Howard Jacobson’s ‘Howl’ is a dark meditation on post-Oct. 7 antisemitism

(RNS) — The calls and text messages have not stopped. My Jewish circle of friends and colleagues — a large one, by any rabbi’s standard — has been living with antisemitic trauma for going on two years now. What emerges from them, from us, is a collective howl.

That is where British author Howard Jacobson’s new novel, “Howl,” (which is not yet widely available in the United States), begins. The title refers to Allen Ginsberg’s famous poem by the same name. The book also parodies and expands on that poem’s opening line: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked …”

It’s because a new madness is destroying the best minds of the next generation.

Except this time, the poem would continue: “… dragging themselves through the Brooklyn streets and faculty lounges at dawn looking for other angry Jews, angel-headed hipsters with rage burning about the ancient heavenly and earthly connection to the Land, reaching for worn-out libels like genocide written in a Cyrillic language and the leftovers of a crumbling empire …”

“Howl” tells the fictional story of Ferdinand Draxler, the headmaster of a London school, who grows increasingly bewildered…