandalized a bookshop for daring to sell some books by an apologist for imperialism, Edward is told of her plans to target Oxford’s largest museum: “Next time we’ll go for something at the Ashmolean: hit them where it hurts. You know apparently they have this big hideous painting about hunting animals for sport. You know Hugo Fotherington-Wade at St. Catz? No? Well, he has an MFA in graffiti and related media. So we’ve got expertise, that’s what I’m saying.”
Oxford certainly attracts, or produces, such eccentrics in a way that even Harvard does not. Yale might have the Skull and Bones, but that society recruits upstanding bores such as the Bush family. Oxford stands alone as a place where it is made to seem plausible that a future world leader might have inserted his manhood into a severed pig’s head at an initiation for one of the university’s endless secret drinking societies. (Former U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron strenuously denied this allegation.)
As a 2014 graduate of Oxford, I had thought that the university had enjoyed a greater immunity to the development of anti-Israel and American-style racial politics described in Shibboleth since I left. For one thing, the academic standards for undergrads simply don’t permit the kind of mass disruptions that happened at schools like Columbia. Oxford doesn’t have the grade inflation or gut courses that permit the semi-professional student activism we see in America: poor performers are expelled or forced to repeat a year. If you want to see real violent extremism, try interrupting a library at Oxford in Trinity Term in the weeks before finals.
A source at the university confirmed my hunch: “I think it’s probably true that, in the years immediately after we graduated, the student experience at Oxford became more politically charged, as was the case elsewhere, particularly under the influence of woke liberalism,” he told me. “My impression is that teaching remains as rigorous as ever, and, though students do now have to attend various forms of mandatory training when they arrive, lectures and tutorials have remained largely unpoliticized and untouched by critical theory and the like,” he added. “I believe that we reached ‘peak woke’ in the university a while back, and that, while there will always be an activist minority, most students want simply to focus on their studies and get a good degree.”
YOUR MOVIE TICKET, SHOULD YOU CHOOSE TO ACCEPT IT…
Nonetheless, the very existence of a novel like Shibboleth attests to the fact that something clearly has shifted, even at Oxford. And Lambert is mocking something that desperately needs to be mocked, and to his enormous credit, he is doing so while he is still a doctoral candidate at the university. In the United States, the counterreaction to the George Floyd riots and the cultural vibe shift that followed the reelection of Donald Trump may have marked the turning point against “peak woke.” But aside from in conservative and heterodox publications, there has been very little acknowledgement of just how ridiculous the discourse around Israel and race has become at our major cultural institutions. Shibboleth stands alongside the excellent 2023 film American Fiction as one of the few mainstream cultural products I can think of that have tried to do so.
Unfortunately, despite containing some good laughs, I fear Shibboleth is simply not a good enough novel to represent this righteous counterattack.
Andrew Bernard is a correspondent for the Jewish News Syndicate.