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The Jewish Chronicle UK | Print

October 2015 Circulation: 21,330

LIFE 35THEJC.COMTHE JEWISH CHRONICLE 9 OCTOBER 2015

PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES

LIFE

Anthea Gerrie is granted a rare audience with art’s true “rock star” and ex-head of the Royal Academy

Don’t call me a collector

LIKE A rock star, Norman Rosenthal sweeps into his favourite Soho café (which does not open until half an hour after he com-mands me to be

there, leaving me standing on a chilly street), one and a quarter hours late for our interview. And, like a rock groupie, I wait patient-ly, unwilling to relinquish my

grasp on this big beast that I’ve been stalking for three months.

A dinosaur of a big beast in some ways; he blames his lateness on not understanding his iPhone, which has been on silent mode since last night and thus not relayed my increasingly anxious messages about whether I am being stood up.

I am not. But I suspect he regards me, an outsider rather than an inti-mate of the charmed inner circle of international art world luvvies in which he moves, as not quite wor-thy of an audience.

This is a man who, like many a rock star, feels free to let rip if he feels crossed — he famously spat at

an art critic who dared to criticise one of his shows within his earshot on press day, and while working at the RA dismissed as not the equal of their peers the majority of living Royal Academicians whose artistic prowess the institution exists to honour.

Not that Rosenthal, with his dead-fish eyes and deadpan man-ner, is an actual rock star, in spite of the arrogance, untamed coiffure, flamboyant suits and regal attitude for which he is famous. Yet he is showbiz all the same; this entrepre-neur’s great talent is his panache in bringing art to the people and mak-ing it pay for the sponsors.

My savioursOne writer’s

experience of what the Big Society

really means p36

My admirationBusiness guru Luke Johnson on why Jews make business work p37LIFE

My savioursOne writer’s

experience of what the Big Society

really means

The Royal Academy would likely be dead in the water without Rosenthal at its helm as exhibitions secretary for more than 30 years.

I first met this dynamo, who has no art or art history qualifications, just a great eye — including one for the zeitgeist — when he was getting ready to unleash Sensation, with all its bad-boy (and girl) Young British Artists, on the august and strug-gling institution.

The show outraged critics, visi-tors and Royal Academicians alike, but it packed the punters in, and the gallery has understood the value of blockbusters and followed Rosenthal’s lead ever since.

But we are here to talk about life after the RA, which he left, gonged but unloved, in 2010 to pursue a future as a freelance curator. Speculation ensued about whether he had been pushed, but it was actually criticising the Academy for its lack of vision in a piece for The Spectator, which led to him getting offered the job in 1977.

He had held the same position of exhibitions secretary at the ICA — not bad for someone whose art career started with a holiday job in a Bond Street dealership.

“I actually wanted to sell records

INTERVIEW SIR NORMAN ROSENTHAL

CONTINUED ON P36

Iconoclast: Norman

Rosenthal ‘fell’ into art

— he actually wanted to sell

pop records

‘This is a man who feels free to let rip if he’s crossed

36 LIFE THEJC.COM THE JEWISH CHRONICLE 9 OCTOBER 2015

rise, called me at the isolated Span-ish villa where my family had been spending the summer.

Up popped Emma, a new friend and colleague who, within seconds of a desperate text from me, pulled in a favour (and spent a fortune) to fly me home on the busiest day of the tourist calendar, after I’d been told no seat was available. And Lisa, my schoolmate’s wife whose con-stant stream of hot food, candles, prayer books and advice helped my father, brother and I concentrate on other things. There was the rabbi I barely know who interrupted her holiday to be a therapist and the rabbi we’ve come to know who guided us through a bewildering maze of religiosity. Neighbours who I’d never met coming to offer sus-tenance, people I’d not seen in dec-

ades whose wisdom I know I’ll need as the weeks and months unfurl.

And Leonard, a jocular, grey-haired ball of energy and a volun-teer from our local synagogue who, I later learned, was roused from his bed on that fateful night by a doc-tor who saw that my father needed help. Devastated, confused and suddenly totally alone after 50-odd years of devoted companionship, it was Leonard who held Dad’s hand. Forms were filled in, state-ments given and all the depressing formalities adhered to before eve-ryone, my mother included, could be ‘‘released’’. But it was a total stranger whose generosity of spirit made it happen.

All these cogs and more in the Jewish ‘‘system’’ — replicas of which exist in all religions — suddenly

clicked seamlessly. The machine took over. A vacuum was filled instantly. People helped for no other reason than wanting to. They weren’t encouraged, or told to, or enticed to by the promise of congratulatory pats on the back, baubles and ermine.

They were not ‘‘big’’ gestures but small ones — often tiny, momen-tary ones. It was not the kind of behaviour that defines ‘‘society’’ but instead defines us as people, con-nects us intimately to one another.

Not under a vast, well-funded umbrella or in front of a grand canvas constructed by government agencies but simple, quiet, pro-found connections that may last a minute or a lifetime.

In fact the whole experiece was so un-Cameronesque as to make

at HMV on Oxford Street, but they had no jobs so I went around the corner to Agnews,” he explains, leading me around the corner him-self to his warren of a Dickensian walk-up duplex, every inch of wall covered with a range of visual treas-ures spanning at least six centuries. “Just don’t call me a collector,” he snaps. “I just find things I love and buy them, like I just fell into the world of art.”

Although his mother, who arrived as a refugee from Hungary one month before war broke out, played her part in stimulating his interest, he concedes: “Jews are

very good, even when there’s very little money around, in seeking out culture. My mother took me to the National Gallery, we went to Ken-wood, and by the age of nine I was taking myself to the theatre to see Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier.”

Born in 1944, Rosenthal got a state education at St Saviours pri-mary school in Warwick Avenue — “at the time when the area was still slummy” — and Westminster City School, while his father, who arrived in the UK during the war with the Free Cezch Army, ran a restaurant for Czech refugees, “and was a bit of a gambler”. But even before he had left university in Leicester, the young history

undergraduate was organising his first art exhibition, Artists in Cornwall, for the Leicester Museum and Art Gallery. No wonder Agnews snapped him up on the spot for a holiday job that lasted three years.

Knighted in 2007, Rosenthal is universally acknowledged with having put London at the centre of the art world during his RA years, championing artists originally reviled by the establishment, from Damien Hirst to Tracey Emin to Sarah Lucas, from whom he has just commissioned a new sculpture for the smart new Nine Elms develop-ment abutting the new US Embassy site.

It’s just one of the diverse consul-

tations into which he has thrown himself between assembling shows everywhere from Berlin to Istanbul, sorting out a Warhol exhibition this winter for the Ashmolean and flying to and from Madrid, where his wife of 25 years, Manuela Mena Marques, mother of their two Lon-don-based daughters, is a curator at the Prado.

But now he is getting ready to step out in London again, making his next major appearance in the capital at the Frieze London Art Fair in Regent’s Park this month with an audacious project.

He is curating eight little col-lections he believes would be worthy of space in the V&A, RA or

THERE’S BEEN a lot of talk at the Conservative Party Conference of whether David Cameron is any closer to realising his grand ambi-

tion for a ‘‘Big Society’’. This is the vague notion espoused by the Prime Minister (before he had the power to do anything about it) that we’re a nation that nurtures each other, that cares.

Well, the other week I came face to face with it — and it was not a pleasant experience. Neither was it big or much of a society, to be honest. But it was there, an invis-ible force of human nature that suddenly sprang into action, envel-oping me in a cloak of uncalled-for compassion.

My mother, Philippa, died of a heart attack. She never made it into the operating theatre at the Royal Free Hospital in North London having been rushed there by ambu-lance after complaining of stomach pains. She slipped away close to midnight, holding my father’s hand as a phalanx of doctors and nurses frantically tried to save her.

She was 80 and the kind of per-son who never made a fuss. I’m sure she’d hate me writing about her as part of some mawkish eulogy, so suffice it to say that she lived a good, long, honest and remarkably happy life. Don’t moan, she said, play with the hand you’re dealt with, be stoic to the last and try not to spoil it by being overly emotional.

So I won’t. Because although this piece is inspired by her, it isn’t really about her. It’s about us and our place in a so-called Big Society, presumably one that doesn’t need a harrowing image of a drowned child to wake us from our selfish slumber and do something worth-while. Except, as we have seen these past few weeks with the refugee cri-sis, it’s not quite that simple. Those values certainly exist, yet politicians are worryingly out of kilter with popular sentiment.

My, or our, experience (I include my 89-year-old father and younger brother in this) provides some evi-dence as to why that should be so. It began the moment my mother drew her last breath— though for me it started the morning after when Dad, having waited until sun-

PHOTO: AP

COMMENT

This is our Big SocietyScarred: David and Samantha Cameron see the Big Society through the prism of their own loss

I can’t abide shul but I’d never deny my heritage

TESTIMONY GRANT FELLER

‘Even when there’s no money, Jews are good at seeking culture

CONTINUED FROM P35

absurd his desire to claim owner-ship for a series of selfless actions simply by reimagining them in his own image. And it made me realise why government often fails to inspire, match or even emulate the unthinking decency we show to each other.

Politicians boast of their listen-ing skills and ability to react to the will of the people, but that’s rarely the case. More often than not, like reeds in the wind, we bend to their will. When it does happen — as has been the case following the images of three-year-old Syrian Aylan Kurdi lying face down in the sand on a Turkish beach — our elected offi-cials, as if reluctantly prised free of their protective bubble, suddenly appear disengaged from reality.

I have no doubt that Cameron, scarred by his own personal trau-ma, is well-meaning, but he and his advisers have tried to latch on to something that already works and burdened it with the kinds of rules, politics and economies that encour-age people to pursue vanity-fuelled ego trips. Precisely the opposite of what motivated Leonard, Emma, Lisa and the rest of my small society of temporary shoulders.

Perhaps there was never a halcyon era when a ‘‘big society’’ picked up the pieces in a mass wave of selfless do-gooding. It was always little, meaningful connections that warranted only minimal thanks. I suspect that the difference is that my parents and grandparents were guided by a political establishment that understood why morality is a more important indicator of one’s humanity than quotas, budgets and delegation — often to organisations that operate with little oversight.

If the laudable ethos of the Big Society reveals anything, it is that our institutions and their leaders, more than ever in history, lack the moral compassion to make it work. Yet we as individuals have buckets of it — one only need see the grass roots movement whose generosity of spirit and outrage at political foot-dragging has compelled our government to take action over tackling this century’s most signifi-cant humanitarian crisis.

It’s ironic that Mum always taught me not to make a fuss about things, to stiffen upper lips and keep schtum when things weren’t going your way. Yet sometimes the most human thing is to do the opposite. It’s why we know what’s right and politicians sometimes haven’t a clue.

LIFE 35THEJC.COMTHE JEWISH CHRONICLE 9 OCTOBER 2015

PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES

LIFE

Anthea Gerrie is granted a rare audience with art’s true “rock star” and ex-head of the Royal Academy

Don’t call me a collector

LIKE A rock star, Norman Rosenthal sweeps into his favourite Soho café (which does not open until half an hour after he com-mands me to be

there, leaving me standing on a chilly street), one and a quarter hours late for our interview. And, like a rock groupie, I wait patient-ly, unwilling to relinquish my

grasp on this big beast that I’ve been stalking for three months.

A dinosaur of a big beast in some ways; he blames his lateness on not understanding his iPhone, which has been on silent mode since last night and thus not relayed my increasingly anxious messages about whether I am being stood up.

I am not. But I suspect he regards me, an outsider rather than an inti-mate of the charmed inner circle of international art world luvvies in which he moves, as not quite wor-thy of an audience.

This is a man who, like many a rock star, feels free to let rip if he feels crossed — he famously spat at

an art critic who dared to criticise one of his shows within his earshot on press day, and while working at the RA dismissed as not the equal of their peers the majority of living Royal Academicians whose artistic prowess the institution exists to honour.

Not that Rosenthal, with his dead-fish eyes and deadpan man-ner, is an actual rock star, in spite of the arrogance, untamed coiffure, flamboyant suits and regal attitude for which he is famous. Yet he is showbiz all the same; this entrepre-neur’s great talent is his panache in bringing art to the people and mak-ing it pay for the sponsors.

My savioursOne writer’s

experience of what the Big Society

really means p36

My admirationBusiness guru Luke Johnson on why Jews make business work p37LIFE

My savioursOne writer’s

experience of what the Big Society

really means

The Royal Academy would likely be dead in the water without Rosenthal at its helm as exhibitions secretary for more than 30 years.

I first met this dynamo, who has no art or art history qualifications, just a great eye — including one for the zeitgeist — when he was getting ready to unleash Sensation, with all its bad-boy (and girl) Young British Artists, on the august and strug-gling institution.

The show outraged critics, visi-tors and Royal Academicians alike, but it packed the punters in, and the gallery has understood the value of blockbusters and followed Rosenthal’s lead ever since.

But we are here to talk about life after the RA, which he left, gonged but unloved, in 2010 to pursue a future as a freelance curator. Speculation ensued about whether he had been pushed, but it was actually criticising the Academy for its lack of vision in a piece for The Spectator, which led to him getting offered the job in 1977.

He had held the same position of exhibitions secretary at the ICA — not bad for someone whose art career started with a holiday job in a Bond Street dealership.

“I actually wanted to sell records

INTERVIEW SIR NORMAN ROSENTHAL

CONTINUED ON P36

Iconoclast: Norman

Rosenthal ‘fell’ into art

— he actually wanted to sell

pop records

‘This is a man who feels free to let rip if he’s crossed

36 LIFE THEJC.COM THE JEWISH CHRONICLE 9 OCTOBER 2015

rise, called me at the isolated Span-ish villa where my family had been spending the summer.

Up popped Emma, a new friend and colleague who, within seconds of a desperate text from me, pulled in a favour (and spent a fortune) to fly me home on the busiest day of the tourist calendar, after I’d been told no seat was available. And Lisa, my schoolmate’s wife whose con-stant stream of hot food, candles, prayer books and advice helped my father, brother and I concentrate on other things. There was the rabbi I barely know who interrupted her holiday to be a therapist and the rabbi we’ve come to know who guided us through a bewildering maze of religiosity. Neighbours who I’d never met coming to offer sus-tenance, people I’d not seen in dec-

ades whose wisdom I know I’ll need as the weeks and months unfurl.

And Leonard, a jocular, grey-haired ball of energy and a volun-teer from our local synagogue who, I later learned, was roused from his bed on that fateful night by a doc-tor who saw that my father needed help. Devastated, confused and suddenly totally alone after 50-odd years of devoted companionship, it was Leonard who held Dad’s hand. Forms were filled in, state-ments given and all the depressing formalities adhered to before eve-ryone, my mother included, could be ‘‘released’’. But it was a total stranger whose generosity of spirit made it happen.

All these cogs and more in the Jewish ‘‘system’’ — replicas of which exist in all religions — suddenly

clicked seamlessly. The machine took over. A vacuum was filled instantly. People helped for no other reason than wanting to. They weren’t encouraged, or told to, or enticed to by the promise of congratulatory pats on the back, baubles and ermine.

They were not ‘‘big’’ gestures but small ones — often tiny, momen-tary ones. It was not the kind of behaviour that defines ‘‘society’’ but instead defines us as people, con-nects us intimately to one another.

Not under a vast, well-funded umbrella or in front of a grand canvas constructed by government agencies but simple, quiet, pro-found connections that may last a minute or a lifetime.

In fact the whole experiece was so un-Cameronesque as to make

at HMV on Oxford Street, but they had no jobs so I went around the corner to Agnews,” he explains, leading me around the corner him-self to his warren of a Dickensian walk-up duplex, every inch of wall covered with a range of visual treas-ures spanning at least six centuries. “Just don’t call me a collector,” he snaps. “I just find things I love and buy them, like I just fell into the world of art.”

Although his mother, who arrived as a refugee from Hungary one month before war broke out, played her part in stimulating his interest, he concedes: “Jews are

very good, even when there’s very little money around, in seeking out culture. My mother took me to the National Gallery, we went to Ken-wood, and by the age of nine I was taking myself to the theatre to see Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier.”

Born in 1944, Rosenthal got a state education at St Saviours pri-mary school in Warwick Avenue — “at the time when the area was still slummy” — and Westminster City School, while his father, who arrived in the UK during the war with the Free Cezch Army, ran a restaurant for Czech refugees, “and was a bit of a gambler”. But even before he had left university in Leicester, the young history

undergraduate was organising his first art exhibition, Artists in Cornwall, for the Leicester Museum and Art Gallery. No wonder Agnews snapped him up on the spot for a holiday job that lasted three years.

Knighted in 2007, Rosenthal is universally acknowledged with having put London at the centre of the art world during his RA years, championing artists originally reviled by the establishment, from Damien Hirst to Tracey Emin to Sarah Lucas, from whom he has just commissioned a new sculpture for the smart new Nine Elms develop-ment abutting the new US Embassy site.

It’s just one of the diverse consul-

tations into which he has thrown himself between assembling shows everywhere from Berlin to Istanbul, sorting out a Warhol exhibition this winter for the Ashmolean and flying to and from Madrid, where his wife of 25 years, Manuela Mena Marques, mother of their two Lon-don-based daughters, is a curator at the Prado.

But now he is getting ready to step out in London again, making his next major appearance in the capital at the Frieze London Art Fair in Regent’s Park this month with an audacious project.

He is curating eight little col-lections he believes would be worthy of space in the V&A, RA or

THERE’S BEEN a lot of talk at the Conservative Party Conference of whether David Cameron is any closer to realising his grand ambi-

tion for a ‘‘Big Society’’. This is the vague notion espoused by the Prime Minister (before he had the power to do anything about it) that we’re a nation that nurtures each other, that cares.

Well, the other week I came face to face with it — and it was not a pleasant experience. Neither was it big or much of a society, to be honest. But it was there, an invis-ible force of human nature that suddenly sprang into action, envel-oping me in a cloak of uncalled-for compassion.

My mother, Philippa, died of a heart attack. She never made it into the operating theatre at the Royal Free Hospital in North London having been rushed there by ambu-lance after complaining of stomach pains. She slipped away close to midnight, holding my father’s hand as a phalanx of doctors and nurses frantically tried to save her.

She was 80 and the kind of per-son who never made a fuss. I’m sure she’d hate me writing about her as part of some mawkish eulogy, so suffice it to say that she lived a good, long, honest and remarkably happy life. Don’t moan, she said, play with the hand you’re dealt with, be stoic to the last and try not to spoil it by being overly emotional.

So I won’t. Because although this piece is inspired by her, it isn’t really about her. It’s about us and our place in a so-called Big Society, presumably one that doesn’t need a harrowing image of a drowned child to wake us from our selfish slumber and do something worth-while. Except, as we have seen these past few weeks with the refugee cri-sis, it’s not quite that simple. Those values certainly exist, yet politicians are worryingly out of kilter with popular sentiment.

My, or our, experience (I include my 89-year-old father and younger brother in this) provides some evi-dence as to why that should be so. It began the moment my mother drew her last breath— though for me it started the morning after when Dad, having waited until sun-

PHOTO: AP

COMMENT

This is our Big SocietyScarred: David and Samantha Cameron see the Big Society through the prism of their own loss

I can’t abide shul but I’d never deny my heritage

TESTIMONY GRANT FELLER

‘Even when there’s no money, Jews are good at seeking culture

CONTINUED FROM P35

absurd his desire to claim owner-ship for a series of selfless actions simply by reimagining them in his own image. And it made me realise why government often fails to inspire, match or even emulate the unthinking decency we show to each other.

Politicians boast of their listen-ing skills and ability to react to the will of the people, but that’s rarely the case. More often than not, like reeds in the wind, we bend to their will. When it does happen — as has been the case following the images of three-year-old Syrian Aylan Kurdi lying face down in the sand on a Turkish beach — our elected offi-cials, as if reluctantly prised free of their protective bubble, suddenly appear disengaged from reality.

I have no doubt that Cameron, scarred by his own personal trau-ma, is well-meaning, but he and his advisers have tried to latch on to something that already works and burdened it with the kinds of rules, politics and economies that encour-age people to pursue vanity-fuelled ego trips. Precisely the opposite of what motivated Leonard, Emma, Lisa and the rest of my small society of temporary shoulders.

Perhaps there was never a halcyon era when a ‘‘big society’’ picked up the pieces in a mass wave of selfless do-gooding. It was always little, meaningful connections that warranted only minimal thanks. I suspect that the difference is that my parents and grandparents were guided by a political establishment that understood why morality is a more important indicator of one’s humanity than quotas, budgets and delegation — often to organisations that operate with little oversight.

If the laudable ethos of the Big Society reveals anything, it is that our institutions and their leaders, more than ever in history, lack the moral compassion to make it work. Yet we as individuals have buckets of it — one only need see the grass roots movement whose generosity of spirit and outrage at political foot-dragging has compelled our government to take action over tackling this century’s most signifi-cant humanitarian crisis.

It’s ironic that Mum always taught me not to make a fuss about things, to stiffen upper lips and keep schtum when things weren’t going your way. Yet sometimes the most human thing is to do the opposite. It’s why we know what’s right and politicians sometimes haven’t a clue.

LIFE 35THEJC.COMTHE JEWISH CHRONICLE 9 OCTOBER 2015

PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES

LIFE

Anthea Gerrie is granted a rare audience with art’s true “rock star” and ex-head of the Royal Academy

Don’t call me a collector

LIKE A rock star, Norman Rosenthal sweeps into his favourite Soho café (which does not open until half an hour after he com-mands me to be

there, leaving me standing on a chilly street), one and a quarter hours late for our interview. And, like a rock groupie, I wait patient-ly, unwilling to relinquish my

grasp on this big beast that I’ve been stalking for three months.

A dinosaur of a big beast in some ways; he blames his lateness on not understanding his iPhone, which has been on silent mode since last night and thus not relayed my increasingly anxious messages about whether I am being stood up.

I am not. But I suspect he regards me, an outsider rather than an inti-mate of the charmed inner circle of international art world luvvies in which he moves, as not quite wor-thy of an audience.

This is a man who, like many a rock star, feels free to let rip if he feels crossed — he famously spat at

an art critic who dared to criticise one of his shows within his earshot on press day, and while working at the RA dismissed as not the equal of their peers the majority of living Royal Academicians whose artistic prowess the institution exists to honour.

Not that Rosenthal, with his dead-fish eyes and deadpan man-ner, is an actual rock star, in spite of the arrogance, untamed coiffure, flamboyant suits and regal attitude for which he is famous. Yet he is showbiz all the same; this entrepre-neur’s great talent is his panache in bringing art to the people and mak-ing it pay for the sponsors.

My savioursOne writer’s

experience of what the Big Society

really means p36

My admirationBusiness guru Luke Johnson on why Jews make business work p37LIFE

My savioursOne writer’s

experience of what the Big Society

really means

The Royal Academy would likely be dead in the water without Rosenthal at its helm as exhibitions secretary for more than 30 years.

I first met this dynamo, who has no art or art history qualifications, just a great eye — including one for the zeitgeist — when he was getting ready to unleash Sensation, with all its bad-boy (and girl) Young British Artists, on the august and strug-gling institution.

The show outraged critics, visi-tors and Royal Academicians alike, but it packed the punters in, and the gallery has understood the value of blockbusters and followed Rosenthal’s lead ever since.

But we are here to talk about life after the RA, which he left, gonged but unloved, in 2010 to pursue a future as a freelance curator. Speculation ensued about whether he had been pushed, but it was actually criticising the Academy for its lack of vision in a piece for The Spectator, which led to him getting offered the job in 1977.

He had held the same position of exhibitions secretary at the ICA — not bad for someone whose art career started with a holiday job in a Bond Street dealership.

“I actually wanted to sell records

INTERVIEW SIR NORMAN ROSENTHAL

CONTINUED ON P36

Iconoclast: Norman

Rosenthal ‘fell’ into art

— he actually wanted to sell

pop records

‘This is a man who feels free to let rip if he’s crossed

36 LIFE THEJC.COM THE JEWISH CHRONICLE 9 OCTOBER 2015

rise, called me at the isolated Span-ish villa where my family had been spending the summer.

Up popped Emma, a new friend and colleague who, within seconds of a desperate text from me, pulled in a favour (and spent a fortune) to fly me home on the busiest day of the tourist calendar, after I’d been told no seat was available. And Lisa, my schoolmate’s wife whose con-stant stream of hot food, candles, prayer books and advice helped my father, brother and I concentrate on other things. There was the rabbi I barely know who interrupted her holiday to be a therapist and the rabbi we’ve come to know who guided us through a bewildering maze of religiosity. Neighbours who I’d never met coming to offer sus-tenance, people I’d not seen in dec-

ades whose wisdom I know I’ll need as the weeks and months unfurl.

And Leonard, a jocular, grey-haired ball of energy and a volun-teer from our local synagogue who, I later learned, was roused from his bed on that fateful night by a doc-tor who saw that my father needed help. Devastated, confused and suddenly totally alone after 50-odd years of devoted companionship, it was Leonard who held Dad’s hand. Forms were filled in, state-ments given and all the depressing formalities adhered to before eve-ryone, my mother included, could be ‘‘released’’. But it was a total stranger whose generosity of spirit made it happen.

All these cogs and more in the Jewish ‘‘system’’ — replicas of which exist in all religions — suddenly

clicked seamlessly. The machine took over. A vacuum was filled instantly. People helped for no other reason than wanting to. They weren’t encouraged, or told to, or enticed to by the promise of congratulatory pats on the back, baubles and ermine.

They were not ‘‘big’’ gestures but small ones — often tiny, momen-tary ones. It was not the kind of behaviour that defines ‘‘society’’ but instead defines us as people, con-nects us intimately to one another.

Not under a vast, well-funded umbrella or in front of a grand canvas constructed by government agencies but simple, quiet, pro-found connections that may last a minute or a lifetime.

In fact the whole experiece was so un-Cameronesque as to make

at HMV on Oxford Street, but they had no jobs so I went around the corner to Agnews,” he explains, leading me around the corner him-self to his warren of a Dickensian walk-up duplex, every inch of wall covered with a range of visual treas-ures spanning at least six centuries. “Just don’t call me a collector,” he snaps. “I just find things I love and buy them, like I just fell into the world of art.”

Although his mother, who arrived as a refugee from Hungary one month before war broke out, played her part in stimulating his interest, he concedes: “Jews are

very good, even when there’s very little money around, in seeking out culture. My mother took me to the National Gallery, we went to Ken-wood, and by the age of nine I was taking myself to the theatre to see Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier.”

Born in 1944, Rosenthal got a state education at St Saviours pri-mary school in Warwick Avenue — “at the time when the area was still slummy” — and Westminster City School, while his father, who arrived in the UK during the war with the Free Cezch Army, ran a restaurant for Czech refugees, “and was a bit of a gambler”. But even before he had left university in Leicester, the young history

undergraduate was organising his first art exhibition, Artists in Cornwall, for the Leicester Museum and Art Gallery. No wonder Agnews snapped him up on the spot for a holiday job that lasted three years.

Knighted in 2007, Rosenthal is universally acknowledged with having put London at the centre of the art world during his RA years, championing artists originally reviled by the establishment, from Damien Hirst to Tracey Emin to Sarah Lucas, from whom he has just commissioned a new sculpture for the smart new Nine Elms develop-ment abutting the new US Embassy site.

It’s just one of the diverse consul-

tations into which he has thrown himself between assembling shows everywhere from Berlin to Istanbul, sorting out a Warhol exhibition this winter for the Ashmolean and flying to and from Madrid, where his wife of 25 years, Manuela Mena Marques, mother of their two Lon-don-based daughters, is a curator at the Prado.

But now he is getting ready to step out in London again, making his next major appearance in the capital at the Frieze London Art Fair in Regent’s Park this month with an audacious project.

He is curating eight little col-lections he believes would be worthy of space in the V&A, RA or

THERE’S BEEN a lot of talk at the Conservative Party Conference of whether David Cameron is any closer to realising his grand ambi-

tion for a ‘‘Big Society’’. This is the vague notion espoused by the Prime Minister (before he had the power to do anything about it) that we’re a nation that nurtures each other, that cares.

Well, the other week I came face to face with it — and it was not a pleasant experience. Neither was it big or much of a society, to be honest. But it was there, an invis-ible force of human nature that suddenly sprang into action, envel-oping me in a cloak of uncalled-for compassion.

My mother, Philippa, died of a heart attack. She never made it into the operating theatre at the Royal Free Hospital in North London having been rushed there by ambu-lance after complaining of stomach pains. She slipped away close to midnight, holding my father’s hand as a phalanx of doctors and nurses frantically tried to save her.

She was 80 and the kind of per-son who never made a fuss. I’m sure she’d hate me writing about her as part of some mawkish eulogy, so suffice it to say that she lived a good, long, honest and remarkably happy life. Don’t moan, she said, play with the hand you’re dealt with, be stoic to the last and try not to spoil it by being overly emotional.

So I won’t. Because although this piece is inspired by her, it isn’t really about her. It’s about us and our place in a so-called Big Society, presumably one that doesn’t need a harrowing image of a drowned child to wake us from our selfish slumber and do something worth-while. Except, as we have seen these past few weeks with the refugee cri-sis, it’s not quite that simple. Those values certainly exist, yet politicians are worryingly out of kilter with popular sentiment.

My, or our, experience (I include my 89-year-old father and younger brother in this) provides some evi-dence as to why that should be so. It began the moment my mother drew her last breath— though for me it started the morning after when Dad, having waited until sun-

PHOTO: AP

COMMENT

This is our Big SocietyScarred: David and Samantha Cameron see the Big Society through the prism of their own loss

I can’t abide shul but I’d never deny my heritage

TESTIMONY GRANT FELLER

‘Even when there’s no money, Jews are good at seeking culture

CONTINUED FROM P35

absurd his desire to claim owner-ship for a series of selfless actions simply by reimagining them in his own image. And it made me realise why government often fails to inspire, match or even emulate the unthinking decency we show to each other.

Politicians boast of their listen-ing skills and ability to react to the will of the people, but that’s rarely the case. More often than not, like reeds in the wind, we bend to their will. When it does happen — as has been the case following the images of three-year-old Syrian Aylan Kurdi lying face down in the sand on a Turkish beach — our elected offi-cials, as if reluctantly prised free of their protective bubble, suddenly appear disengaged from reality.

I have no doubt that Cameron, scarred by his own personal trau-ma, is well-meaning, but he and his advisers have tried to latch on to something that already works and burdened it with the kinds of rules, politics and economies that encour-age people to pursue vanity-fuelled ego trips. Precisely the opposite of what motivated Leonard, Emma, Lisa and the rest of my small society of temporary shoulders.

Perhaps there was never a halcyon era when a ‘‘big society’’ picked up the pieces in a mass wave of selfless do-gooding. It was always little, meaningful connections that warranted only minimal thanks. I suspect that the difference is that my parents and grandparents were guided by a political establishment that understood why morality is a more important indicator of one’s humanity than quotas, budgets and delegation — often to organisations that operate with little oversight.

If the laudable ethos of the Big Society reveals anything, it is that our institutions and their leaders, more than ever in history, lack the moral compassion to make it work. Yet we as individuals have buckets of it — one only need see the grass roots movement whose generosity of spirit and outrage at political foot-dragging has compelled our government to take action over tackling this century’s most signifi-cant humanitarian crisis.

It’s ironic that Mum always taught me not to make a fuss about things, to stiffen upper lips and keep schtum when things weren’t going your way. Yet sometimes the most human thing is to do the opposite. It’s why we know what’s right and politicians sometimes haven’t a clue.

!

LIFE 35THEJC.COMTHE JEWISH CHRONICLE 9 OCTOBER 2015

PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES

LIFE

Anthea Gerrie is granted a rare audience with art’s true “rock star” and ex-head of the Royal Academy

Don’t call me a collector

LIKE A rock star, Norman Rosenthal sweeps into his favourite Soho café (which does not open until half an hour after he com-mands me to be

there, leaving me standing on a chilly street), one and a quarter hours late for our interview. And, like a rock groupie, I wait patient-ly, unwilling to relinquish my

grasp on this big beast that I’ve been stalking for three months.

A dinosaur of a big beast in some ways; he blames his lateness on not understanding his iPhone, which has been on silent mode since last night and thus not relayed my increasingly anxious messages about whether I am being stood up.

I am not. But I suspect he regards me, an outsider rather than an inti-mate of the charmed inner circle of international art world luvvies in which he moves, as not quite wor-thy of an audience.

This is a man who, like many a rock star, feels free to let rip if he feels crossed — he famously spat at

an art critic who dared to criticise one of his shows within his earshot on press day, and while working at the RA dismissed as not the equal of their peers the majority of living Royal Academicians whose artistic prowess the institution exists to honour.

Not that Rosenthal, with his dead-fish eyes and deadpan man-ner, is an actual rock star, in spite of the arrogance, untamed coiffure, flamboyant suits and regal attitude for which he is famous. Yet he is showbiz all the same; this entrepre-neur’s great talent is his panache in bringing art to the people and mak-ing it pay for the sponsors.

My savioursOne writer’s

experience of what the Big Society

really means p36

My admirationBusiness guru Luke Johnson on why Jews make business work p37LIFE

My savioursOne writer’s

experience of what the Big Society

really means

The Royal Academy would likely be dead in the water without Rosenthal at its helm as exhibitions secretary for more than 30 years.

I first met this dynamo, who has no art or art history qualifications, just a great eye — including one for the zeitgeist — when he was getting ready to unleash Sensation, with all its bad-boy (and girl) Young British Artists, on the august and strug-gling institution.

The show outraged critics, visi-tors and Royal Academicians alike, but it packed the punters in, and the gallery has understood the value of blockbusters and followed Rosenthal’s lead ever since.

But we are here to talk about life after the RA, which he left, gonged but unloved, in 2010 to pursue a future as a freelance curator. Speculation ensued about whether he had been pushed, but it was actually criticising the Academy for its lack of vision in a piece for The Spectator, which led to him getting offered the job in 1977.

He had held the same position of exhibitions secretary at the ICA — not bad for someone whose art career started with a holiday job in a Bond Street dealership.

“I actually wanted to sell records

INTERVIEW SIR NORMAN ROSENTHAL

CONTINUED ON P36

Iconoclast: Norman

Rosenthal ‘fell’ into art

— he actually wanted to sell

pop records

‘This is a man who feels free to let rip if he’s crossed

36 LIFE THEJC.COM THE JEWISH CHRONICLE 9 OCTOBER 2015

rise, called me at the isolated Span-ish villa where my family had been spending the summer.

Up popped Emma, a new friend and colleague who, within seconds of a desperate text from me, pulled in a favour (and spent a fortune) to fly me home on the busiest day of the tourist calendar, after I’d been told no seat was available. And Lisa, my schoolmate’s wife whose con-stant stream of hot food, candles, prayer books and advice helped my father, brother and I concentrate on other things. There was the rabbi I barely know who interrupted her holiday to be a therapist and the rabbi we’ve come to know who guided us through a bewildering maze of religiosity. Neighbours who I’d never met coming to offer sus-tenance, people I’d not seen in dec-

ades whose wisdom I know I’ll need as the weeks and months unfurl.

And Leonard, a jocular, grey-haired ball of energy and a volun-teer from our local synagogue who, I later learned, was roused from his bed on that fateful night by a doc-tor who saw that my father needed help. Devastated, confused and suddenly totally alone after 50-odd years of devoted companionship, it was Leonard who held Dad’s hand. Forms were filled in, state-ments given and all the depressing formalities adhered to before eve-ryone, my mother included, could be ‘‘released’’. But it was a total stranger whose generosity of spirit made it happen.

All these cogs and more in the Jewish ‘‘system’’ — replicas of which exist in all religions — suddenly

clicked seamlessly. The machine took over. A vacuum was filled instantly. People helped for no other reason than wanting to. They weren’t encouraged, or told to, or enticed to by the promise of congratulatory pats on the back, baubles and ermine.

They were not ‘‘big’’ gestures but small ones — often tiny, momen-tary ones. It was not the kind of behaviour that defines ‘‘society’’ but instead defines us as people, con-nects us intimately to one another.

Not under a vast, well-funded umbrella or in front of a grand canvas constructed by government agencies but simple, quiet, pro-found connections that may last a minute or a lifetime.

In fact the whole experiece was so un-Cameronesque as to make

at HMV on Oxford Street, but they had no jobs so I went around the corner to Agnews,” he explains, leading me around the corner him-self to his warren of a Dickensian walk-up duplex, every inch of wall covered with a range of visual treas-ures spanning at least six centuries. “Just don’t call me a collector,” he snaps. “I just find things I love and buy them, like I just fell into the world of art.”

Although his mother, who arrived as a refugee from Hungary one month before war broke out, played her part in stimulating his interest, he concedes: “Jews are

very good, even when there’s very little money around, in seeking out culture. My mother took me to the National Gallery, we went to Ken-wood, and by the age of nine I was taking myself to the theatre to see Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier.”

Born in 1944, Rosenthal got a state education at St Saviours pri-mary school in Warwick Avenue — “at the time when the area was still slummy” — and Westminster City School, while his father, who arrived in the UK during the war with the Free Cezch Army, ran a restaurant for Czech refugees, “and was a bit of a gambler”. But even before he had left university in Leicester, the young history

undergraduate was organising his first art exhibition, Artists in Cornwall, for the Leicester Museum and Art Gallery. No wonder Agnews snapped him up on the spot for a holiday job that lasted three years.

Knighted in 2007, Rosenthal is universally acknowledged with having put London at the centre of the art world during his RA years, championing artists originally reviled by the establishment, from Damien Hirst to Tracey Emin to Sarah Lucas, from whom he has just commissioned a new sculpture for the smart new Nine Elms develop-ment abutting the new US Embassy site.

It’s just one of the diverse consul-

tations into which he has thrown himself between assembling shows everywhere from Berlin to Istanbul, sorting out a Warhol exhibition this winter for the Ashmolean and flying to and from Madrid, where his wife of 25 years, Manuela Mena Marques, mother of their two Lon-don-based daughters, is a curator at the Prado.

But now he is getting ready to step out in London again, making his next major appearance in the capital at the Frieze London Art Fair in Regent’s Park this month with an audacious project.

He is curating eight little col-lections he believes would be worthy of space in the V&A, RA or

THERE’S BEEN a lot of talk at the Conservative Party Conference of whether David Cameron is any closer to realising his grand ambi-

tion for a ‘‘Big Society’’. This is the vague notion espoused by the Prime Minister (before he had the power to do anything about it) that we’re a nation that nurtures each other, that cares.

Well, the other week I came face to face with it — and it was not a pleasant experience. Neither was it big or much of a society, to be honest. But it was there, an invis-ible force of human nature that suddenly sprang into action, envel-oping me in a cloak of uncalled-for compassion.

My mother, Philippa, died of a heart attack. She never made it into the operating theatre at the Royal Free Hospital in North London having been rushed there by ambu-lance after complaining of stomach pains. She slipped away close to midnight, holding my father’s hand as a phalanx of doctors and nurses frantically tried to save her.

She was 80 and the kind of per-son who never made a fuss. I’m sure she’d hate me writing about her as part of some mawkish eulogy, so suffice it to say that she lived a good, long, honest and remarkably happy life. Don’t moan, she said, play with the hand you’re dealt with, be stoic to the last and try not to spoil it by being overly emotional.

So I won’t. Because although this piece is inspired by her, it isn’t really about her. It’s about us and our place in a so-called Big Society, presumably one that doesn’t need a harrowing image of a drowned child to wake us from our selfish slumber and do something worth-while. Except, as we have seen these past few weeks with the refugee cri-sis, it’s not quite that simple. Those values certainly exist, yet politicians are worryingly out of kilter with popular sentiment.

My, or our, experience (I include my 89-year-old father and younger brother in this) provides some evi-dence as to why that should be so. It began the moment my mother drew her last breath— though for me it started the morning after when Dad, having waited until sun-

PHOTO: AP

COMMENT

This is our Big SocietyScarred: David and Samantha Cameron see the Big Society through the prism of their own loss

I can’t abide shul but I’d never deny my heritage

TESTIMONY GRANT FELLER

‘Even when there’s no money, Jews are good at seeking culture

CONTINUED FROM P35

absurd his desire to claim owner-ship for a series of selfless actions simply by reimagining them in his own image. And it made me realise why government often fails to inspire, match or even emulate the unthinking decency we show to each other.

Politicians boast of their listen-ing skills and ability to react to the will of the people, but that’s rarely the case. More often than not, like reeds in the wind, we bend to their will. When it does happen — as has been the case following the images of three-year-old Syrian Aylan Kurdi lying face down in the sand on a Turkish beach — our elected offi-cials, as if reluctantly prised free of their protective bubble, suddenly appear disengaged from reality.

I have no doubt that Cameron, scarred by his own personal trau-ma, is well-meaning, but he and his advisers have tried to latch on to something that already works and burdened it with the kinds of rules, politics and economies that encour-age people to pursue vanity-fuelled ego trips. Precisely the opposite of what motivated Leonard, Emma, Lisa and the rest of my small society of temporary shoulders.

Perhaps there was never a halcyon era when a ‘‘big society’’ picked up the pieces in a mass wave of selfless do-gooding. It was always little, meaningful connections that warranted only minimal thanks. I suspect that the difference is that my parents and grandparents were guided by a political establishment that understood why morality is a more important indicator of one’s humanity than quotas, budgets and delegation — often to organisations that operate with little oversight.

If the laudable ethos of the Big Society reveals anything, it is that our institutions and their leaders, more than ever in history, lack the moral compassion to make it work. Yet we as individuals have buckets of it — one only need see the grass roots movement whose generosity of spirit and outrage at political foot-dragging has compelled our government to take action over tackling this century’s most signifi-cant humanitarian crisis.

It’s ironic that Mum always taught me not to make a fuss about things, to stiffen upper lips and keep schtum when things weren’t going your way. Yet sometimes the most human thing is to do the opposite. It’s why we know what’s right and politicians sometimes haven’t a clue.

LIFE 35THEJC.COMTHE JEWISH CHRONICLE 9 OCTOBER 2015

PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES

LIFE

Anthea Gerrie is granted a rare audience with art’s true “rock star” and ex-head of the Royal Academy

Don’t call me a collector

LIKE A rock star, Norman Rosenthal sweeps into his favourite Soho café (which does not open until half an hour after he com-mands me to be

there, leaving me standing on a chilly street), one and a quarter hours late for our interview. And, like a rock groupie, I wait patient-ly, unwilling to relinquish my

grasp on this big beast that I’ve been stalking for three months.

A dinosaur of a big beast in some ways; he blames his lateness on not understanding his iPhone, which has been on silent mode since last night and thus not relayed my increasingly anxious messages about whether I am being stood up.

I am not. But I suspect he regards me, an outsider rather than an inti-mate of the charmed inner circle of international art world luvvies in which he moves, as not quite wor-thy of an audience.

This is a man who, like many a rock star, feels free to let rip if he feels crossed — he famously spat at

an art critic who dared to criticise one of his shows within his earshot on press day, and while working at the RA dismissed as not the equal of their peers the majority of living Royal Academicians whose artistic prowess the institution exists to honour.

Not that Rosenthal, with his dead-fish eyes and deadpan man-ner, is an actual rock star, in spite of the arrogance, untamed coiffure, flamboyant suits and regal attitude for which he is famous. Yet he is showbiz all the same; this entrepre-neur’s great talent is his panache in bringing art to the people and mak-ing it pay for the sponsors.

My savioursOne writer’s

experience of what the Big Society

really means p36

My admirationBusiness guru Luke Johnson on why Jews make business work p37LIFE

My savioursOne writer’s

experience of what the Big Society

really means

The Royal Academy would likely be dead in the water without Rosenthal at its helm as exhibitions secretary for more than 30 years.

I first met this dynamo, who has no art or art history qualifications, just a great eye — including one for the zeitgeist — when he was getting ready to unleash Sensation, with all its bad-boy (and girl) Young British Artists, on the august and strug-gling institution.

The show outraged critics, visi-tors and Royal Academicians alike, but it packed the punters in, and the gallery has understood the value of blockbusters and followed Rosenthal’s lead ever since.

But we are here to talk about life after the RA, which he left, gonged but unloved, in 2010 to pursue a future as a freelance curator. Speculation ensued about whether he had been pushed, but it was actually criticising the Academy for its lack of vision in a piece for The Spectator, which led to him getting offered the job in 1977.

He had held the same position of exhibitions secretary at the ICA — not bad for someone whose art career started with a holiday job in a Bond Street dealership.

“I actually wanted to sell records

INTERVIEW SIR NORMAN ROSENTHAL

CONTINUED ON P36

Iconoclast: Norman

Rosenthal ‘fell’ into art

— he actually wanted to sell

pop records

‘This is a man who feels free to let rip if he’s crossed

36 LIFE THEJC.COM THE JEWISH CHRONICLE 9 OCTOBER 2015

rise, called me at the isolated Span-ish villa where my family had been spending the summer.

Up popped Emma, a new friend and colleague who, within seconds of a desperate text from me, pulled in a favour (and spent a fortune) to fly me home on the busiest day of the tourist calendar, after I’d been told no seat was available. And Lisa, my schoolmate’s wife whose con-stant stream of hot food, candles, prayer books and advice helped my father, brother and I concentrate on other things. There was the rabbi I barely know who interrupted her holiday to be a therapist and the rabbi we’ve come to know who guided us through a bewildering maze of religiosity. Neighbours who I’d never met coming to offer sus-tenance, people I’d not seen in dec-

ades whose wisdom I know I’ll need as the weeks and months unfurl.

And Leonard, a jocular, grey-haired ball of energy and a volun-teer from our local synagogue who, I later learned, was roused from his bed on that fateful night by a doc-tor who saw that my father needed help. Devastated, confused and suddenly totally alone after 50-odd years of devoted companionship, it was Leonard who held Dad’s hand. Forms were filled in, state-ments given and all the depressing formalities adhered to before eve-ryone, my mother included, could be ‘‘released’’. But it was a total stranger whose generosity of spirit made it happen.

All these cogs and more in the Jewish ‘‘system’’ — replicas of which exist in all religions — suddenly

clicked seamlessly. The machine took over. A vacuum was filled instantly. People helped for no other reason than wanting to. They weren’t encouraged, or told to, or enticed to by the promise of congratulatory pats on the back, baubles and ermine.

They were not ‘‘big’’ gestures but small ones — often tiny, momen-tary ones. It was not the kind of behaviour that defines ‘‘society’’ but instead defines us as people, con-nects us intimately to one another.

Not under a vast, well-funded umbrella or in front of a grand canvas constructed by government agencies but simple, quiet, pro-found connections that may last a minute or a lifetime.

In fact the whole experiece was so un-Cameronesque as to make

at HMV on Oxford Street, but they had no jobs so I went around the corner to Agnews,” he explains, leading me around the corner him-self to his warren of a Dickensian walk-up duplex, every inch of wall covered with a range of visual treas-ures spanning at least six centuries. “Just don’t call me a collector,” he snaps. “I just find things I love and buy them, like I just fell into the world of art.”

Although his mother, who arrived as a refugee from Hungary one month before war broke out, played her part in stimulating his interest, he concedes: “Jews are

very good, even when there’s very little money around, in seeking out culture. My mother took me to the National Gallery, we went to Ken-wood, and by the age of nine I was taking myself to the theatre to see Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier.”

Born in 1944, Rosenthal got a state education at St Saviours pri-mary school in Warwick Avenue — “at the time when the area was still slummy” — and Westminster City School, while his father, who arrived in the UK during the war with the Free Cezch Army, ran a restaurant for Czech refugees, “and was a bit of a gambler”. But even before he had left university in Leicester, the young history

undergraduate was organising his first art exhibition, Artists in Cornwall, for the Leicester Museum and Art Gallery. No wonder Agnews snapped him up on the spot for a holiday job that lasted three years.

Knighted in 2007, Rosenthal is universally acknowledged with having put London at the centre of the art world during his RA years, championing artists originally reviled by the establishment, from Damien Hirst to Tracey Emin to Sarah Lucas, from whom he has just commissioned a new sculpture for the smart new Nine Elms develop-ment abutting the new US Embassy site.

It’s just one of the diverse consul-

tations into which he has thrown himself between assembling shows everywhere from Berlin to Istanbul, sorting out a Warhol exhibition this winter for the Ashmolean and flying to and from Madrid, where his wife of 25 years, Manuela Mena Marques, mother of their two Lon-don-based daughters, is a curator at the Prado.

But now he is getting ready to step out in London again, making his next major appearance in the capital at the Frieze London Art Fair in Regent’s Park this month with an audacious project.

He is curating eight little col-lections he believes would be worthy of space in the V&A, RA or

THERE’S BEEN a lot of talk at the Conservative Party Conference of whether David Cameron is any closer to realising his grand ambi-

tion for a ‘‘Big Society’’. This is the vague notion espoused by the Prime Minister (before he had the power to do anything about it) that we’re a nation that nurtures each other, that cares.

Well, the other week I came face to face with it — and it was not a pleasant experience. Neither was it big or much of a society, to be honest. But it was there, an invis-ible force of human nature that suddenly sprang into action, envel-oping me in a cloak of uncalled-for compassion.

My mother, Philippa, died of a heart attack. She never made it into the operating theatre at the Royal Free Hospital in North London having been rushed there by ambu-lance after complaining of stomach pains. She slipped away close to midnight, holding my father’s hand as a phalanx of doctors and nurses frantically tried to save her.

She was 80 and the kind of per-son who never made a fuss. I’m sure she’d hate me writing about her as part of some mawkish eulogy, so suffice it to say that she lived a good, long, honest and remarkably happy life. Don’t moan, she said, play with the hand you’re dealt with, be stoic to the last and try not to spoil it by being overly emotional.

So I won’t. Because although this piece is inspired by her, it isn’t really about her. It’s about us and our place in a so-called Big Society, presumably one that doesn’t need a harrowing image of a drowned child to wake us from our selfish slumber and do something worth-while. Except, as we have seen these past few weeks with the refugee cri-sis, it’s not quite that simple. Those values certainly exist, yet politicians are worryingly out of kilter with popular sentiment.

My, or our, experience (I include my 89-year-old father and younger brother in this) provides some evi-dence as to why that should be so. It began the moment my mother drew her last breath— though for me it started the morning after when Dad, having waited until sun-

PHOTO: AP

COMMENT

This is our Big SocietyScarred: David and Samantha Cameron see the Big Society through the prism of their own loss

I can’t abide shul but I’d never deny my heritage

TESTIMONY GRANT FELLER

‘Even when there’s no money, Jews are good at seeking culture

CONTINUED FROM P35

absurd his desire to claim owner-ship for a series of selfless actions simply by reimagining them in his own image. And it made me realise why government often fails to inspire, match or even emulate the unthinking decency we show to each other.

Politicians boast of their listen-ing skills and ability to react to the will of the people, but that’s rarely the case. More often than not, like reeds in the wind, we bend to their will. When it does happen — as has been the case following the images of three-year-old Syrian Aylan Kurdi lying face down in the sand on a Turkish beach — our elected offi-cials, as if reluctantly prised free of their protective bubble, suddenly appear disengaged from reality.

I have no doubt that Cameron, scarred by his own personal trau-ma, is well-meaning, but he and his advisers have tried to latch on to something that already works and burdened it with the kinds of rules, politics and economies that encour-age people to pursue vanity-fuelled ego trips. Precisely the opposite of what motivated Leonard, Emma, Lisa and the rest of my small society of temporary shoulders.

Perhaps there was never a halcyon era when a ‘‘big society’’ picked up the pieces in a mass wave of selfless do-gooding. It was always little, meaningful connections that warranted only minimal thanks. I suspect that the difference is that my parents and grandparents were guided by a political establishment that understood why morality is a more important indicator of one’s humanity than quotas, budgets and delegation — often to organisations that operate with little oversight.

If the laudable ethos of the Big Society reveals anything, it is that our institutions and their leaders, more than ever in history, lack the moral compassion to make it work. Yet we as individuals have buckets of it — one only need see the grass roots movement whose generosity of spirit and outrage at political foot-dragging has compelled our government to take action over tackling this century’s most signifi-cant humanitarian crisis.

It’s ironic that Mum always taught me not to make a fuss about things, to stiffen upper lips and keep schtum when things weren’t going your way. Yet sometimes the most human thing is to do the opposite. It’s why we know what’s right and politicians sometimes haven’t a clue.

LIFE 35THEJC.COMTHE JEWISH CHRONICLE 9 OCTOBER 2015

PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES

LIFE

Anthea Gerrie is granted a rare audience with art’s true “rock star” and ex-head of the Royal Academy

Don’t call me a collector

LIKE A rock star, Norman Rosenthal sweeps into his favourite Soho café (which does not open until half an hour after he com-mands me to be

there, leaving me standing on a chilly street), one and a quarter hours late for our interview. And, like a rock groupie, I wait patient-ly, unwilling to relinquish my

grasp on this big beast that I’ve been stalking for three months.

A dinosaur of a big beast in some ways; he blames his lateness on not understanding his iPhone, which has been on silent mode since last night and thus not relayed my increasingly anxious messages about whether I am being stood up.

I am not. But I suspect he regards me, an outsider rather than an inti-mate of the charmed inner circle of international art world luvvies in which he moves, as not quite wor-thy of an audience.

This is a man who, like many a rock star, feels free to let rip if he feels crossed — he famously spat at

an art critic who dared to criticise one of his shows within his earshot on press day, and while working at the RA dismissed as not the equal of their peers the majority of living Royal Academicians whose artistic prowess the institution exists to honour.

Not that Rosenthal, with his dead-fish eyes and deadpan man-ner, is an actual rock star, in spite of the arrogance, untamed coiffure, flamboyant suits and regal attitude for which he is famous. Yet he is showbiz all the same; this entrepre-neur’s great talent is his panache in bringing art to the people and mak-ing it pay for the sponsors.

My savioursOne writer’s

experience of what the Big Society

really means p36

My admirationBusiness guru Luke Johnson on why Jews make business work p37LIFE

My savioursOne writer’s

experience of what the Big Society

really means

The Royal Academy would likely be dead in the water without Rosenthal at its helm as exhibitions secretary for more than 30 years.

I first met this dynamo, who has no art or art history qualifications, just a great eye — including one for the zeitgeist — when he was getting ready to unleash Sensation, with all its bad-boy (and girl) Young British Artists, on the august and strug-gling institution.

The show outraged critics, visi-tors and Royal Academicians alike, but it packed the punters in, and the gallery has understood the value of blockbusters and followed Rosenthal’s lead ever since.

But we are here to talk about life after the RA, which he left, gonged but unloved, in 2010 to pursue a future as a freelance curator. Speculation ensued about whether he had been pushed, but it was actually criticising the Academy for its lack of vision in a piece for The Spectator, which led to him getting offered the job in 1977.

He had held the same position of exhibitions secretary at the ICA — not bad for someone whose art career started with a holiday job in a Bond Street dealership.

“I actually wanted to sell records

INTERVIEW SIR NORMAN ROSENTHAL

CONTINUED ON P36

Iconoclast: Norman

Rosenthal ‘fell’ into art

— he actually wanted to sell

pop records

‘This is a man who feels free to let rip if he’s crossed

36 LIFE THEJC.COM THE JEWISH CHRONICLE 9 OCTOBER 2015

rise, called me at the isolated Span-ish villa where my family had been spending the summer.

Up popped Emma, a new friend and colleague who, within seconds of a desperate text from me, pulled in a favour (and spent a fortune) to fly me home on the busiest day of the tourist calendar, after I’d been told no seat was available. And Lisa, my schoolmate’s wife whose con-stant stream of hot food, candles, prayer books and advice helped my father, brother and I concentrate on other things. There was the rabbi I barely know who interrupted her holiday to be a therapist and the rabbi we’ve come to know who guided us through a bewildering maze of religiosity. Neighbours who I’d never met coming to offer sus-tenance, people I’d not seen in dec-

ades whose wisdom I know I’ll need as the weeks and months unfurl.

And Leonard, a jocular, grey-haired ball of energy and a volun-teer from our local synagogue who, I later learned, was roused from his bed on that fateful night by a doc-tor who saw that my father needed help. Devastated, confused and suddenly totally alone after 50-odd years of devoted companionship, it was Leonard who held Dad’s hand. Forms were filled in, state-ments given and all the depressing formalities adhered to before eve-ryone, my mother included, could be ‘‘released’’. But it was a total stranger whose generosity of spirit made it happen.

All these cogs and more in the Jewish ‘‘system’’ — replicas of which exist in all religions — suddenly

clicked seamlessly. The machine took over. A vacuum was filled instantly. People helped for no other reason than wanting to. They weren’t encouraged, or told to, or enticed to by the promise of congratulatory pats on the back, baubles and ermine.

They were not ‘‘big’’ gestures but small ones — often tiny, momen-tary ones. It was not the kind of behaviour that defines ‘‘society’’ but instead defines us as people, con-nects us intimately to one another.

Not under a vast, well-funded umbrella or in front of a grand canvas constructed by government agencies but simple, quiet, pro-found connections that may last a minute or a lifetime.

In fact the whole experiece was so un-Cameronesque as to make

at HMV on Oxford Street, but they had no jobs so I went around the corner to Agnews,” he explains, leading me around the corner him-self to his warren of a Dickensian walk-up duplex, every inch of wall covered with a range of visual treas-ures spanning at least six centuries. “Just don’t call me a collector,” he snaps. “I just find things I love and buy them, like I just fell into the world of art.”

Although his mother, who arrived as a refugee from Hungary one month before war broke out, played her part in stimulating his interest, he concedes: “Jews are

very good, even when there’s very little money around, in seeking out culture. My mother took me to the National Gallery, we went to Ken-wood, and by the age of nine I was taking myself to the theatre to see Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier.”

Born in 1944, Rosenthal got a state education at St Saviours pri-mary school in Warwick Avenue — “at the time when the area was still slummy” — and Westminster City School, while his father, who arrived in the UK during the war with the Free Cezch Army, ran a restaurant for Czech refugees, “and was a bit of a gambler”. But even before he had left university in Leicester, the young history

undergraduate was organising his first art exhibition, Artists in Cornwall, for the Leicester Museum and Art Gallery. No wonder Agnews snapped him up on the spot for a holiday job that lasted three years.

Knighted in 2007, Rosenthal is universally acknowledged with having put London at the centre of the art world during his RA years, championing artists originally reviled by the establishment, from Damien Hirst to Tracey Emin to Sarah Lucas, from whom he has just commissioned a new sculpture for the smart new Nine Elms develop-ment abutting the new US Embassy site.

It’s just one of the diverse consul-

tations into which he has thrown himself between assembling shows everywhere from Berlin to Istanbul, sorting out a Warhol exhibition this winter for the Ashmolean and flying to and from Madrid, where his wife of 25 years, Manuela Mena Marques, mother of their two Lon-don-based daughters, is a curator at the Prado.

But now he is getting ready to step out in London again, making his next major appearance in the capital at the Frieze London Art Fair in Regent’s Park this month with an audacious project.

He is curating eight little col-lections he believes would be worthy of space in the V&A, RA or

THERE’S BEEN a lot of talk at the Conservative Party Conference of whether David Cameron is any closer to realising his grand ambi-

tion for a ‘‘Big Society’’. This is the vague notion espoused by the Prime Minister (before he had the power to do anything about it) that we’re a nation that nurtures each other, that cares.

Well, the other week I came face to face with it — and it was not a pleasant experience. Neither was it big or much of a society, to be honest. But it was there, an invis-ible force of human nature that suddenly sprang into action, envel-oping me in a cloak of uncalled-for compassion.

My mother, Philippa, died of a heart attack. She never made it into the operating theatre at the Royal Free Hospital in North London having been rushed there by ambu-lance after complaining of stomach pains. She slipped away close to midnight, holding my father’s hand as a phalanx of doctors and nurses frantically tried to save her.

She was 80 and the kind of per-son who never made a fuss. I’m sure she’d hate me writing about her as part of some mawkish eulogy, so suffice it to say that she lived a good, long, honest and remarkably happy life. Don’t moan, she said, play with the hand you’re dealt with, be stoic to the last and try not to spoil it by being overly emotional.

So I won’t. Because although this piece is inspired by her, it isn’t really about her. It’s about us and our place in a so-called Big Society, presumably one that doesn’t need a harrowing image of a drowned child to wake us from our selfish slumber and do something worth-while. Except, as we have seen these past few weeks with the refugee cri-sis, it’s not quite that simple. Those values certainly exist, yet politicians are worryingly out of kilter with popular sentiment.

My, or our, experience (I include my 89-year-old father and younger brother in this) provides some evi-dence as to why that should be so. It began the moment my mother drew her last breath— though for me it started the morning after when Dad, having waited until sun-

PHOTO: AP

COMMENT

This is our Big SocietyScarred: David and Samantha Cameron see the Big Society through the prism of their own loss

I can’t abide shul but I’d never deny my heritage

TESTIMONY GRANT FELLER

‘Even when there’s no money, Jews are good at seeking culture

CONTINUED FROM P35

absurd his desire to claim owner-ship for a series of selfless actions simply by reimagining them in his own image. And it made me realise why government often fails to inspire, match or even emulate the unthinking decency we show to each other.

Politicians boast of their listen-ing skills and ability to react to the will of the people, but that’s rarely the case. More often than not, like reeds in the wind, we bend to their will. When it does happen — as has been the case following the images of three-year-old Syrian Aylan Kurdi lying face down in the sand on a Turkish beach — our elected offi-cials, as if reluctantly prised free of their protective bubble, suddenly appear disengaged from reality.

I have no doubt that Cameron, scarred by his own personal trau-ma, is well-meaning, but he and his advisers have tried to latch on to something that already works and burdened it with the kinds of rules, politics and economies that encour-age people to pursue vanity-fuelled ego trips. Precisely the opposite of what motivated Leonard, Emma, Lisa and the rest of my small society of temporary shoulders.

Perhaps there was never a halcyon era when a ‘‘big society’’ picked up the pieces in a mass wave of selfless do-gooding. It was always little, meaningful connections that warranted only minimal thanks. I suspect that the difference is that my parents and grandparents were guided by a political establishment that understood why morality is a more important indicator of one’s humanity than quotas, budgets and delegation — often to organisations that operate with little oversight.

If the laudable ethos of the Big Society reveals anything, it is that our institutions and their leaders, more than ever in history, lack the moral compassion to make it work. Yet we as individuals have buckets of it — one only need see the grass roots movement whose generosity of spirit and outrage at political foot-dragging has compelled our government to take action over tackling this century’s most signifi-cant humanitarian crisis.

It’s ironic that Mum always taught me not to make a fuss about things, to stiffen upper lips and keep schtum when things weren’t going your way. Yet sometimes the most human thing is to do the opposite. It’s why we know what’s right and politicians sometimes haven’t a clue.

LIFE 35THEJC.COMTHE JEWISH CHRONICLE 9 OCTOBER 2015

PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES

LIFE

Anthea Gerrie is granted a rare audience with art’s true “rock star” and ex-head of the Royal Academy

Don’t call me a collector

LIKE A rock star, Norman Rosenthal sweeps into his favourite Soho café (which does not open until half an hour after he com-mands me to be

there, leaving me standing on a chilly street), one and a quarter hours late for our interview. And, like a rock groupie, I wait patient-ly, unwilling to relinquish my

grasp on this big beast that I’ve been stalking for three months.

A dinosaur of a big beast in some ways; he blames his lateness on not understanding his iPhone, which has been on silent mode since last night and thus not relayed my increasingly anxious messages about whether I am being stood up.

I am not. But I suspect he regards me, an outsider rather than an inti-mate of the charmed inner circle of international art world luvvies in which he moves, as not quite wor-thy of an audience.

This is a man who, like many a rock star, feels free to let rip if he feels crossed — he famously spat at

an art critic who dared to criticise one of his shows within his earshot on press day, and while working at the RA dismissed as not the equal of their peers the majority of living Royal Academicians whose artistic prowess the institution exists to honour.

Not that Rosenthal, with his dead-fish eyes and deadpan man-ner, is an actual rock star, in spite of the arrogance, untamed coiffure, flamboyant suits and regal attitude for which he is famous. Yet he is showbiz all the same; this entrepre-neur’s great talent is his panache in bringing art to the people and mak-ing it pay for the sponsors.

My savioursOne writer’s

experience of what the Big Society

really means p36

My admirationBusiness guru Luke Johnson on why Jews make business work p37LIFE

My savioursOne writer’s

experience of what the Big Society

really means

The Royal Academy would likely be dead in the water without Rosenthal at its helm as exhibitions secretary for more than 30 years.

I first met this dynamo, who has no art or art history qualifications, just a great eye — including one for the zeitgeist — when he was getting ready to unleash Sensation, with all its bad-boy (and girl) Young British Artists, on the august and strug-gling institution.

The show outraged critics, visi-tors and Royal Academicians alike, but it packed the punters in, and the gallery has understood the value of blockbusters and followed Rosenthal’s lead ever since.

But we are here to talk about life after the RA, which he left, gonged but unloved, in 2010 to pursue a future as a freelance curator. Speculation ensued about whether he had been pushed, but it was actually criticising the Academy for its lack of vision in a piece for The Spectator, which led to him getting offered the job in 1977.

He had held the same position of exhibitions secretary at the ICA — not bad for someone whose art career started with a holiday job in a Bond Street dealership.

“I actually wanted to sell records

INTERVIEW SIR NORMAN ROSENTHAL

CONTINUED ON P36

Iconoclast: Norman

Rosenthal ‘fell’ into art

— he actually wanted to sell

pop records

‘This is a man who feels free to let rip if he’s crossed

36 LIFE THEJC.COM THE JEWISH CHRONICLE 9 OCTOBER 2015

rise, called me at the isolated Span-ish villa where my family had been spending the summer.

Up popped Emma, a new friend and colleague who, within seconds of a desperate text from me, pulled in a favour (and spent a fortune) to fly me home on the busiest day of the tourist calendar, after I’d been told no seat was available. And Lisa, my schoolmate’s wife whose con-stant stream of hot food, candles, prayer books and advice helped my father, brother and I concentrate on other things. There was the rabbi I barely know who interrupted her holiday to be a therapist and the rabbi we’ve come to know who guided us through a bewildering maze of religiosity. Neighbours who I’d never met coming to offer sus-tenance, people I’d not seen in dec-

ades whose wisdom I know I’ll need as the weeks and months unfurl.

And Leonard, a jocular, grey-haired ball of energy and a volun-teer from our local synagogue who, I later learned, was roused from his bed on that fateful night by a doc-tor who saw that my father needed help. Devastated, confused and suddenly totally alone after 50-odd years of devoted companionship, it was Leonard who held Dad’s hand. Forms were filled in, state-ments given and all the depressing formalities adhered to before eve-ryone, my mother included, could be ‘‘released’’. But it was a total stranger whose generosity of spirit made it happen.

All these cogs and more in the Jewish ‘‘system’’ — replicas of which exist in all religions — suddenly

clicked seamlessly. The machine took over. A vacuum was filled instantly. People helped for no other reason than wanting to. They weren’t encouraged, or told to, or enticed to by the promise of congratulatory pats on the back, baubles and ermine.

They were not ‘‘big’’ gestures but small ones — often tiny, momen-tary ones. It was not the kind of behaviour that defines ‘‘society’’ but instead defines us as people, con-nects us intimately to one another.

Not under a vast, well-funded umbrella or in front of a grand canvas constructed by government agencies but simple, quiet, pro-found connections that may last a minute or a lifetime.

In fact the whole experiece was so un-Cameronesque as to make

at HMV on Oxford Street, but they had no jobs so I went around the corner to Agnews,” he explains, leading me around the corner him-self to his warren of a Dickensian walk-up duplex, every inch of wall covered with a range of visual treas-ures spanning at least six centuries. “Just don’t call me a collector,” he snaps. “I just find things I love and buy them, like I just fell into the world of art.”

Although his mother, who arrived as a refugee from Hungary one month before war broke out, played her part in stimulating his interest, he concedes: “Jews are

very good, even when there’s very little money around, in seeking out culture. My mother took me to the National Gallery, we went to Ken-wood, and by the age of nine I was taking myself to the theatre to see Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier.”

Born in 1944, Rosenthal got a state education at St Saviours pri-mary school in Warwick Avenue — “at the time when the area was still slummy” — and Westminster City School, while his father, who arrived in the UK during the war with the Free Cezch Army, ran a restaurant for Czech refugees, “and was a bit of a gambler”. But even before he had left university in Leicester, the young history

undergraduate was organising his first art exhibition, Artists in Cornwall, for the Leicester Museum and Art Gallery. No wonder Agnews snapped him up on the spot for a holiday job that lasted three years.

Knighted in 2007, Rosenthal is universally acknowledged with having put London at the centre of the art world during his RA years, championing artists originally reviled by the establishment, from Damien Hirst to Tracey Emin to Sarah Lucas, from whom he has just commissioned a new sculpture for the smart new Nine Elms develop-ment abutting the new US Embassy site.

It’s just one of the diverse consul-

tations into which he has thrown himself between assembling shows everywhere from Berlin to Istanbul, sorting out a Warhol exhibition this winter for the Ashmolean and flying to and from Madrid, where his wife of 25 years, Manuela Mena Marques, mother of their two Lon-don-based daughters, is a curator at the Prado.

But now he is getting ready to step out in London again, making his next major appearance in the capital at the Frieze London Art Fair in Regent’s Park this month with an audacious project.

He is curating eight little col-lections he believes would be worthy of space in the V&A, RA or

THERE’S BEEN a lot of talk at the Conservative Party Conference of whether David Cameron is any closer to realising his grand ambi-

tion for a ‘‘Big Society’’. This is the vague notion espoused by the Prime Minister (before he had the power to do anything about it) that we’re a nation that nurtures each other, that cares.

Well, the other week I came face to face with it — and it was not a pleasant experience. Neither was it big or much of a society, to be honest. But it was there, an invis-ible force of human nature that suddenly sprang into action, envel-oping me in a cloak of uncalled-for compassion.

My mother, Philippa, died of a heart attack. She never made it into the operating theatre at the Royal Free Hospital in North London having been rushed there by ambu-lance after complaining of stomach pains. She slipped away close to midnight, holding my father’s hand as a phalanx of doctors and nurses frantically tried to save her.

She was 80 and the kind of per-son who never made a fuss. I’m sure she’d hate me writing about her as part of some mawkish eulogy, so suffice it to say that she lived a good, long, honest and remarkably happy life. Don’t moan, she said, play with the hand you’re dealt with, be stoic to the last and try not to spoil it by being overly emotional.

So I won’t. Because although this piece is inspired by her, it isn’t really about her. It’s about us and our place in a so-called Big Society, presumably one that doesn’t need a harrowing image of a drowned child to wake us from our selfish slumber and do something worth-while. Except, as we have seen these past few weeks with the refugee cri-sis, it’s not quite that simple. Those values certainly exist, yet politicians are worryingly out of kilter with popular sentiment.

My, or our, experience (I include my 89-year-old father and younger brother in this) provides some evi-dence as to why that should be so. It began the moment my mother drew her last breath— though for me it started the morning after when Dad, having waited until sun-

PHOTO: AP

COMMENT

This is our Big SocietyScarred: David and Samantha Cameron see the Big Society through the prism of their own loss

I can’t abide shul but I’d never deny my heritage

TESTIMONY GRANT FELLER

‘Even when there’s no money, Jews are good at seeking culture

CONTINUED FROM P35

absurd his desire to claim owner-ship for a series of selfless actions simply by reimagining them in his own image. And it made me realise why government often fails to inspire, match or even emulate the unthinking decency we show to each other.

Politicians boast of their listen-ing skills and ability to react to the will of the people, but that’s rarely the case. More often than not, like reeds in the wind, we bend to their will. When it does happen — as has been the case following the images of three-year-old Syrian Aylan Kurdi lying face down in the sand on a Turkish beach — our elected offi-cials, as if reluctantly prised free of their protective bubble, suddenly appear disengaged from reality.

I have no doubt that Cameron, scarred by his own personal trau-ma, is well-meaning, but he and his advisers have tried to latch on to something that already works and burdened it with the kinds of rules, politics and economies that encour-age people to pursue vanity-fuelled ego trips. Precisely the opposite of what motivated Leonard, Emma, Lisa and the rest of my small society of temporary shoulders.

Perhaps there was never a halcyon era when a ‘‘big society’’ picked up the pieces in a mass wave of selfless do-gooding. It was always little, meaningful connections that warranted only minimal thanks. I suspect that the difference is that my parents and grandparents were guided by a political establishment that understood why morality is a more important indicator of one’s humanity than quotas, budgets and delegation — often to organisations that operate with little oversight.

If the laudable ethos of the Big Society reveals anything, it is that our institutions and their leaders, more than ever in history, lack the moral compassion to make it work. Yet we as individuals have buckets of it — one only need see the grass roots movement whose generosity of spirit and outrage at political foot-dragging has compelled our government to take action over tackling this century’s most signifi-cant humanitarian crisis.

It’s ironic that Mum always taught me not to make a fuss about things, to stiffen upper lips and keep schtum when things weren’t going your way. Yet sometimes the most human thing is to do the opposite. It’s why we know what’s right and politicians sometimes haven’t a clue.

LIFE 35THEJC.COMTHE JEWISH CHRONICLE 9 OCTOBER 2015

PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES

LIFE

Anthea Gerrie is granted a rare audience with art’s true “rock star” and ex-head of the Royal Academy

Don’t call me a collector

LIKE A rock star, Norman Rosenthal sweeps into his favourite Soho café (which does not open until half an hour after he com-mands me to be

there, leaving me standing on a chilly street), one and a quarter hours late for our interview. And, like a rock groupie, I wait patient-ly, unwilling to relinquish my

grasp on this big beast that I’ve been stalking for three months.

A dinosaur of a big beast in some ways; he blames his lateness on not understanding his iPhone, which has been on silent mode since last night and thus not relayed my increasingly anxious messages about whether I am being stood up.

I am not. But I suspect he regards me, an outsider rather than an inti-mate of the charmed inner circle of international art world luvvies in which he moves, as not quite wor-thy of an audience.

This is a man who, like many a rock star, feels free to let rip if he feels crossed — he famously spat at

an art critic who dared to criticise one of his shows within his earshot on press day, and while working at the RA dismissed as not the equal of their peers the majority of living Royal Academicians whose artistic prowess the institution exists to honour.

Not that Rosenthal, with his dead-fish eyes and deadpan man-ner, is an actual rock star, in spite of the arrogance, untamed coiffure, flamboyant suits and regal attitude for which he is famous. Yet he is showbiz all the same; this entrepre-neur’s great talent is his panache in bringing art to the people and mak-ing it pay for the sponsors.

My savioursOne writer’s

experience of what the Big Society

really means p36

My admirationBusiness guru Luke Johnson on why Jews make business work p37LIFE

My savioursOne writer’s

experience of what the Big Society

really means

The Royal Academy would likely be dead in the water without Rosenthal at its helm as exhibitions secretary for more than 30 years.

I first met this dynamo, who has no art or art history qualifications, just a great eye — including one for the zeitgeist — when he was getting ready to unleash Sensation, with all its bad-boy (and girl) Young British Artists, on the august and strug-gling institution.

The show outraged critics, visi-tors and Royal Academicians alike, but it packed the punters in, and the gallery has understood the value of blockbusters and followed Rosenthal’s lead ever since.

But we are here to talk about life after the RA, which he left, gonged but unloved, in 2010 to pursue a future as a freelance curator. Speculation ensued about whether he had been pushed, but it was actually criticising the Academy for its lack of vision in a piece for The Spectator, which led to him getting offered the job in 1977.

He had held the same position of exhibitions secretary at the ICA — not bad for someone whose art career started with a holiday job in a Bond Street dealership.

“I actually wanted to sell records

INTERVIEW SIR NORMAN ROSENTHAL

CONTINUED ON P36

Iconoclast: Norman

Rosenthal ‘fell’ into art

— he actually wanted to sell

pop records

‘This is a man who feels free to let rip if he’s crossed

36 LIFE THEJC.COM THE JEWISH CHRONICLE 9 OCTOBER 2015

rise, called me at the isolated Span-ish villa where my family had been spending the summer.

Up popped Emma, a new friend and colleague who, within seconds of a desperate text from me, pulled in a favour (and spent a fortune) to fly me home on the busiest day of the tourist calendar, after I’d been told no seat was available. And Lisa, my schoolmate’s wife whose con-stant stream of hot food, candles, prayer books and advice helped my father, brother and I concentrate on other things. There was the rabbi I barely know who interrupted her holiday to be a therapist and the rabbi we’ve come to know who guided us through a bewildering maze of religiosity. Neighbours who I’d never met coming to offer sus-tenance, people I’d not seen in dec-

ades whose wisdom I know I’ll need as the weeks and months unfurl.

And Leonard, a jocular, grey-haired ball of energy and a volun-teer from our local synagogue who, I later learned, was roused from his bed on that fateful night by a doc-tor who saw that my father needed help. Devastated, confused and suddenly totally alone after 50-odd years of devoted companionship, it was Leonard who held Dad’s hand. Forms were filled in, state-ments given and all the depressing formalities adhered to before eve-ryone, my mother included, could be ‘‘released’’. But it was a total stranger whose generosity of spirit made it happen.

All these cogs and more in the Jewish ‘‘system’’ — replicas of which exist in all religions — suddenly

clicked seamlessly. The machine took over. A vacuum was filled instantly. People helped for no other reason than wanting to. They weren’t encouraged, or told to, or enticed to by the promise of congratulatory pats on the back, baubles and ermine.

They were not ‘‘big’’ gestures but small ones — often tiny, momen-tary ones. It was not the kind of behaviour that defines ‘‘society’’ but instead defines us as people, con-nects us intimately to one another.

Not under a vast, well-funded umbrella or in front of a grand canvas constructed by government agencies but simple, quiet, pro-found connections that may last a minute or a lifetime.

In fact the whole experiece was so un-Cameronesque as to make

at HMV on Oxford Street, but they had no jobs so I went around the corner to Agnews,” he explains, leading me around the corner him-self to his warren of a Dickensian walk-up duplex, every inch of wall covered with a range of visual treas-ures spanning at least six centuries. “Just don’t call me a collector,” he snaps. “I just find things I love and buy them, like I just fell into the world of art.”

Although his mother, who arrived as a refugee from Hungary one month before war broke out, played her part in stimulating his interest, he concedes: “Jews are

very good, even when there’s very little money around, in seeking out culture. My mother took me to the National Gallery, we went to Ken-wood, and by the age of nine I was taking myself to the theatre to see Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier.”

Born in 1944, Rosenthal got a state education at St Saviours pri-mary school in Warwick Avenue — “at the time when the area was still slummy” — and Westminster City School, while his father, who arrived in the UK during the war with the Free Cezch Army, ran a restaurant for Czech refugees, “and was a bit of a gambler”. But even before he had left university in Leicester, the young history

undergraduate was organising his first art exhibition, Artists in Cornwall, for the Leicester Museum and Art Gallery. No wonder Agnews snapped him up on the spot for a holiday job that lasted three years.

Knighted in 2007, Rosenthal is universally acknowledged with having put London at the centre of the art world during his RA years, championing artists originally reviled by the establishment, from Damien Hirst to Tracey Emin to Sarah Lucas, from whom he has just commissioned a new sculpture for the smart new Nine Elms develop-ment abutting the new US Embassy site.

It’s just one of the diverse consul-

tations into which he has thrown himself between assembling shows everywhere from Berlin to Istanbul, sorting out a Warhol exhibition this winter for the Ashmolean and flying to and from Madrid, where his wife of 25 years, Manuela Mena Marques, mother of their two Lon-don-based daughters, is a curator at the Prado.

But now he is getting ready to step out in London again, making his next major appearance in the capital at the Frieze London Art Fair in Regent’s Park this month with an audacious project.

He is curating eight little col-lections he believes would be worthy of space in the V&A, RA or

THERE’S BEEN a lot of talk at the Conservative Party Conference of whether David Cameron is any closer to realising his grand ambi-

tion for a ‘‘Big Society’’. This is the vague notion espoused by the Prime Minister (before he had the power to do anything about it) that we’re a nation that nurtures each other, that cares.

Well, the other week I came face to face with it — and it was not a pleasant experience. Neither was it big or much of a society, to be honest. But it was there, an invis-ible force of human nature that suddenly sprang into action, envel-oping me in a cloak of uncalled-for compassion.

My mother, Philippa, died of a heart attack. She never made it into the operating theatre at the Royal Free Hospital in North London having been rushed there by ambu-lance after complaining of stomach pains. She slipped away close to midnight, holding my father’s hand as a phalanx of doctors and nurses frantically tried to save her.

She was 80 and the kind of per-son who never made a fuss. I’m sure she’d hate me writing about her as part of some mawkish eulogy, so suffice it to say that she lived a good, long, honest and remarkably happy life. Don’t moan, she said, play with the hand you’re dealt with, be stoic to the last and try not to spoil it by being overly emotional.

So I won’t. Because although this piece is inspired by her, it isn’t really about her. It’s about us and our place in a so-called Big Society, presumably one that doesn’t need a harrowing image of a drowned child to wake us from our selfish slumber and do something worth-while. Except, as we have seen these past few weeks with the refugee cri-sis, it’s not quite that simple. Those values certainly exist, yet politicians are worryingly out of kilter with popular sentiment.

My, or our, experience (I include my 89-year-old father and younger brother in this) provides some evi-dence as to why that should be so. It began the moment my mother drew her last breath— though for me it started the morning after when Dad, having waited until sun-

PHOTO: AP

COMMENT

This is our Big SocietyScarred: David and Samantha Cameron see the Big Society through the prism of their own loss

I can’t abide shul but I’d never deny my heritage

TESTIMONY GRANT FELLER

‘Even when there’s no money, Jews are good at seeking culture

CONTINUED FROM P35

absurd his desire to claim owner-ship for a series of selfless actions simply by reimagining them in his own image. And it made me realise why government often fails to inspire, match or even emulate the unthinking decency we show to each other.

Politicians boast of their listen-ing skills and ability to react to the will of the people, but that’s rarely the case. More often than not, like reeds in the wind, we bend to their will. When it does happen — as has been the case following the images of three-year-old Syrian Aylan Kurdi lying face down in the sand on a Turkish beach — our elected offi-cials, as if reluctantly prised free of their protective bubble, suddenly appear disengaged from reality.

I have no doubt that Cameron, scarred by his own personal trau-ma, is well-meaning, but he and his advisers have tried to latch on to something that already works and burdened it with the kinds of rules, politics and economies that encour-age people to pursue vanity-fuelled ego trips. Precisely the opposite of what motivated Leonard, Emma, Lisa and the rest of my small society of temporary shoulders.

Perhaps there was never a halcyon era when a ‘‘big society’’ picked up the pieces in a mass wave of selfless do-gooding. It was always little, meaningful connections that warranted only minimal thanks. I suspect that the difference is that my parents and grandparents were guided by a political establishment that understood why morality is a more important indicator of one’s humanity than quotas, budgets and delegation — often to organisations that operate with little oversight.

If the laudable ethos of the Big Society reveals anything, it is that our institutions and their leaders, more than ever in history, lack the moral compassion to make it work. Yet we as individuals have buckets of it — one only need see the grass roots movement whose generosity of spirit and outrage at political foot-dragging has compelled our government to take action over tackling this century’s most signifi-cant humanitarian crisis.

It’s ironic that Mum always taught me not to make a fuss about things, to stiffen upper lips and keep schtum when things weren’t going your way. Yet sometimes the most human thing is to do the opposite. It’s why we know what’s right and politicians sometimes haven’t a clue.

LIFE 35THEJC.COMTHE JEWISH CHRONICLE 9 OCTOBER 2015

PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES

LIFE

Anthea Gerrie is granted a rare audience with art’s true “rock star” and ex-head of the Royal Academy

Don’t call me a collector

LIKE A rock star, Norman Rosenthal sweeps into his favourite Soho café (which does not open until half an hour after he com-mands me to be

there, leaving me standing on a chilly street), one and a quarter hours late for our interview. And, like a rock groupie, I wait patient-ly, unwilling to relinquish my

grasp on this big beast that I’ve been stalking for three months.

A dinosaur of a big beast in some ways; he blames his lateness on not understanding his iPhone, which has been on silent mode since last night and thus not relayed my increasingly anxious messages about whether I am being stood up.

I am not. But I suspect he regards me, an outsider rather than an inti-mate of the charmed inner circle of international art world luvvies in which he moves, as not quite wor-thy of an audience.

This is a man who, like many a rock star, feels free to let rip if he feels crossed — he famously spat at

an art critic who dared to criticise one of his shows within his earshot on press day, and while working at the RA dismissed as not the equal of their peers the majority of living Royal Academicians whose artistic prowess the institution exists to honour.

Not that Rosenthal, with his dead-fish eyes and deadpan man-ner, is an actual rock star, in spite of the arrogance, untamed coiffure, flamboyant suits and regal attitude for which he is famous. Yet he is showbiz all the same; this entrepre-neur’s great talent is his panache in bringing art to the people and mak-ing it pay for the sponsors.

My savioursOne writer’s

experience of what the Big Society

really means p36

My admirationBusiness guru Luke Johnson on why Jews make business work p37LIFE

My savioursOne writer’s

experience of what the Big Society

really means

The Royal Academy would likely be dead in the water without Rosenthal at its helm as exhibitions secretary for more than 30 years.

I first met this dynamo, who has no art or art history qualifications, just a great eye — including one for the zeitgeist — when he was getting ready to unleash Sensation, with all its bad-boy (and girl) Young British Artists, on the august and strug-gling institution.

The show outraged critics, visi-tors and Royal Academicians alike, but it packed the punters in, and the gallery has understood the value of blockbusters and followed Rosenthal’s lead ever since.

But we are here to talk about life after the RA, which he left, gonged but unloved, in 2010 to pursue a future as a freelance curator. Speculation ensued about whether he had been pushed, but it was actually criticising the Academy for its lack of vision in a piece for The Spectator, which led to him getting offered the job in 1977.

He had held the same position of exhibitions secretary at the ICA — not bad for someone whose art career started with a holiday job in a Bond Street dealership.

“I actually wanted to sell records

INTERVIEW SIR NORMAN ROSENTHAL

CONTINUED ON P36

Iconoclast: Norman

Rosenthal ‘fell’ into art

— he actually wanted to sell

pop records

‘This is a man who feels free to let rip if he’s crossed

36 LIFE THEJC.COM THE JEWISH CHRONICLE 9 OCTOBER 2015

rise, called me at the isolated Span-ish villa where my family had been spending the summer.

Up popped Emma, a new friend and colleague who, within seconds of a desperate text from me, pulled in a favour (and spent a fortune) to fly me home on the busiest day of the tourist calendar, after I’d been told no seat was available. And Lisa, my schoolmate’s wife whose con-stant stream of hot food, candles, prayer books and advice helped my father, brother and I concentrate on other things. There was the rabbi I barely know who interrupted her holiday to be a therapist and the rabbi we’ve come to know who guided us through a bewildering maze of religiosity. Neighbours who I’d never met coming to offer sus-tenance, people I’d not seen in dec-

ades whose wisdom I know I’ll need as the weeks and months unfurl.

And Leonard, a jocular, grey-haired ball of energy and a volun-teer from our local synagogue who, I later learned, was roused from his bed on that fateful night by a doc-tor who saw that my father needed help. Devastated, confused and suddenly totally alone after 50-odd years of devoted companionship, it was Leonard who held Dad’s hand. Forms were filled in, state-ments given and all the depressing formalities adhered to before eve-ryone, my mother included, could be ‘‘released’’. But it was a total stranger whose generosity of spirit made it happen.

All these cogs and more in the Jewish ‘‘system’’ — replicas of which exist in all religions — suddenly

clicked seamlessly. The machine took over. A vacuum was filled instantly. People helped for no other reason than wanting to. They weren’t encouraged, or told to, or enticed to by the promise of congratulatory pats on the back, baubles and ermine.

They were not ‘‘big’’ gestures but small ones — often tiny, momen-tary ones. It was not the kind of behaviour that defines ‘‘society’’ but instead defines us as people, con-nects us intimately to one another.

Not under a vast, well-funded umbrella or in front of a grand canvas constructed by government agencies but simple, quiet, pro-found connections that may last a minute or a lifetime.

In fact the whole experiece was so un-Cameronesque as to make

at HMV on Oxford Street, but they had no jobs so I went around the corner to Agnews,” he explains, leading me around the corner him-self to his warren of a Dickensian walk-up duplex, every inch of wall covered with a range of visual treas-ures spanning at least six centuries. “Just don’t call me a collector,” he snaps. “I just find things I love and buy them, like I just fell into the world of art.”

Although his mother, who arrived as a refugee from Hungary one month before war broke out, played her part in stimulating his interest, he concedes: “Jews are

very good, even when there’s very little money around, in seeking out culture. My mother took me to the National Gallery, we went to Ken-wood, and by the age of nine I was taking myself to the theatre to see Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier.”

Born in 1944, Rosenthal got a state education at St Saviours pri-mary school in Warwick Avenue — “at the time when the area was still slummy” — and Westminster City School, while his father, who arrived in the UK during the war with the Free Cezch Army, ran a restaurant for Czech refugees, “and was a bit of a gambler”. But even before he had left university in Leicester, the young history

undergraduate was organising his first art exhibition, Artists in Cornwall, for the Leicester Museum and Art Gallery. No wonder Agnews snapped him up on the spot for a holiday job that lasted three years.

Knighted in 2007, Rosenthal is universally acknowledged with having put London at the centre of the art world during his RA years, championing artists originally reviled by the establishment, from Damien Hirst to Tracey Emin to Sarah Lucas, from whom he has just commissioned a new sculpture for the smart new Nine Elms develop-ment abutting the new US Embassy site.

It’s just one of the diverse consul-

tations into which he has thrown himself between assembling shows everywhere from Berlin to Istanbul, sorting out a Warhol exhibition this winter for the Ashmolean and flying to and from Madrid, where his wife of 25 years, Manuela Mena Marques, mother of their two Lon-don-based daughters, is a curator at the Prado.

But now he is getting ready to step out in London again, making his next major appearance in the capital at the Frieze London Art Fair in Regent’s Park this month with an audacious project.

He is curating eight little col-lections he believes would be worthy of space in the V&A, RA or

THERE’S BEEN a lot of talk at the Conservative Party Conference of whether David Cameron is any closer to realising his grand ambi-

tion for a ‘‘Big Society’’. This is the vague notion espoused by the Prime Minister (before he had the power to do anything about it) that we’re a nation that nurtures each other, that cares.

Well, the other week I came face to face with it — and it was not a pleasant experience. Neither was it big or much of a society, to be honest. But it was there, an invis-ible force of human nature that suddenly sprang into action, envel-oping me in a cloak of uncalled-for compassion.

My mother, Philippa, died of a heart attack. She never made it into the operating theatre at the Royal Free Hospital in North London having been rushed there by ambu-lance after complaining of stomach pains. She slipped away close to midnight, holding my father’s hand as a phalanx of doctors and nurses frantically tried to save her.

She was 80 and the kind of per-son who never made a fuss. I’m sure she’d hate me writing about her as part of some mawkish eulogy, so suffice it to say that she lived a good, long, honest and remarkably happy life. Don’t moan, she said, play with the hand you’re dealt with, be stoic to the last and try not to spoil it by being overly emotional.

So I won’t. Because although this piece is inspired by her, it isn’t really about her. It’s about us and our place in a so-called Big Society, presumably one that doesn’t need a harrowing image of a drowned child to wake us from our selfish slumber and do something worth-while. Except, as we have seen these past few weeks with the refugee cri-sis, it’s not quite that simple. Those values certainly exist, yet politicians are worryingly out of kilter with popular sentiment.

My, or our, experience (I include my 89-year-old father and younger brother in this) provides some evi-dence as to why that should be so. It began the moment my mother drew her last breath— though for me it started the morning after when Dad, having waited until sun-

PHOTO: AP

COMMENT

This is our Big SocietyScarred: David and Samantha Cameron see the Big Society through the prism of their own loss

I can’t abide shul but I’d never deny my heritage

TESTIMONY GRANT FELLER

‘Even when there’s no money, Jews are good at seeking culture

CONTINUED FROM P35

absurd his desire to claim owner-ship for a series of selfless actions simply by reimagining them in his own image. And it made me realise why government often fails to inspire, match or even emulate the unthinking decency we show to each other.

Politicians boast of their listen-ing skills and ability to react to the will of the people, but that’s rarely the case. More often than not, like reeds in the wind, we bend to their will. When it does happen — as has been the case following the images of three-year-old Syrian Aylan Kurdi lying face down in the sand on a Turkish beach — our elected offi-cials, as if reluctantly prised free of their protective bubble, suddenly appear disengaged from reality.

I have no doubt that Cameron, scarred by his own personal trau-ma, is well-meaning, but he and his advisers have tried to latch on to something that already works and burdened it with the kinds of rules, politics and economies that encour-age people to pursue vanity-fuelled ego trips. Precisely the opposite of what motivated Leonard, Emma, Lisa and the rest of my small society of temporary shoulders.

Perhaps there was never a halcyon era when a ‘‘big society’’ picked up the pieces in a mass wave of selfless do-gooding. It was always little, meaningful connections that warranted only minimal thanks. I suspect that the difference is that my parents and grandparents were guided by a political establishment that understood why morality is a more important indicator of one’s humanity than quotas, budgets and delegation — often to organisations that operate with little oversight.

If the laudable ethos of the Big Society reveals anything, it is that our institutions and their leaders, more than ever in history, lack the moral compassion to make it work. Yet we as individuals have buckets of it — one only need see the grass roots movement whose generosity of spirit and outrage at political foot-dragging has compelled our government to take action over tackling this century’s most signifi-cant humanitarian crisis.

It’s ironic that Mum always taught me not to make a fuss about things, to stiffen upper lips and keep schtum when things weren’t going your way. Yet sometimes the most human thing is to do the opposite. It’s why we know what’s right and politicians sometimes haven’t a clue.

36 LIFE THEJC.COM THE JEWISH CHRONICLE 9 OCTOBER 2015

rise, called me at the isolated Span-ish villa where my family had been spending the summer.

Up popped Emma, a new friend and colleague who, within seconds of a desperate text from me, pulled in a favour (and spent a fortune) to fly me home on the busiest day of the tourist calendar, after I’d been told no seat was available. And Lisa, my schoolmate’s wife whose con-stant stream of hot food, candles, prayer books and advice helped my father, brother and I concentrate on other things. There was the rabbi I barely know who interrupted her holiday to be a therapist and the rabbi we’ve come to know who guided us through a bewildering maze of religiosity. Neighbours who I’d never met coming to offer sus-tenance, people I’d not seen in dec-

ades whose wisdom I know I’ll need as the weeks and months unfurl.

And Leonard, a jocular, grey-haired ball of energy and a volun-teer from our local synagogue who, I later learned, was roused from his bed on that fateful night by a doc-tor who saw that my father needed help. Devastated, confused and suddenly totally alone after 50-odd years of devoted companionship, it was Leonard who held Dad’s hand. Forms were filled in, state-ments given and all the depressing formalities adhered to before eve-ryone, my mother included, could be ‘‘released’’. But it was a total stranger whose generosity of spirit made it happen.

All these cogs and more in the Jewish ‘‘system’’ — replicas of which exist in all religions — suddenly

clicked seamlessly. The machine took over. A vacuum was filled instantly. People helped for no other reason than wanting to. They weren’t encouraged, or told to, or enticed to by the promise of congratulatory pats on the back, baubles and ermine.

They were not ‘‘big’’ gestures but small ones — often tiny, momen-tary ones. It was not the kind of behaviour that defines ‘‘society’’ but instead defines us as people, con-nects us intimately to one another.

Not under a vast, well-funded umbrella or in front of a grand canvas constructed by government agencies but simple, quiet, pro-found connections that may last a minute or a lifetime.

In fact the whole experiece was so un-Cameronesque as to make

at HMV on Oxford Street, but they had no jobs so I went around the corner to Agnews,” he explains, leading me around the corner him-self to his warren of a Dickensian walk-up duplex, every inch of wall covered with a range of visual treas-ures spanning at least six centuries. “Just don’t call me a collector,” he snaps. “I just find things I love and buy them, like I just fell into the world of art.”

Although his mother, who arrived as a refugee from Hungary one month before war broke out, played her part in stimulating his interest, he concedes: “Jews are

very good, even when there’s very little money around, in seeking out culture. My mother took me to the National Gallery, we went to Ken-wood, and by the age of nine I was taking myself to the theatre to see Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier.”

Born in 1944, Rosenthal got a state education at St Saviours pri-mary school in Warwick Avenue — “at the time when the area was still slummy” — and Westminster City School, while his father, who arrived in the UK during the war with the Free Cezch Army, ran a restaurant for Czech refugees, “and was a bit of a gambler”. But even before he had left university in Leicester, the young history

undergraduate was organising his first art exhibition, Artists in Cornwall, for the Leicester Museum and Art Gallery. No wonder Agnews snapped him up on the spot for a holiday job that lasted three years.

Knighted in 2007, Rosenthal is universally acknowledged with having put London at the centre of the art world during his RA years, championing artists originally reviled by the establishment, from Damien Hirst to Tracey Emin to Sarah Lucas, from whom he has just commissioned a new sculpture for the smart new Nine Elms develop-ment abutting the new US Embassy site.

It’s just one of the diverse consul-

tations into which he has thrown himself between assembling shows everywhere from Berlin to Istanbul, sorting out a Warhol exhibition this winter for the Ashmolean and flying to and from Madrid, where his wife of 25 years, Manuela Mena Marques, mother of their two Lon-don-based daughters, is a curator at the Prado.

But now he is getting ready to step out in London again, making his next major appearance in the capital at the Frieze London Art Fair in Regent’s Park this month with an audacious project.

He is curating eight little col-lections he believes would be worthy of space in the V&A, RA or

THERE’S BEEN a lot of talk at the Conservative Party Conference of whether David Cameron is any closer to realising his grand ambi-

tion for a ‘‘Big Society’’. This is the vague notion espoused by the Prime Minister (before he had the power to do anything about it) that we’re a nation that nurtures each other, that cares.

Well, the other week I came face to face with it — and it was not a pleasant experience. Neither was it big or much of a society, to be honest. But it was there, an invis-ible force of human nature that suddenly sprang into action, envel-oping me in a cloak of uncalled-for compassion.

My mother, Philippa, died of a heart attack. She never made it into the operating theatre at the Royal Free Hospital in North London having been rushed there by ambu-lance after complaining of stomach pains. She slipped away close to midnight, holding my father’s hand as a phalanx of doctors and nurses frantically tried to save her.

She was 80 and the kind of per-son who never made a fuss. I’m sure she’d hate me writing about her as part of some mawkish eulogy, so suffice it to say that she lived a good, long, honest and remarkably happy life. Don’t moan, she said, play with the hand you’re dealt with, be stoic to the last and try not to spoil it by being overly emotional.

So I won’t. Because although this piece is inspired by her, it isn’t really about her. It’s about us and our place in a so-called Big Society, presumably one that doesn’t need a harrowing image of a drowned child to wake us from our selfish slumber and do something worth-while. Except, as we have seen these past few weeks with the refugee cri-sis, it’s not quite that simple. Those values certainly exist, yet politicians are worryingly out of kilter with popular sentiment.

My, or our, experience (I include my 89-year-old father and younger brother in this) provides some evi-dence as to why that should be so. It began the moment my mother drew her last breath— though for me it started the morning after when Dad, having waited until sun-

PHOTO: AP

COMMENT

This is our Big SocietyScarred: David and Samantha Cameron see the Big Society through the prism of their own loss

I can’t abide shul but I’d never deny my heritage

TESTIMONY GRANT FELLER

‘Even when there’s no money, Jews are good at seeking culture

CONTINUED FROM P35

absurd his desire to claim owner-ship for a series of selfless actions simply by reimagining them in his own image. And it made me realise why government often fails to inspire, match or even emulate the unthinking decency we show to each other.

Politicians boast of their listen-ing skills and ability to react to the will of the people, but that’s rarely the case. More often than not, like reeds in the wind, we bend to their will. When it does happen — as has been the case following the images of three-year-old Syrian Aylan Kurdi lying face down in the sand on a Turkish beach — our elected offi-cials, as if reluctantly prised free of their protective bubble, suddenly appear disengaged from reality.

I have no doubt that Cameron, scarred by his own personal trau-ma, is well-meaning, but he and his advisers have tried to latch on to something that already works and burdened it with the kinds of rules, politics and economies that encour-age people to pursue vanity-fuelled ego trips. Precisely the opposite of what motivated Leonard, Emma, Lisa and the rest of my small society of temporary shoulders.

Perhaps there was never a halcyon era when a ‘‘big society’’ picked up the pieces in a mass wave of selfless do-gooding. It was always little, meaningful connections that warranted only minimal thanks. I suspect that the difference is that my parents and grandparents were guided by a political establishment that understood why morality is a more important indicator of one’s humanity than quotas, budgets and delegation — often to organisations that operate with little oversight.

If the laudable ethos of the Big Society reveals anything, it is that our institutions and their leaders, more than ever in history, lack the moral compassion to make it work. Yet we as individuals have buckets of it — one only need see the grass roots movement whose generosity of spirit and outrage at political foot-dragging has compelled our government to take action over tackling this century’s most signifi-cant humanitarian crisis.

It’s ironic that Mum always taught me not to make a fuss about things, to stiffen upper lips and keep schtum when things weren’t going your way. Yet sometimes the most human thing is to do the opposite. It’s why we know what’s right and politicians sometimes haven’t a clue.

36 LIFE THEJC.COM THE JEWISH CHRONICLE 9 OCTOBER 2015

rise, called me at the isolated Span-ish villa where my family had been spending the summer.

Up popped Emma, a new friend and colleague who, within seconds of a desperate text from me, pulled in a favour (and spent a fortune) to fly me home on the busiest day of the tourist calendar, after I’d been told no seat was available. And Lisa, my schoolmate’s wife whose con-stant stream of hot food, candles, prayer books and advice helped my father, brother and I concentrate on other things. There was the rabbi I barely know who interrupted her holiday to be a therapist and the rabbi we’ve come to know who guided us through a bewildering maze of religiosity. Neighbours who I’d never met coming to offer sus-tenance, people I’d not seen in dec-

ades whose wisdom I know I’ll need as the weeks and months unfurl.

And Leonard, a jocular, grey-haired ball of energy and a volun-teer from our local synagogue who, I later learned, was roused from his bed on that fateful night by a doc-tor who saw that my father needed help. Devastated, confused and suddenly totally alone after 50-odd years of devoted companionship, it was Leonard who held Dad’s hand. Forms were filled in, state-ments given and all the depressing formalities adhered to before eve-ryone, my mother included, could be ‘‘released’’. But it was a total stranger whose generosity of spirit made it happen.

All these cogs and more in the Jewish ‘‘system’’ — replicas of which exist in all religions — suddenly

clicked seamlessly. The machine took over. A vacuum was filled instantly. People helped for no other reason than wanting to. They weren’t encouraged, or told to, or enticed to by the promise of congratulatory pats on the back, baubles and ermine.

They were not ‘‘big’’ gestures but small ones — often tiny, momen-tary ones. It was not the kind of behaviour that defines ‘‘society’’ but instead defines us as people, con-nects us intimately to one another.

Not under a vast, well-funded umbrella or in front of a grand canvas constructed by government agencies but simple, quiet, pro-found connections that may last a minute or a lifetime.

In fact the whole experiece was so un-Cameronesque as to make

at HMV on Oxford Street, but they had no jobs so I went around the corner to Agnews,” he explains, leading me around the corner him-self to his warren of a Dickensian walk-up duplex, every inch of wall covered with a range of visual treas-ures spanning at least six centuries. “Just don’t call me a collector,” he snaps. “I just find things I love and buy them, like I just fell into the world of art.”

Although his mother, who arrived as a refugee from Hungary one month before war broke out, played her part in stimulating his interest, he concedes: “Jews are

very good, even when there’s very little money around, in seeking out culture. My mother took me to the National Gallery, we went to Ken-wood, and by the age of nine I was taking myself to the theatre to see Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier.”

Born in 1944, Rosenthal got a state education at St Saviours pri-mary school in Warwick Avenue — “at the time when the area was still slummy” — and Westminster City School, while his father, who arrived in the UK during the war with the Free Cezch Army, ran a restaurant for Czech refugees, “and was a bit of a gambler”. But even before he had left university in Leicester, the young history

undergraduate was organising his first art exhibition, Artists in Cornwall, for the Leicester Museum and Art Gallery. No wonder Agnews snapped him up on the spot for a holiday job that lasted three years.

Knighted in 2007, Rosenthal is universally acknowledged with having put London at the centre of the art world during his RA years, championing artists originally reviled by the establishment, from Damien Hirst to Tracey Emin to Sarah Lucas, from whom he has just commissioned a new sculpture for the smart new Nine Elms develop-ment abutting the new US Embassy site.

It’s just one of the diverse consul-

tations into which he has thrown himself between assembling shows everywhere from Berlin to Istanbul, sorting out a Warhol exhibition this winter for the Ashmolean and flying to and from Madrid, where his wife of 25 years, Manuela Mena Marques, mother of their two Lon-don-based daughters, is a curator at the Prado.

But now he is getting ready to step out in London again, making his next major appearance in the capital at the Frieze London Art Fair in Regent’s Park this month with an audacious project.

He is curating eight little col-lections he believes would be worthy of space in the V&A, RA or

THERE’S BEEN a lot of talk at the Conservative Party Conference of whether David Cameron is any closer to realising his grand ambi-

tion for a ‘‘Big Society’’. This is the vague notion espoused by the Prime Minister (before he had the power to do anything about it) that we’re a nation that nurtures each other, that cares.

Well, the other week I came face to face with it — and it was not a pleasant experience. Neither was it big or much of a society, to be honest. But it was there, an invis-ible force of human nature that suddenly sprang into action, envel-oping me in a cloak of uncalled-for compassion.

My mother, Philippa, died of a heart attack. She never made it into the operating theatre at the Royal Free Hospital in North London having been rushed there by ambu-lance after complaining of stomach pains. She slipped away close to midnight, holding my father’s hand as a phalanx of doctors and nurses frantically tried to save her.

She was 80 and the kind of per-son who never made a fuss. I’m sure she’d hate me writing about her as part of some mawkish eulogy, so suffice it to say that she lived a good, long, honest and remarkably happy life. Don’t moan, she said, play with the hand you’re dealt with, be stoic to the last and try not to spoil it by being overly emotional.

So I won’t. Because although this piece is inspired by her, it isn’t really about her. It’s about us and our place in a so-called Big Society, presumably one that doesn’t need a harrowing image of a drowned child to wake us from our selfish slumber and do something worth-while. Except, as we have seen these past few weeks with the refugee cri-sis, it’s not quite that simple. Those values certainly exist, yet politicians are worryingly out of kilter with popular sentiment.

My, or our, experience (I include my 89-year-old father and younger brother in this) provides some evi-dence as to why that should be so. It began the moment my mother drew her last breath— though for me it started the morning after when Dad, having waited until sun-

PHOTO: AP

COMMENT

This is our Big SocietyScarred: David and Samantha Cameron see the Big Society through the prism of their own loss

I can’t abide shul but I’d never deny my heritage

TESTIMONY GRANT FELLER

‘Even when there’s no money, Jews are good at seeking culture

CONTINUED FROM P35

absurd his desire to claim owner-ship for a series of selfless actions simply by reimagining them in his own image. And it made me realise why government often fails to inspire, match or even emulate the unthinking decency we show to each other.

Politicians boast of their listen-ing skills and ability to react to the will of the people, but that’s rarely the case. More often than not, like reeds in the wind, we bend to their will. When it does happen — as has been the case following the images of three-year-old Syrian Aylan Kurdi lying face down in the sand on a Turkish beach — our elected offi-cials, as if reluctantly prised free of their protective bubble, suddenly appear disengaged from reality.

I have no doubt that Cameron, scarred by his own personal trau-ma, is well-meaning, but he and his advisers have tried to latch on to something that already works and burdened it with the kinds of rules, politics and economies that encour-age people to pursue vanity-fuelled ego trips. Precisely the opposite of what motivated Leonard, Emma, Lisa and the rest of my small society of temporary shoulders.

Perhaps there was never a halcyon era when a ‘‘big society’’ picked up the pieces in a mass wave of selfless do-gooding. It was always little, meaningful connections that warranted only minimal thanks. I suspect that the difference is that my parents and grandparents were guided by a political establishment that understood why morality is a more important indicator of one’s humanity than quotas, budgets and delegation — often to organisations that operate with little oversight.

If the laudable ethos of the Big Society reveals anything, it is that our institutions and their leaders, more than ever in history, lack the moral compassion to make it work. Yet we as individuals have buckets of it — one only need see the grass roots movement whose generosity of spirit and outrage at political foot-dragging has compelled our government to take action over tackling this century’s most signifi-cant humanitarian crisis.

It’s ironic that Mum always taught me not to make a fuss about things, to stiffen upper lips and keep schtum when things weren’t going your way. Yet sometimes the most human thing is to do the opposite. It’s why we know what’s right and politicians sometimes haven’t a clue.

36 LIFE THEJC.COM THE JEWISH CHRONICLE 9 OCTOBER 2015

rise, called me at the isolated Span-ish villa where my family had been spending the summer.

Up popped Emma, a new friend and colleague who, within seconds of a desperate text from me, pulled in a favour (and spent a fortune) to fly me home on the busiest day of the tourist calendar, after I’d been told no seat was available. And Lisa, my schoolmate’s wife whose con-stant stream of hot food, candles, prayer books and advice helped my father, brother and I concentrate on other things. There was the rabbi I barely know who interrupted her holiday to be a therapist and the rabbi we’ve come to know who guided us through a bewildering maze of religiosity. Neighbours who I’d never met coming to offer sus-tenance, people I’d not seen in dec-

ades whose wisdom I know I’ll need as the weeks and months unfurl.

And Leonard, a jocular, grey-haired ball of energy and a volun-teer from our local synagogue who, I later learned, was roused from his bed on that fateful night by a doc-tor who saw that my father needed help. Devastated, confused and suddenly totally alone after 50-odd years of devoted companionship, it was Leonard who held Dad’s hand. Forms were filled in, state-ments given and all the depressing formalities adhered to before eve-ryone, my mother included, could be ‘‘released’’. But it was a total stranger whose generosity of spirit made it happen.

All these cogs and more in the Jewish ‘‘system’’ — replicas of which exist in all religions — suddenly

clicked seamlessly. The machine took over. A vacuum was filled instantly. People helped for no other reason than wanting to. They weren’t encouraged, or told to, or enticed to by the promise of congratulatory pats on the back, baubles and ermine.

They were not ‘‘big’’ gestures but small ones — often tiny, momen-tary ones. It was not the kind of behaviour that defines ‘‘society’’ but instead defines us as people, con-nects us intimately to one another.

Not under a vast, well-funded umbrella or in front of a grand canvas constructed by government agencies but simple, quiet, pro-found connections that may last a minute or a lifetime.

In fact the whole experiece was so un-Cameronesque as to make

at HMV on Oxford Street, but they had no jobs so I went around the corner to Agnews,” he explains, leading me around the corner him-self to his warren of a Dickensian walk-up duplex, every inch of wall covered with a range of visual treas-ures spanning at least six centuries. “Just don’t call me a collector,” he snaps. “I just find things I love and buy them, like I just fell into the world of art.”

Although his mother, who arrived as a refugee from Hungary one month before war broke out, played her part in stimulating his interest, he concedes: “Jews are

very good, even when there’s very little money around, in seeking out culture. My mother took me to the National Gallery, we went to Ken-wood, and by the age of nine I was taking myself to the theatre to see Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier.”

Born in 1944, Rosenthal got a state education at St Saviours pri-mary school in Warwick Avenue — “at the time when the area was still slummy” — and Westminster City School, while his father, who arrived in the UK during the war with the Free Cezch Army, ran a restaurant for Czech refugees, “and was a bit of a gambler”. But even before he had left university in Leicester, the young history

undergraduate was organising his first art exhibition, Artists in Cornwall, for the Leicester Museum and Art Gallery. No wonder Agnews snapped him up on the spot for a holiday job that lasted three years.

Knighted in 2007, Rosenthal is universally acknowledged with having put London at the centre of the art world during his RA years, championing artists originally reviled by the establishment, from Damien Hirst to Tracey Emin to Sarah Lucas, from whom he has just commissioned a new sculpture for the smart new Nine Elms develop-ment abutting the new US Embassy site.

It’s just one of the diverse consul-

tations into which he has thrown himself between assembling shows everywhere from Berlin to Istanbul, sorting out a Warhol exhibition this winter for the Ashmolean and flying to and from Madrid, where his wife of 25 years, Manuela Mena Marques, mother of their two Lon-don-based daughters, is a curator at the Prado.

But now he is getting ready to step out in London again, making his next major appearance in the capital at the Frieze London Art Fair in Regent’s Park this month with an audacious project.

He is curating eight little col-lections he believes would be worthy of space in the V&A, RA or

THERE’S BEEN a lot of talk at the Conservative Party Conference of whether David Cameron is any closer to realising his grand ambi-

tion for a ‘‘Big Society’’. This is the vague notion espoused by the Prime Minister (before he had the power to do anything about it) that we’re a nation that nurtures each other, that cares.

Well, the other week I came face to face with it — and it was not a pleasant experience. Neither was it big or much of a society, to be honest. But it was there, an invis-ible force of human nature that suddenly sprang into action, envel-oping me in a cloak of uncalled-for compassion.

My mother, Philippa, died of a heart attack. She never made it into the operating theatre at the Royal Free Hospital in North London having been rushed there by ambu-lance after complaining of stomach pains. She slipped away close to midnight, holding my father’s hand as a phalanx of doctors and nurses frantically tried to save her.

She was 80 and the kind of per-son who never made a fuss. I’m sure she’d hate me writing about her as part of some mawkish eulogy, so suffice it to say that she lived a good, long, honest and remarkably happy life. Don’t moan, she said, play with the hand you’re dealt with, be stoic to the last and try not to spoil it by being overly emotional.

So I won’t. Because although this piece is inspired by her, it isn’t really about her. It’s about us and our place in a so-called Big Society, presumably one that doesn’t need a harrowing image of a drowned child to wake us from our selfish slumber and do something worth-while. Except, as we have seen these past few weeks with the refugee cri-sis, it’s not quite that simple. Those values certainly exist, yet politicians are worryingly out of kilter with popular sentiment.

My, or our, experience (I include my 89-year-old father and younger brother in this) provides some evi-dence as to why that should be so. It began the moment my mother drew her last breath— though for me it started the morning after when Dad, having waited until sun-

PHOTO: AP

COMMENT

This is our Big SocietyScarred: David and Samantha Cameron see the Big Society through the prism of their own loss

I can’t abide shul but I’d never deny my heritage

TESTIMONY GRANT FELLER

‘Even when there’s no money, Jews are good at seeking culture

CONTINUED FROM P35

absurd his desire to claim owner-ship for a series of selfless actions simply by reimagining them in his own image. And it made me realise why government often fails to inspire, match or even emulate the unthinking decency we show to each other.

Politicians boast of their listen-ing skills and ability to react to the will of the people, but that’s rarely the case. More often than not, like reeds in the wind, we bend to their will. When it does happen — as has been the case following the images of three-year-old Syrian Aylan Kurdi lying face down in the sand on a Turkish beach — our elected offi-cials, as if reluctantly prised free of their protective bubble, suddenly appear disengaged from reality.

I have no doubt that Cameron, scarred by his own personal trau-ma, is well-meaning, but he and his advisers have tried to latch on to something that already works and burdened it with the kinds of rules, politics and economies that encour-age people to pursue vanity-fuelled ego trips. Precisely the opposite of what motivated Leonard, Emma, Lisa and the rest of my small society of temporary shoulders.

Perhaps there was never a halcyon era when a ‘‘big society’’ picked up the pieces in a mass wave of selfless do-gooding. It was always little, meaningful connections that warranted only minimal thanks. I suspect that the difference is that my parents and grandparents were guided by a political establishment that understood why morality is a more important indicator of one’s humanity than quotas, budgets and delegation — often to organisations that operate with little oversight.

If the laudable ethos of the Big Society reveals anything, it is that our institutions and their leaders, more than ever in history, lack the moral compassion to make it work. Yet we as individuals have buckets of it — one only need see the grass roots movement whose generosity of spirit and outrage at political foot-dragging has compelled our government to take action over tackling this century’s most signifi-cant humanitarian crisis.

It’s ironic that Mum always taught me not to make a fuss about things, to stiffen upper lips and keep schtum when things weren’t going your way. Yet sometimes the most human thing is to do the opposite. It’s why we know what’s right and politicians sometimes haven’t a clue.

!

36 LIFE THEJC.COM THE JEWISH CHRONICLE 9 OCTOBER 2015

rise, called me at the isolated Span-ish villa where my family had been spending the summer.

Up popped Emma, a new friend and colleague who, within seconds of a desperate text from me, pulled in a favour (and spent a fortune) to fly me home on the busiest day of the tourist calendar, after I’d been told no seat was available. And Lisa, my schoolmate’s wife whose con-stant stream of hot food, candles, prayer books and advice helped my father, brother and I concentrate on other things. There was the rabbi I barely know who interrupted her holiday to be a therapist and the rabbi we’ve come to know who guided us through a bewildering maze of religiosity. Neighbours who I’d never met coming to offer sus-tenance, people I’d not seen in dec-

ades whose wisdom I know I’ll need as the weeks and months unfurl.

And Leonard, a jocular, grey-haired ball of energy and a volun-teer from our local synagogue who, I later learned, was roused from his bed on that fateful night by a doc-tor who saw that my father needed help. Devastated, confused and suddenly totally alone after 50-odd years of devoted companionship, it was Leonard who held Dad’s hand. Forms were filled in, state-ments given and all the depressing formalities adhered to before eve-ryone, my mother included, could be ‘‘released’’. But it was a total stranger whose generosity of spirit made it happen.

All these cogs and more in the Jewish ‘‘system’’ — replicas of which exist in all religions — suddenly

clicked seamlessly. The machine took over. A vacuum was filled instantly. People helped for no other reason than wanting to. They weren’t encouraged, or told to, or enticed to by the promise of congratulatory pats on the back, baubles and ermine.

They were not ‘‘big’’ gestures but small ones — often tiny, momen-tary ones. It was not the kind of behaviour that defines ‘‘society’’ but instead defines us as people, con-nects us intimately to one another.

Not under a vast, well-funded umbrella or in front of a grand canvas constructed by government agencies but simple, quiet, pro-found connections that may last a minute or a lifetime.

In fact the whole experiece was so un-Cameronesque as to make

at HMV on Oxford Street, but they had no jobs so I went around the corner to Agnews,” he explains, leading me around the corner him-self to his warren of a Dickensian walk-up duplex, every inch of wall covered with a range of visual treas-ures spanning at least six centuries. “Just don’t call me a collector,” he snaps. “I just find things I love and buy them, like I just fell into the world of art.”

Although his mother, who arrived as a refugee from Hungary one month before war broke out, played her part in stimulating his interest, he concedes: “Jews are

very good, even when there’s very little money around, in seeking out culture. My mother took me to the National Gallery, we went to Ken-wood, and by the age of nine I was taking myself to the theatre to see Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier.”

Born in 1944, Rosenthal got a state education at St Saviours pri-mary school in Warwick Avenue — “at the time when the area was still slummy” — and Westminster City School, while his father, who arrived in the UK during the war with the Free Cezch Army, ran a restaurant for Czech refugees, “and was a bit of a gambler”. But even before he had left university in Leicester, the young history

undergraduate was organising his first art exhibition, Artists in Cornwall, for the Leicester Museum and Art Gallery. No wonder Agnews snapped him up on the spot for a holiday job that lasted three years.

Knighted in 2007, Rosenthal is universally acknowledged with having put London at the centre of the art world during his RA years, championing artists originally reviled by the establishment, from Damien Hirst to Tracey Emin to Sarah Lucas, from whom he has just commissioned a new sculpture for the smart new Nine Elms develop-ment abutting the new US Embassy site.

It’s just one of the diverse consul-

tations into which he has thrown himself between assembling shows everywhere from Berlin to Istanbul, sorting out a Warhol exhibition this winter for the Ashmolean and flying to and from Madrid, where his wife of 25 years, Manuela Mena Marques, mother of their two Lon-don-based daughters, is a curator at the Prado.

But now he is getting ready to step out in London again, making his next major appearance in the capital at the Frieze London Art Fair in Regent’s Park this month with an audacious project.

He is curating eight little col-lections he believes would be worthy of space in the V&A, RA or

THERE’S BEEN a lot of talk at the Conservative Party Conference of whether David Cameron is any closer to realising his grand ambi-

tion for a ‘‘Big Society’’. This is the vague notion espoused by the Prime Minister (before he had the power to do anything about it) that we’re a nation that nurtures each other, that cares.

Well, the other week I came face to face with it — and it was not a pleasant experience. Neither was it big or much of a society, to be honest. But it was there, an invis-ible force of human nature that suddenly sprang into action, envel-oping me in a cloak of uncalled-for compassion.

My mother, Philippa, died of a heart attack. She never made it into the operating theatre at the Royal Free Hospital in North London having been rushed there by ambu-lance after complaining of stomach pains. She slipped away close to midnight, holding my father’s hand as a phalanx of doctors and nurses frantically tried to save her.

She was 80 and the kind of per-son who never made a fuss. I’m sure she’d hate me writing about her as part of some mawkish eulogy, so suffice it to say that she lived a good, long, honest and remarkably happy life. Don’t moan, she said, play with the hand you’re dealt with, be stoic to the last and try not to spoil it by being overly emotional.

So I won’t. Because although this piece is inspired by her, it isn’t really about her. It’s about us and our place in a so-called Big Society, presumably one that doesn’t need a harrowing image of a drowned child to wake us from our selfish slumber and do something worth-while. Except, as we have seen these past few weeks with the refugee cri-sis, it’s not quite that simple. Those values certainly exist, yet politicians are worryingly out of kilter with popular sentiment.

My, or our, experience (I include my 89-year-old father and younger brother in this) provides some evi-dence as to why that should be so. It began the moment my mother drew her last breath— though for me it started the morning after when Dad, having waited until sun-

PHOTO: AP

COMMENT

This is our Big SocietyScarred: David and Samantha Cameron see the Big Society through the prism of their own loss

I can’t abide shul but I’d never deny my heritage

TESTIMONY GRANT FELLER

‘Even when there’s no money, Jews are good at seeking culture

CONTINUED FROM P35

absurd his desire to claim owner-ship for a series of selfless actions simply by reimagining them in his own image. And it made me realise why government often fails to inspire, match or even emulate the unthinking decency we show to each other.

Politicians boast of their listen-ing skills and ability to react to the will of the people, but that’s rarely the case. More often than not, like reeds in the wind, we bend to their will. When it does happen — as has been the case following the images of three-year-old Syrian Aylan Kurdi lying face down in the sand on a Turkish beach — our elected offi-cials, as if reluctantly prised free of their protective bubble, suddenly appear disengaged from reality.

I have no doubt that Cameron, scarred by his own personal trau-ma, is well-meaning, but he and his advisers have tried to latch on to something that already works and burdened it with the kinds of rules, politics and economies that encour-age people to pursue vanity-fuelled ego trips. Precisely the opposite of what motivated Leonard, Emma, Lisa and the rest of my small society of temporary shoulders.

Perhaps there was never a halcyon era when a ‘‘big society’’ picked up the pieces in a mass wave of selfless do-gooding. It was always little, meaningful connections that warranted only minimal thanks. I suspect that the difference is that my parents and grandparents were guided by a political establishment that understood why morality is a more important indicator of one’s humanity than quotas, budgets and delegation — often to organisations that operate with little oversight.

If the laudable ethos of the Big Society reveals anything, it is that our institutions and their leaders, more than ever in history, lack the moral compassion to make it work. Yet we as individuals have buckets of it — one only need see the grass roots movement whose generosity of spirit and outrage at political foot-dragging has compelled our government to take action over tackling this century’s most signifi-cant humanitarian crisis.

It’s ironic that Mum always taught me not to make a fuss about things, to stiffen upper lips and keep schtum when things weren’t going your way. Yet sometimes the most human thing is to do the opposite. It’s why we know what’s right and politicians sometimes haven’t a clue.

36 LIFE THEJC.COM THE JEWISH CHRONICLE 9 OCTOBER 2015

rise, called me at the isolated Span-ish villa where my family had been spending the summer.

Up popped Emma, a new friend and colleague who, within seconds of a desperate text from me, pulled in a favour (and spent a fortune) to fly me home on the busiest day of the tourist calendar, after I’d been told no seat was available. And Lisa, my schoolmate’s wife whose con-stant stream of hot food, candles, prayer books and advice helped my father, brother and I concentrate on other things. There was the rabbi I barely know who interrupted her holiday to be a therapist and the rabbi we’ve come to know who guided us through a bewildering maze of religiosity. Neighbours who I’d never met coming to offer sus-tenance, people I’d not seen in dec-

ades whose wisdom I know I’ll need as the weeks and months unfurl.

And Leonard, a jocular, grey-haired ball of energy and a volun-teer from our local synagogue who, I later learned, was roused from his bed on that fateful night by a doc-tor who saw that my father needed help. Devastated, confused and suddenly totally alone after 50-odd years of devoted companionship, it was Leonard who held Dad’s hand. Forms were filled in, state-ments given and all the depressing formalities adhered to before eve-ryone, my mother included, could be ‘‘released’’. But it was a total stranger whose generosity of spirit made it happen.

All these cogs and more in the Jewish ‘‘system’’ — replicas of which exist in all religions — suddenly

clicked seamlessly. The machine took over. A vacuum was filled instantly. People helped for no other reason than wanting to. They weren’t encouraged, or told to, or enticed to by the promise of congratulatory pats on the back, baubles and ermine.

They were not ‘‘big’’ gestures but small ones — often tiny, momen-tary ones. It was not the kind of behaviour that defines ‘‘society’’ but instead defines us as people, con-nects us intimately to one another.

Not under a vast, well-funded umbrella or in front of a grand canvas constructed by government agencies but simple, quiet, pro-found connections that may last a minute or a lifetime.

In fact the whole experiece was so un-Cameronesque as to make

at HMV on Oxford Street, but they had no jobs so I went around the corner to Agnews,” he explains, leading me around the corner him-self to his warren of a Dickensian walk-up duplex, every inch of wall covered with a range of visual treas-ures spanning at least six centuries. “Just don’t call me a collector,” he snaps. “I just find things I love and buy them, like I just fell into the world of art.”

Although his mother, who arrived as a refugee from Hungary one month before war broke out, played her part in stimulating his interest, he concedes: “Jews are

very good, even when there’s very little money around, in seeking out culture. My mother took me to the National Gallery, we went to Ken-wood, and by the age of nine I was taking myself to the theatre to see Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier.”

Born in 1944, Rosenthal got a state education at St Saviours pri-mary school in Warwick Avenue — “at the time when the area was still slummy” — and Westminster City School, while his father, who arrived in the UK during the war with the Free Cezch Army, ran a restaurant for Czech refugees, “and was a bit of a gambler”. But even before he had left university in Leicester, the young history

undergraduate was organising his first art exhibition, Artists in Cornwall, for the Leicester Museum and Art Gallery. No wonder Agnews snapped him up on the spot for a holiday job that lasted three years.

Knighted in 2007, Rosenthal is universally acknowledged with having put London at the centre of the art world during his RA years, championing artists originally reviled by the establishment, from Damien Hirst to Tracey Emin to Sarah Lucas, from whom he has just commissioned a new sculpture for the smart new Nine Elms develop-ment abutting the new US Embassy site.

It’s just one of the diverse consul-

tations into which he has thrown himself between assembling shows everywhere from Berlin to Istanbul, sorting out a Warhol exhibition this winter for the Ashmolean and flying to and from Madrid, where his wife of 25 years, Manuela Mena Marques, mother of their two Lon-don-based daughters, is a curator at the Prado.

But now he is getting ready to step out in London again, making his next major appearance in the capital at the Frieze London Art Fair in Regent’s Park this month with an audacious project.

He is curating eight little col-lections he believes would be worthy of space in the V&A, RA or

THERE’S BEEN a lot of talk at the Conservative Party Conference of whether David Cameron is any closer to realising his grand ambi-

tion for a ‘‘Big Society’’. This is the vague notion espoused by the Prime Minister (before he had the power to do anything about it) that we’re a nation that nurtures each other, that cares.

Well, the other week I came face to face with it — and it was not a pleasant experience. Neither was it big or much of a society, to be honest. But it was there, an invis-ible force of human nature that suddenly sprang into action, envel-oping me in a cloak of uncalled-for compassion.

My mother, Philippa, died of a heart attack. She never made it into the operating theatre at the Royal Free Hospital in North London having been rushed there by ambu-lance after complaining of stomach pains. She slipped away close to midnight, holding my father’s hand as a phalanx of doctors and nurses frantically tried to save her.

She was 80 and the kind of per-son who never made a fuss. I’m sure she’d hate me writing about her as part of some mawkish eulogy, so suffice it to say that she lived a good, long, honest and remarkably happy life. Don’t moan, she said, play with the hand you’re dealt with, be stoic to the last and try not to spoil it by being overly emotional.

So I won’t. Because although this piece is inspired by her, it isn’t really about her. It’s about us and our place in a so-called Big Society, presumably one that doesn’t need a harrowing image of a drowned child to wake us from our selfish slumber and do something worth-while. Except, as we have seen these past few weeks with the refugee cri-sis, it’s not quite that simple. Those values certainly exist, yet politicians are worryingly out of kilter with popular sentiment.

My, or our, experience (I include my 89-year-old father and younger brother in this) provides some evi-dence as to why that should be so. It began the moment my mother drew her last breath— though for me it started the morning after when Dad, having waited until sun-

PHOTO: AP

COMMENT

This is our Big SocietyScarred: David and Samantha Cameron see the Big Society through the prism of their own loss

I can’t abide shul but I’d never deny my heritage

TESTIMONY GRANT FELLER

‘Even when there’s no money, Jews are good at seeking culture

CONTINUED FROM P35

absurd his desire to claim owner-ship for a series of selfless actions simply by reimagining them in his own image. And it made me realise why government often fails to inspire, match or even emulate the unthinking decency we show to each other.

Politicians boast of their listen-ing skills and ability to react to the will of the people, but that’s rarely the case. More often than not, like reeds in the wind, we bend to their will. When it does happen — as has been the case following the images of three-year-old Syrian Aylan Kurdi lying face down in the sand on a Turkish beach — our elected offi-cials, as if reluctantly prised free of their protective bubble, suddenly appear disengaged from reality.

I have no doubt that Cameron, scarred by his own personal trau-ma, is well-meaning, but he and his advisers have tried to latch on to something that already works and burdened it with the kinds of rules, politics and economies that encour-age people to pursue vanity-fuelled ego trips. Precisely the opposite of what motivated Leonard, Emma, Lisa and the rest of my small society of temporary shoulders.

Perhaps there was never a halcyon era when a ‘‘big society’’ picked up the pieces in a mass wave of selfless do-gooding. It was always little, meaningful connections that warranted only minimal thanks. I suspect that the difference is that my parents and grandparents were guided by a political establishment that understood why morality is a more important indicator of one’s humanity than quotas, budgets and delegation — often to organisations that operate with little oversight.

If the laudable ethos of the Big Society reveals anything, it is that our institutions and their leaders, more than ever in history, lack the moral compassion to make it work. Yet we as individuals have buckets of it — one only need see the grass roots movement whose generosity of spirit and outrage at political foot-dragging has compelled our government to take action over tackling this century’s most signifi-cant humanitarian crisis.

It’s ironic that Mum always taught me not to make a fuss about things, to stiffen upper lips and keep schtum when things weren’t going your way. Yet sometimes the most human thing is to do the opposite. It’s why we know what’s right and politicians sometimes haven’t a clue.

LIFE 37THEJC.COMTHE JEWISH CHRONICLE 9 OCTOBER 2015

public institutions like the Belve-dere in Vienna, which lost the stun-ning gilded Klimt portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer that once sat beside The Kiss in a room that no longer knocks visitors’ socks off.

Rosenthal outraged many Jews by writing in The Art Newspaper: “Grandchildren or distant relations of people who had works of art or property taken away by the Nazis do not now have an inalienable right to ownership…If valuable objects have ended up in the public sphere, even on accounts of the ter-rible facts of history, then that is the way it is.”

But you need to read between the lines, because his real argument is

that when looted art that, like the Klimt, is a representation of an era of Jewish history, the community is the loser if the art disappears back into the private sphere.

It is why he quickly adds a rider to the last outrageous thing he says to me about Israel being “Hitler’s last revenge”.

“By which I mean simply the grief the country has caused its own people as well as its neigh-bours with all the troubles and hos-tility. However, I can understand completely why Israel exists and that its setting up was completely inevitable.”

Sir Norman Rosenthal is nothing if not an iconoclast.

FEATURES

I RECENTLY SPENT some time in Israel. It is an astonish-ing country, buzzing with energy and confidence, a magnet for talent and investment — a cauldron of innovation. Meeting entrepreneurs and inves-

tors there, I was inspired and impressed.

Whether it is in aerospace, clean-tech, irrigation systems, software, cybersecurity, pharma or defence systems, Israel is a world-class player. It is an example of how small nations can triumph despite the odds.

Its spending on research and development as a percentage of GDP is the second-highest in the world; it has more scientists and engineers per head than anywhere else; and a booming ecosystem of research institutes and venture capital helps to fuel technology transfer and outside investment — especially from America.

From Teva Pharmaceutical to Elbit Systems to Mobileye, its recent industrial achievements are remarkable. All this derives from brainpower, for Israel has no natu-ral resources and is surrounded by hostile neighbours.

It is proof of the power of techni-cal education, immigration and the benefits of the right sort of military service.

The book Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle, by Dan Senor and Saul Singer, says that another key factor is the cluster effect of having so many high-tech companies, suppliers, researchers and investors concentrated in a small area.

But Israel’s economic success is also about the Jewish spirit of enterprise. This was brought home to me by Derek Taylor’s book Thank You for Your Business: The Jewish Con-tribution to the British Economy — a remarkably thorough survey of just how many companies have been founded, co-founded and/or run by Jewish entrepreneurs over the past century or so in this country.

It is an epic list, from Triumph Motorcycles to Granada TV, from Coats Viyella to Bunzl, from Tesco to Lex, from Photo-Me to Ladbrokes, from Hammerson to Odeon, from Sage to St Ives, from Compass to Carpetright, from Glaxo to Reuters, from Harland and Wolff to Kangol,

emphasises the importance of religion and family among the high achievers.

But that cannot possibly be the full explanation; many other eth-nic minorities could say the same thing, yet none can claim such an extraordinary economic impact, despite a British population of only about 300,000 Jews.

Education and a desire for self-improvement are seen as character-istic of all prosperous, advancing societies, especially among striving immigrants.

But for most of the 20th century, Jews were under-represented in

BUSINESS LUKE JOHNSON

COMMENT

‘

Vibrant: the start-up culture of Tel Aviv.Right: Luke Johnson

It’s great to just stumble across things, you can still dig up great stuff

other great public institutions — “showing that it is still possible, with knowledge and love, to put together outstanding collections of art that demonstrate the highest level of creativity in many different periods of history”.

These will include categories of objects never seen at Frieze before, from unfashionable Italian maiol-ica — “When did you last see an exhibition of maiolica?” he barks — to Egyptian carvings to Paleolithic stones.

There will be German Expression-ist portraits from the likes of Kirch-ner, Grosz and Beckmann based on the Renaissance tradition of “kop-fe”, or woodcut heads; and perhaps

of special interest to Jewish visitors a selection of Japanese netsuke, the kimono ornaments so beloved to the artist and writer Edmund de Waal’s Jewish family and elo-quently described by him in his memoir The Hare With Amber Eyes. Crucially for Frieze, his co-curators are European gallerists who would not otherwise have a presence at the show (the netsuke are from the London dealer Sydney Moss).

Yet Collections is an oddly named project for a man who says he’s opposed to the idea of setting out to make formal acquisitions and categorise them: “It’s better to just stumble across things — and you can still dig up some great stuff in

Portobello, if you know what you’re looking for, like the Ruisdael print I picked up of a Dutch 17th-century Jewish cemetery. Two prints were made, and now I have the pair.”

They are among a few items of Judaica he’s surprisingly proud to own for a man who can’t abide synagogues: “The last time I put my head in was Yom Kippur about 15 years ago,” he says of the old Dean Street shul down the road from his flat. “I found it intellectually embarrassing.” On the other hand, he says: “I would never deny my Jewishness.”

He has, however, denied the right of Holocaust victims to restitution of their looted art at the expense of

universities in Britain, suggesting that conventional attainment was not the reason they progressed in the commercial world.

A propensity for self-employment was clearly important, perhaps reflecting the culture of individualism so apparent in modern Israel, as well as the lack of a traditional hierarchy.

Similarly, among many immigrants there is a tendency towards risk-taking as a way of life, because these are self-selecting adventurers who have taken the plunge and moved country — and probably have little to lose, and perhaps no choice.

I wonder if DNA is on their side. The earliest agricultural societies settled in the Levant, in about 10,000BC, during the New Stone Age. By cultivating cereals and domesticating livestock, these Neolithic farmers were probably the world’s first entrepreneurs. They established the principle of deferred gratification for greater gain, as opposed to the nomadic lifestyle that was prevalent until then.

So, almost certainly, groups such as the Jews, Armenians and Lebanese have been developing enterprises and trading goods longer than any others. All these ethnic groups have diaspora who exhibit exceptional capabilities in capitalism.

Of course, they have high performers in many other walks of life, but it is business that interests me.

Ultimately I think it is culture and communities that matter most for any cohort of would-be entrepreneurs. Role models, local networks, hard work and a respect for accomplishment are vital. The external environment is crucial too — Jews have done well in Britain as we have the rule of law and strong property rights.

Israel is not a perfect society: I visited the West Bank, thanks to some Jewish philanthropists, and saw some of the challenges faced by the Palestinian community.

Perhaps Israel’s ingenious entrepreneurs can also solve the political problems of the Holy Land, and find an outcome in which all religions live in harmony.

Luke Johnson is chairman of Risk Capital Partners and the Centre for Entrepreneurs.The Sunday Times/News Syndication

from EMI to Shell… and many hundreds of other significant com-panies.

A large proportion of the entre-preneurs responsible for these businesses were first or second-generation immigrants, many from modest backgrounds.

I have spent much of my busi-ness career in partnership with very able Jewish entrepreneurs, so I can testify as to their capabilities and ambition.

Of course, the question that really fascinates me is this: what is the magic they possess that means so many do well in business? Taylor

The real reason Israel works? It’s in the DNA

‘Taking risks has become a way of life

PHOTOS: FLASH 90/THE TIMES TOM PILSTON

36 LIFE THEJC.COM THE JEWISH CHRONICLE 9 OCTOBER 2015

rise, called me at the isolated Span-ish villa where my family had been spending the summer.

Up popped Emma, a new friend and colleague who, within seconds of a desperate text from me, pulled in a favour (and spent a fortune) to fly me home on the busiest day of the tourist calendar, after I’d been told no seat was available. And Lisa, my schoolmate’s wife whose con-stant stream of hot food, candles, prayer books and advice helped my father, brother and I concentrate on other things. There was the rabbi I barely know who interrupted her holiday to be a therapist and the rabbi we’ve come to know who guided us through a bewildering maze of religiosity. Neighbours who I’d never met coming to offer sus-tenance, people I’d not seen in dec-

ades whose wisdom I know I’ll need as the weeks and months unfurl.

And Leonard, a jocular, grey-haired ball of energy and a volun-teer from our local synagogue who, I later learned, was roused from his bed on that fateful night by a doc-tor who saw that my father needed help. Devastated, confused and suddenly totally alone after 50-odd years of devoted companionship, it was Leonard who held Dad’s hand. Forms were filled in, state-ments given and all the depressing formalities adhered to before eve-ryone, my mother included, could be ‘‘released’’. But it was a total stranger whose generosity of spirit made it happen.

All these cogs and more in the Jewish ‘‘system’’ — replicas of which exist in all religions — suddenly

clicked seamlessly. The machine took over. A vacuum was filled instantly. People helped for no other reason than wanting to. They weren’t encouraged, or told to, or enticed to by the promise of congratulatory pats on the back, baubles and ermine.

They were not ‘‘big’’ gestures but small ones — often tiny, momen-tary ones. It was not the kind of behaviour that defines ‘‘society’’ but instead defines us as people, con-nects us intimately to one another.

Not under a vast, well-funded umbrella or in front of a grand canvas constructed by government agencies but simple, quiet, pro-found connections that may last a minute or a lifetime.

In fact the whole experiece was so un-Cameronesque as to make

at HMV on Oxford Street, but they had no jobs so I went around the corner to Agnews,” he explains, leading me around the corner him-self to his warren of a Dickensian walk-up duplex, every inch of wall covered with a range of visual treas-ures spanning at least six centuries. “Just don’t call me a collector,” he snaps. “I just find things I love and buy them, like I just fell into the world of art.”

Although his mother, who arrived as a refugee from Hungary one month before war broke out, played her part in stimulating his interest, he concedes: “Jews are

very good, even when there’s very little money around, in seeking out culture. My mother took me to the National Gallery, we went to Ken-wood, and by the age of nine I was taking myself to the theatre to see Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier.”

Born in 1944, Rosenthal got a state education at St Saviours pri-mary school in Warwick Avenue — “at the time when the area was still slummy” — and Westminster City School, while his father, who arrived in the UK during the war with the Free Cezch Army, ran a restaurant for Czech refugees, “and was a bit of a gambler”. But even before he had left university in Leicester, the young history

undergraduate was organising his first art exhibition, Artists in Cornwall, for the Leicester Museum and Art Gallery. No wonder Agnews snapped him up on the spot for a holiday job that lasted three years.

Knighted in 2007, Rosenthal is universally acknowledged with having put London at the centre of the art world during his RA years, championing artists originally reviled by the establishment, from Damien Hirst to Tracey Emin to Sarah Lucas, from whom he has just commissioned a new sculpture for the smart new Nine Elms develop-ment abutting the new US Embassy site.

It’s just one of the diverse consul-

tations into which he has thrown himself between assembling shows everywhere from Berlin to Istanbul, sorting out a Warhol exhibition this winter for the Ashmolean and flying to and from Madrid, where his wife of 25 years, Manuela Mena Marques, mother of their two Lon-don-based daughters, is a curator at the Prado.

But now he is getting ready to step out in London again, making his next major appearance in the capital at the Frieze London Art Fair in Regent’s Park this month with an audacious project.

He is curating eight little col-lections he believes would be worthy of space in the V&A, RA or

THERE’S BEEN a lot of talk at the Conservative Party Conference of whether David Cameron is any closer to realising his grand ambi-

tion for a ‘‘Big Society’’. This is the vague notion espoused by the Prime Minister (before he had the power to do anything about it) that we’re a nation that nurtures each other, that cares.

Well, the other week I came face to face with it — and it was not a pleasant experience. Neither was it big or much of a society, to be honest. But it was there, an invis-ible force of human nature that suddenly sprang into action, envel-oping me in a cloak of uncalled-for compassion.

My mother, Philippa, died of a heart attack. She never made it into the operating theatre at the Royal Free Hospital in North London having been rushed there by ambu-lance after complaining of stomach pains. She slipped away close to midnight, holding my father’s hand as a phalanx of doctors and nurses frantically tried to save her.

She was 80 and the kind of per-son who never made a fuss. I’m sure she’d hate me writing about her as part of some mawkish eulogy, so suffice it to say that she lived a good, long, honest and remarkably happy life. Don’t moan, she said, play with the hand you’re dealt with, be stoic to the last and try not to spoil it by being overly emotional.

So I won’t. Because although this piece is inspired by her, it isn’t really about her. It’s about us and our place in a so-called Big Society, presumably one that doesn’t need a harrowing image of a drowned child to wake us from our selfish slumber and do something worth-while. Except, as we have seen these past few weeks with the refugee cri-sis, it’s not quite that simple. Those values certainly exist, yet politicians are worryingly out of kilter with popular sentiment.

My, or our, experience (I include my 89-year-old father and younger brother in this) provides some evi-dence as to why that should be so. It began the moment my mother drew her last breath— though for me it started the morning after when Dad, having waited until sun-

PHOTO: AP

COMMENT

This is our Big SocietyScarred: David and Samantha Cameron see the Big Society through the prism of their own loss

I can’t abide shul but I’d never deny my heritage

TESTIMONY GRANT FELLER

‘Even when there’s no money, Jews are good at seeking culture

CONTINUED FROM P41

absurd his desire to claim owner-ship for a series of selfless actions simply by reimagining them in his own image. And it made me realise why government often fails to inspire, match or even emulate the unthinking decency we show to each other.

Politicians boast of their listen-ing skills and ability to react to the will of the people, but that’s rarely the case. More often than not, like reeds in the wind, we bend to their will. When it does happen — as has been the case following the images of three-year-old Syrian Aylan Kurdi lying face down in the sand on a Turkish beach — our elected offi-cials, as if reluctantly prised free of their protective bubble, suddenly appear disengaged from reality.

I have no doubt that Cameron, scarred by his own personal trau-ma, is well-meaning, but he and his advisers have tried to latch on to something that already works and burdened it with the kinds of rules, politics and economies that encour-age people to pursue vanity-fuelled ego trips. Precisely the opposite of what motivated Leonard, Emma, Lisa and the rest of my small society of temporary shoulders.

Perhaps there was never a halcyon era when a ‘‘big society’’ picked up the pieces in a mass wave of selfless do-gooding. It was always little, meaningful connections that warranted only minimal thanks. I suspect that the difference is that my parents and grandparents were guided by a political establishment that understood why morality is a more important indicator of one’s humanity than quotas, budgets and delegation — often to organisations that operate with little oversight.

If the laudable ethos of the Big Society reveals anything, it is that our institutions and their leaders, more than ever in history, lack the moral compassion to make it work. Yet we as individuals have buckets of it — one only need see the grass roots movement whose generosity of spirit and outrage at political foot-dragging has compelled our government to take action over tackling this century’s most signifi-cant humanitarian crisis.

It’s ironic that Mum always taught me not to make a fuss about things, to stiffen upper lips and keep schtum when things weren’t going your way. Yet sometimes the most human thing is to do the opposite. It’s why we know what’s right and politicians sometimes haven’t a clue.

LIFE 37THEJC.COMTHE JEWISH CHRONICLE 9 OCTOBER 2015

public institutions like the Belve-dere in Vienna, which lost the stun-ning gilded Klimt portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer that once sat beside The Kiss in a room that no longer knocks visitors’ socks off.

Rosenthal outraged many Jews by writing in The Art Newspaper: “Grandchildren or distant relations of people who had works of art or property taken away by the Nazis do not now have an inalienable right to ownership…If valuable objects have ended up in the public sphere, even on accounts of the ter-rible facts of history, then that is the way it is.”

But you need to read between the lines, because his real argument is

that when looted art that, like the Klimt, is a representation of an era of Jewish history, the community is the loser if the art disappears back into the private sphere.

It is why he quickly adds a rider to the last outrageous thing he says to me about Israel being “Hitler’s last revenge”.

“By which I mean simply the grief the country has caused its own people as well as its neigh-bours with all the troubles and hos-tility. However, I can understand completely why Israel exists and that its setting up was completely inevitable.”

Sir Norman Rosenthal is nothing if not an iconoclast.

FEATURES

I RECENTLY SPENT some time in Israel. It is an astonish-ing country, buzzing with energy and confidence, a magnet for talent and investment — a cauldron of innovation. Meeting entrepreneurs and inves-

tors there, I was inspired and impressed.

Whether it is in aerospace, clean-tech, irrigation systems, software, cybersecurity, pharma or defence systems, Israel is a world-class player. It is an example of how small nations can triumph despite the odds.

Its spending on research and development as a percentage of GDP is the second-highest in the world; it has more scientists and engineers per head than anywhere else; and a booming ecosystem of research institutes and venture capital helps to fuel technology transfer and outside investment — especially from America.

From Teva Pharmaceutical to Elbit Systems to Mobileye, its recent industrial achievements are remarkable. All this derives from brainpower, for Israel has no natu-ral resources and is surrounded by hostile neighbours.

It is proof of the power of techni-cal education, immigration and the benefits of the right sort of military service.

The book Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle, by Dan Senor and Saul Singer, says that another key factor is the cluster effect of having so many high-tech companies, suppliers, researchers and investors concentrated in a small area.

But Israel’s economic success is also about the Jewish spirit of enterprise. This was brought home to me by Derek Taylor’s book Thank You for Your Business: The Jewish Con-tribution to the British Economy — a remarkably thorough survey of just how many companies have been founded, co-founded and/or run by Jewish entrepreneurs over the past century or so in this country.

It is an epic list, from Triumph Motorcycles to Granada TV, from Coats Viyella to Bunzl, from Tesco to Lex, from Photo-Me to Ladbrokes, from Hammerson to Odeon, from Sage to St Ives, from Compass to Carpetright, from Glaxo to Reuters, from Harland and Wolff to Kangol,

emphasises the importance of religion and family among the high achievers.

But that cannot possibly be the full explanation; many other eth-nic minorities could say the same thing, yet none can claim such an extraordinary economic impact, despite a British population of only about 300,000 Jews.

Education and a desire for self-improvement are seen as character-istic of all prosperous, advancing societies, especially among striving immigrants.

But for most of the 20th century, Jews were under-represented in

BUSINESS LUKE JOHNSON

COMMENT

‘

Vibrant: the start-up culture of Tel Aviv.Right: Luke Johnson

It’s great to just stumble across things, you can still dig up great stuff

other great public institutions — “showing that it is still possible, with knowledge and love, to put together outstanding collections of art that demonstrate the highest level of creativity in many different periods of history”.

These will include categories of objects never seen at Frieze before, from unfashionable Italian maiol-ica — “When did you last see an exhibition of maiolica?” he barks — to Egyptian carvings to Paleolithic stones.

There will be German Expression-ist portraits from the likes of Kirch-ner, Grosz and Beckmann based on the Renaissance tradition of “kop-fe”, or woodcut heads; and perhaps

of special interest to Jewish visitors a selection of Japanese netsuke, the kimono ornaments so beloved to the artist and writer Edmund de Waal’s Jewish family and elo-quently described by him in his memoir The Hare With Amber Eyes. Crucially for Frieze, his co-curators are European gallerists who would not otherwise have a presence at the show (the netsuke are from the London dealer Sydney Moss).

Yet Collections is an oddly named project for a man who says he’s opposed to the idea of setting out to make formal acquisitions and categorise them: “It’s better to just stumble across things — and you can still dig up some great stuff in

Portobello, if you know what you’re looking for, like the Ruisdael print I picked up of a Dutch 17th-century Jewish cemetery. Two prints were made, and now I have the pair.”

They are among a few items of Judaica he’s surprisingly proud to own for a man who can’t abide synagogues: “The last time I put my head in was Yom Kippur about 15 years ago,” he says of the old Dean Street shul down the road from his flat. “I found it intellectually embarrassing.” On the other hand, he says: “I would never deny my Jewishness.”

He has, however, denied the right of Holocaust victims to restitution of their looted art at the expense of

universities in Britain, suggesting that conventional attainment was not the reason they progressed in the commercial world.

A propensity for self-employment was clearly important, perhaps reflecting the culture of individualism so apparent in modern Israel, as well as the lack of a traditional hierarchy.

Similarly, among many immigrants there is a tendency towards risk-taking as a way of life, because these are self-selecting adventurers who have taken the plunge and moved country — and probably have little to lose, and perhaps no choice.

I wonder if DNA is on their side. The earliest agricultural societies settled in the Levant, in about 10,000BC, during the New Stone Age. By cultivating cereals and domesticating livestock, these Neolithic farmers were probably the world’s first entrepreneurs. They established the principle of deferred gratification for greater gain, as opposed to the nomadic lifestyle that was prevalent until then.

So, almost certainly, groups such as the Jews, Armenians and Lebanese have been developing enterprises and trading goods longer than any others. All these ethnic groups have diaspora who exhibit exceptional capabilities in capitalism.

Of course, they have high performers in many other walks of life, but it is business that interests me.

Ultimately I think it is culture and communities that matter most for any cohort of would-be entrepreneurs. Role models, local networks, hard work and a respect for accomplishment are vital. The external environment is crucial too — Jews have done well in Britain as we have the rule of law and strong property rights.

Israel is not a perfect society: I visited the West Bank, thanks to some Jewish philanthropists, and saw some of the challenges faced by the Palestinian community.

Perhaps Israel’s ingenious entrepreneurs can also solve the political problems of the Holy Land, and find an outcome in which all religions live in harmony.

Luke Johnson is chairman of Risk Capital Partners and the Centre for Entrepreneurs.The Sunday Times/News Syndication

from EMI to Shell… and many hundreds of other significant com-panies.

A large proportion of the entre-preneurs responsible for these businesses were first or second-generation immigrants, many from modest backgrounds.

I have spent much of my busi-ness career in partnership with very able Jewish entrepreneurs, so I can testify as to their capabilities and ambition.

Of course, the question that really fascinates me is this: what is the magic they possess that means so many do well in business? Taylor

The real reason Israel works? It’s in the DNA

‘Taking risks has become a way of life

PHOTOS: FLASH 90/THE TIMES TOM PILSTON

36 LIFE THEJC.COM THE JEWISH CHRONICLE 9 OCTOBER 2015

rise, called me at the isolated Span-ish villa where my family had been spending the summer.

Up popped Emma, a new friend and colleague who, within seconds of a desperate text from me, pulled in a favour (and spent a fortune) to fly me home on the busiest day of the tourist calendar, after I’d been told no seat was available. And Lisa, my schoolmate’s wife whose con-stant stream of hot food, candles, prayer books and advice helped my father, brother and I concentrate on other things. There was the rabbi I barely know who interrupted her holiday to be a therapist and the rabbi we’ve come to know who guided us through a bewildering maze of religiosity. Neighbours who I’d never met coming to offer sus-tenance, people I’d not seen in dec-

ades whose wisdom I know I’ll need as the weeks and months unfurl.

And Leonard, a jocular, grey-haired ball of energy and a volun-teer from our local synagogue who, I later learned, was roused from his bed on that fateful night by a doc-tor who saw that my father needed help. Devastated, confused and suddenly totally alone after 50-odd years of devoted companionship, it was Leonard who held Dad’s hand. Forms were filled in, state-ments given and all the depressing formalities adhered to before eve-ryone, my mother included, could be ‘‘released’’. But it was a total stranger whose generosity of spirit made it happen.

All these cogs and more in the Jewish ‘‘system’’ — replicas of which exist in all religions — suddenly

clicked seamlessly. The machine took over. A vacuum was filled instantly. People helped for no other reason than wanting to. They weren’t encouraged, or told to, or enticed to by the promise of congratulatory pats on the back, baubles and ermine.

They were not ‘‘big’’ gestures but small ones — often tiny, momen-tary ones. It was not the kind of behaviour that defines ‘‘society’’ but instead defines us as people, con-nects us intimately to one another.

Not under a vast, well-funded umbrella or in front of a grand canvas constructed by government agencies but simple, quiet, pro-found connections that may last a minute or a lifetime.

In fact the whole experiece was so un-Cameronesque as to make

at HMV on Oxford Street, but they had no jobs so I went around the corner to Agnews,” he explains, leading me around the corner him-self to his warren of a Dickensian walk-up duplex, every inch of wall covered with a range of visual treas-ures spanning at least six centuries. “Just don’t call me a collector,” he snaps. “I just find things I love and buy them, like I just fell into the world of art.”

Although his mother, who arrived as a refugee from Hungary one month before war broke out, played her part in stimulating his interest, he concedes: “Jews are

very good, even when there’s very little money around, in seeking out culture. My mother took me to the National Gallery, we went to Ken-wood, and by the age of nine I was taking myself to the theatre to see Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier.”

Born in 1944, Rosenthal got a state education at St Saviours pri-mary school in Warwick Avenue — “at the time when the area was still slummy” — and Westminster City School, while his father, who arrived in the UK during the war with the Free Cezch Army, ran a restaurant for Czech refugees, “and was a bit of a gambler”. But even before he had left university in Leicester, the young history

undergraduate was organising his first art exhibition, Artists in Cornwall, for the Leicester Museum and Art Gallery. No wonder Agnews snapped him up on the spot for a holiday job that lasted three years.

Knighted in 2007, Rosenthal is universally acknowledged with having put London at the centre of the art world during his RA years, championing artists originally reviled by the establishment, from Damien Hirst to Tracey Emin to Sarah Lucas, from whom he has just commissioned a new sculpture for the smart new Nine Elms develop-ment abutting the new US Embassy site.

It’s just one of the diverse consul-

tations into which he has thrown himself between assembling shows everywhere from Berlin to Istanbul, sorting out a Warhol exhibition this winter for the Ashmolean and flying to and from Madrid, where his wife of 25 years, Manuela Mena Marques, mother of their two Lon-don-based daughters, is a curator at the Prado.

But now he is getting ready to step out in London again, making his next major appearance in the capital at the Frieze London Art Fair in Regent’s Park this month with an audacious project.

He is curating eight little col-lections he believes would be worthy of space in the V&A, RA or

THERE’S BEEN a lot of talk at the Conservative Party Conference of whether David Cameron is any closer to realising his grand ambi-

tion for a ‘‘Big Society’’. This is the vague notion espoused by the Prime Minister (before he had the power to do anything about it) that we’re a nation that nurtures each other, that cares.

Well, the other week I came face to face with it — and it was not a pleasant experience. Neither was it big or much of a society, to be honest. But it was there, an invis-ible force of human nature that suddenly sprang into action, envel-oping me in a cloak of uncalled-for compassion.

My mother, Philippa, died of a heart attack. She never made it into the operating theatre at the Royal Free Hospital in North London having been rushed there by ambu-lance after complaining of stomach pains. She slipped away close to midnight, holding my father’s hand as a phalanx of doctors and nurses frantically tried to save her.

She was 80 and the kind of per-son who never made a fuss. I’m sure she’d hate me writing about her as part of some mawkish eulogy, so suffice it to say that she lived a good, long, honest and remarkably happy life. Don’t moan, she said, play with the hand you’re dealt with, be stoic to the last and try not to spoil it by being overly emotional.

So I won’t. Because although this piece is inspired by her, it isn’t really about her. It’s about us and our place in a so-called Big Society, presumably one that doesn’t need a harrowing image of a drowned child to wake us from our selfish slumber and do something worth-while. Except, as we have seen these past few weeks with the refugee cri-sis, it’s not quite that simple. Those values certainly exist, yet politicians are worryingly out of kilter with popular sentiment.

My, or our, experience (I include my 89-year-old father and younger brother in this) provides some evi-dence as to why that should be so. It began the moment my mother drew her last breath— though for me it started the morning after when Dad, having waited until sun-

PHOTO: AP

COMMENT

This is our Big SocietyScarred: David and Samantha Cameron see the Big Society through the prism of their own loss

I can’t abide shul but I’d never deny my heritage

TESTIMONY GRANT FELLER

‘Even when there’s no money, Jews are good at seeking culture

CONTINUED FROM P41

absurd his desire to claim owner-ship for a series of selfless actions simply by reimagining them in his own image. And it made me realise why government often fails to inspire, match or even emulate the unthinking decency we show to each other.

Politicians boast of their listen-ing skills and ability to react to the will of the people, but that’s rarely the case. More often than not, like reeds in the wind, we bend to their will. When it does happen — as has been the case following the images of three-year-old Syrian Aylan Kurdi lying face down in the sand on a Turkish beach — our elected offi-cials, as if reluctantly prised free of their protective bubble, suddenly appear disengaged from reality.

I have no doubt that Cameron, scarred by his own personal trau-ma, is well-meaning, but he and his advisers have tried to latch on to something that already works and burdened it with the kinds of rules, politics and economies that encour-age people to pursue vanity-fuelled ego trips. Precisely the opposite of what motivated Leonard, Emma, Lisa and the rest of my small society of temporary shoulders.

Perhaps there was never a halcyon era when a ‘‘big society’’ picked up the pieces in a mass wave of selfless do-gooding. It was always little, meaningful connections that warranted only minimal thanks. I suspect that the difference is that my parents and grandparents were guided by a political establishment that understood why morality is a more important indicator of one’s humanity than quotas, budgets and delegation — often to organisations that operate with little oversight.

If the laudable ethos of the Big Society reveals anything, it is that our institutions and their leaders, more than ever in history, lack the moral compassion to make it work. Yet we as individuals have buckets of it — one only need see the grass roots movement whose generosity of spirit and outrage at political foot-dragging has compelled our government to take action over tackling this century’s most signifi-cant humanitarian crisis.

It’s ironic that Mum always taught me not to make a fuss about things, to stiffen upper lips and keep schtum when things weren’t going your way. Yet sometimes the most human thing is to do the opposite. It’s why we know what’s right and politicians sometimes haven’t a clue.

LIFE 37THEJC.COMTHE JEWISH CHRONICLE 9 OCTOBER 2015

public institutions like the Belve-dere in Vienna, which lost the stun-ning gilded Klimt portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer that once sat beside The Kiss in a room that no longer knocks visitors’ socks off.

Rosenthal outraged many Jews by writing in The Art Newspaper: “Grandchildren or distant relations of people who had works of art or property taken away by the Nazis do not now have an inalienable right to ownership…If valuable objects have ended up in the public sphere, even on accounts of the ter-rible facts of history, then that is the way it is.”

But you need to read between the lines, because his real argument is

that when looted art that, like the Klimt, is a representation of an era of Jewish history, the community is the loser if the art disappears back into the private sphere.

It is why he quickly adds a rider to the last outrageous thing he says to me about Israel being “Hitler’s last revenge”.

“By which I mean simply the grief the country has caused its own people as well as its neigh-bours with all the troubles and hos-tility. However, I can understand completely why Israel exists and that its setting up was completely inevitable.”

Sir Norman Rosenthal is nothing if not an iconoclast.

FEATURES

I RECENTLY SPENT some time in Israel. It is an astonish-ing country, buzzing with energy and confidence, a magnet for talent and investment — a cauldron of innovation. Meeting entrepreneurs and inves-

tors there, I was inspired and impressed.

Whether it is in aerospace, clean-tech, irrigation systems, software, cybersecurity, pharma or defence systems, Israel is a world-class player. It is an example of how small nations can triumph despite the odds.

Its spending on research and development as a percentage of GDP is the second-highest in the world; it has more scientists and engineers per head than anywhere else; and a booming ecosystem of research institutes and venture capital helps to fuel technology transfer and outside investment — especially from America.

From Teva Pharmaceutical to Elbit Systems to Mobileye, its recent industrial achievements are remarkable. All this derives from brainpower, for Israel has no natu-ral resources and is surrounded by hostile neighbours.

It is proof of the power of techni-cal education, immigration and the benefits of the right sort of military service.

The book Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle, by Dan Senor and Saul Singer, says that another key factor is the cluster effect of having so many high-tech companies, suppliers, researchers and investors concentrated in a small area.

But Israel’s economic success is also about the Jewish spirit of enterprise. This was brought home to me by Derek Taylor’s book Thank You for Your Business: The Jewish Con-tribution to the British Economy — a remarkably thorough survey of just how many companies have been founded, co-founded and/or run by Jewish entrepreneurs over the past century or so in this country.

It is an epic list, from Triumph Motorcycles to Granada TV, from Coats Viyella to Bunzl, from Tesco to Lex, from Photo-Me to Ladbrokes, from Hammerson to Odeon, from Sage to St Ives, from Compass to Carpetright, from Glaxo to Reuters, from Harland and Wolff to Kangol,

emphasises the importance of religion and family among the high achievers.

But that cannot possibly be the full explanation; many other eth-nic minorities could say the same thing, yet none can claim such an extraordinary economic impact, despite a British population of only about 300,000 Jews.

Education and a desire for self-improvement are seen as character-istic of all prosperous, advancing societies, especially among striving immigrants.

But for most of the 20th century, Jews were under-represented in

BUSINESS LUKE JOHNSON

COMMENT

‘

Vibrant: the start-up culture of Tel Aviv.Right: Luke Johnson

It’s great to just stumble across things, you can still dig up great stuff

other great public institutions — “showing that it is still possible, with knowledge and love, to put together outstanding collections of art that demonstrate the highest level of creativity in many different periods of history”.

These will include categories of objects never seen at Frieze before, from unfashionable Italian maiol-ica — “When did you last see an exhibition of maiolica?” he barks — to Egyptian carvings to Paleolithic stones.

There will be German Expression-ist portraits from the likes of Kirch-ner, Grosz and Beckmann based on the Renaissance tradition of “kop-fe”, or woodcut heads; and perhaps

of special interest to Jewish visitors a selection of Japanese netsuke, the kimono ornaments so beloved to the artist and writer Edmund de Waal’s Jewish family and elo-quently described by him in his memoir The Hare With Amber Eyes. Crucially for Frieze, his co-curators are European gallerists who would not otherwise have a presence at the show (the netsuke are from the London dealer Sydney Moss).

Yet Collections is an oddly named project for a man who says he’s opposed to the idea of setting out to make formal acquisitions and categorise them: “It’s better to just stumble across things — and you can still dig up some great stuff in

Portobello, if you know what you’re looking for, like the Ruisdael print I picked up of a Dutch 17th-century Jewish cemetery. Two prints were made, and now I have the pair.”

They are among a few items of Judaica he’s surprisingly proud to own for a man who can’t abide synagogues: “The last time I put my head in was Yom Kippur about 15 years ago,” he says of the old Dean Street shul down the road from his flat. “I found it intellectually embarrassing.” On the other hand, he says: “I would never deny my Jewishness.”

He has, however, denied the right of Holocaust victims to restitution of their looted art at the expense of

universities in Britain, suggesting that conventional attainment was not the reason they progressed in the commercial world.

A propensity for self-employment was clearly important, perhaps reflecting the culture of individualism so apparent in modern Israel, as well as the lack of a traditional hierarchy.

Similarly, among many immigrants there is a tendency towards risk-taking as a way of life, because these are self-selecting adventurers who have taken the plunge and moved country — and probably have little to lose, and perhaps no choice.

I wonder if DNA is on their side. The earliest agricultural societies settled in the Levant, in about 10,000BC, during the New Stone Age. By cultivating cereals and domesticating livestock, these Neolithic farmers were probably the world’s first entrepreneurs. They established the principle of deferred gratification for greater gain, as opposed to the nomadic lifestyle that was prevalent until then.

So, almost certainly, groups such as the Jews, Armenians and Lebanese have been developing enterprises and trading goods longer than any others. All these ethnic groups have diaspora who exhibit exceptional capabilities in capitalism.

Of course, they have high performers in many other walks of life, but it is business that interests me.

Ultimately I think it is culture and communities that matter most for any cohort of would-be entrepreneurs. Role models, local networks, hard work and a respect for accomplishment are vital. The external environment is crucial too — Jews have done well in Britain as we have the rule of law and strong property rights.

Israel is not a perfect society: I visited the West Bank, thanks to some Jewish philanthropists, and saw some of the challenges faced by the Palestinian community.

Perhaps Israel’s ingenious entrepreneurs can also solve the political problems of the Holy Land, and find an outcome in which all religions live in harmony.

Luke Johnson is chairman of Risk Capital Partners and the Centre for Entrepreneurs.The Sunday Times/News Syndication

from EMI to Shell… and many hundreds of other significant com-panies.

A large proportion of the entre-preneurs responsible for these businesses were first or second-generation immigrants, many from modest backgrounds.

I have spent much of my busi-ness career in partnership with very able Jewish entrepreneurs, so I can testify as to their capabilities and ambition.

Of course, the question that really fascinates me is this: what is the magic they possess that means so many do well in business? Taylor

The real reason Israel works? It’s in the DNA

‘Taking risks has become a way of life

PHOTOS: FLASH 90/THE TIMES TOM PILSTON

36 LIFE THEJC.COM THE JEWISH CHRONICLE 9 OCTOBER 2015

rise, called me at the isolated Span-ish villa where my family had been spending the summer.

Up popped Emma, a new friend and colleague who, within seconds of a desperate text from me, pulled in a favour (and spent a fortune) to fly me home on the busiest day of the tourist calendar, after I’d been told no seat was available. And Lisa, my schoolmate’s wife whose con-stant stream of hot food, candles, prayer books and advice helped my father, brother and I concentrate on other things. There was the rabbi I barely know who interrupted her holiday to be a therapist and the rabbi we’ve come to know who guided us through a bewildering maze of religiosity. Neighbours who I’d never met coming to offer sus-tenance, people I’d not seen in dec-

ades whose wisdom I know I’ll need as the weeks and months unfurl.

And Leonard, a jocular, grey-haired ball of energy and a volun-teer from our local synagogue who, I later learned, was roused from his bed on that fateful night by a doc-tor who saw that my father needed help. Devastated, confused and suddenly totally alone after 50-odd years of devoted companionship, it was Leonard who held Dad’s hand. Forms were filled in, state-ments given and all the depressing formalities adhered to before eve-ryone, my mother included, could be ‘‘released’’. But it was a total stranger whose generosity of spirit made it happen.

All these cogs and more in the Jewish ‘‘system’’ — replicas of which exist in all religions — suddenly

clicked seamlessly. The machine took over. A vacuum was filled instantly. People helped for no other reason than wanting to. They weren’t encouraged, or told to, or enticed to by the promise of congratulatory pats on the back, baubles and ermine.

They were not ‘‘big’’ gestures but small ones — often tiny, momen-tary ones. It was not the kind of behaviour that defines ‘‘society’’ but instead defines us as people, con-nects us intimately to one another.

Not under a vast, well-funded umbrella or in front of a grand canvas constructed by government agencies but simple, quiet, pro-found connections that may last a minute or a lifetime.

In fact the whole experiece was so un-Cameronesque as to make

at HMV on Oxford Street, but they had no jobs so I went around the corner to Agnews,” he explains, leading me around the corner him-self to his warren of a Dickensian walk-up duplex, every inch of wall covered with a range of visual treas-ures spanning at least six centuries. “Just don’t call me a collector,” he snaps. “I just find things I love and buy them, like I just fell into the world of art.”

Although his mother, who arrived as a refugee from Hungary one month before war broke out, played her part in stimulating his interest, he concedes: “Jews are

very good, even when there’s very little money around, in seeking out culture. My mother took me to the National Gallery, we went to Ken-wood, and by the age of nine I was taking myself to the theatre to see Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier.”

Born in 1944, Rosenthal got a state education at St Saviours pri-mary school in Warwick Avenue — “at the time when the area was still slummy” — and Westminster City School, while his father, who arrived in the UK during the war with the Free Cezch Army, ran a restaurant for Czech refugees, “and was a bit of a gambler”. But even before he had left university in Leicester, the young history

undergraduate was organising his first art exhibition, Artists in Cornwall, for the Leicester Museum and Art Gallery. No wonder Agnews snapped him up on the spot for a holiday job that lasted three years.

Knighted in 2007, Rosenthal is universally acknowledged with having put London at the centre of the art world during his RA years, championing artists originally reviled by the establishment, from Damien Hirst to Tracey Emin to Sarah Lucas, from whom he has just commissioned a new sculpture for the smart new Nine Elms develop-ment abutting the new US Embassy site.

It’s just one of the diverse consul-

tations into which he has thrown himself between assembling shows everywhere from Berlin to Istanbul, sorting out a Warhol exhibition this winter for the Ashmolean and flying to and from Madrid, where his wife of 25 years, Manuela Mena Marques, mother of their two Lon-don-based daughters, is a curator at the Prado.

But now he is getting ready to step out in London again, making his next major appearance in the capital at the Frieze London Art Fair in Regent’s Park this month with an audacious project.

He is curating eight little col-lections he believes would be worthy of space in the V&A, RA or

THERE’S BEEN a lot of talk at the Conservative Party Conference of whether David Cameron is any closer to realising his grand ambi-

tion for a ‘‘Big Society’’. This is the vague notion espoused by the Prime Minister (before he had the power to do anything about it) that we’re a nation that nurtures each other, that cares.

Well, the other week I came face to face with it — and it was not a pleasant experience. Neither was it big or much of a society, to be honest. But it was there, an invis-ible force of human nature that suddenly sprang into action, envel-oping me in a cloak of uncalled-for compassion.

My mother, Philippa, died of a heart attack. She never made it into the operating theatre at the Royal Free Hospital in North London having been rushed there by ambu-lance after complaining of stomach pains. She slipped away close to midnight, holding my father’s hand as a phalanx of doctors and nurses frantically tried to save her.

She was 80 and the kind of per-son who never made a fuss. I’m sure she’d hate me writing about her as part of some mawkish eulogy, so suffice it to say that she lived a good, long, honest and remarkably happy life. Don’t moan, she said, play with the hand you’re dealt with, be stoic to the last and try not to spoil it by being overly emotional.

So I won’t. Because although this piece is inspired by her, it isn’t really about her. It’s about us and our place in a so-called Big Society, presumably one that doesn’t need a harrowing image of a drowned child to wake us from our selfish slumber and do something worth-while. Except, as we have seen these past few weeks with the refugee cri-sis, it’s not quite that simple. Those values certainly exist, yet politicians are worryingly out of kilter with popular sentiment.

My, or our, experience (I include my 89-year-old father and younger brother in this) provides some evi-dence as to why that should be so. It began the moment my mother drew her last breath— though for me it started the morning after when Dad, having waited until sun-

PHOTO: AP

COMMENT

This is our Big SocietyScarred: David and Samantha Cameron see the Big Society through the prism of their own loss

I can’t abide shul but I’d never deny my heritage

TESTIMONY GRANT FELLER

‘Even when there’s no money, Jews are good at seeking culture

CONTINUED FROM P41

absurd his desire to claim owner-ship for a series of selfless actions simply by reimagining them in his own image. And it made me realise why government often fails to inspire, match or even emulate the unthinking decency we show to each other.

Politicians boast of their listen-ing skills and ability to react to the will of the people, but that’s rarely the case. More often than not, like reeds in the wind, we bend to their will. When it does happen — as has been the case following the images of three-year-old Syrian Aylan Kurdi lying face down in the sand on a Turkish beach — our elected offi-cials, as if reluctantly prised free of their protective bubble, suddenly appear disengaged from reality.

I have no doubt that Cameron, scarred by his own personal trau-ma, is well-meaning, but he and his advisers have tried to latch on to something that already works and burdened it with the kinds of rules, politics and economies that encour-age people to pursue vanity-fuelled ego trips. Precisely the opposite of what motivated Leonard, Emma, Lisa and the rest of my small society of temporary shoulders.

Perhaps there was never a halcyon era when a ‘‘big society’’ picked up the pieces in a mass wave of selfless do-gooding. It was always little, meaningful connections that warranted only minimal thanks. I suspect that the difference is that my parents and grandparents were guided by a political establishment that understood why morality is a more important indicator of one’s humanity than quotas, budgets and delegation — often to organisations that operate with little oversight.

If the laudable ethos of the Big Society reveals anything, it is that our institutions and their leaders, more than ever in history, lack the moral compassion to make it work. Yet we as individuals have buckets of it — one only need see the grass roots movement whose generosity of spirit and outrage at political foot-dragging has compelled our government to take action over tackling this century’s most signifi-cant humanitarian crisis.

It’s ironic that Mum always taught me not to make a fuss about things, to stiffen upper lips and keep schtum when things weren’t going your way. Yet sometimes the most human thing is to do the opposite. It’s why we know what’s right and politicians sometimes haven’t a clue.

LIFE 37THEJC.COMTHE JEWISH CHRONICLE 9 OCTOBER 2015

public institutions like the Belve-dere in Vienna, which lost the stun-ning gilded Klimt portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer that once sat beside The Kiss in a room that no longer knocks visitors’ socks off.

Rosenthal outraged many Jews by writing in The Art Newspaper: “Grandchildren or distant relations of people who had works of art or property taken away by the Nazis do not now have an inalienable right to ownership…If valuable objects have ended up in the public sphere, even on accounts of the ter-rible facts of history, then that is the way it is.”

But you need to read between the lines, because his real argument is

that when looted art that, like the Klimt, is a representation of an era of Jewish history, the community is the loser if the art disappears back into the private sphere.

It is why he quickly adds a rider to the last outrageous thing he says to me about Israel being “Hitler’s last revenge”.

“By which I mean simply the grief the country has caused its own people as well as its neigh-bours with all the troubles and hos-tility. However, I can understand completely why Israel exists and that its setting up was completely inevitable.”

Sir Norman Rosenthal is nothing if not an iconoclast.

FEATURES

I RECENTLY SPENT some time in Israel. It is an astonish-ing country, buzzing with energy and confidence, a magnet for talent and investment — a cauldron of innovation. Meeting entrepreneurs and inves-

tors there, I was inspired and impressed.

Whether it is in aerospace, clean-tech, irrigation systems, software, cybersecurity, pharma or defence systems, Israel is a world-class player. It is an example of how small nations can triumph despite the odds.

Its spending on research and development as a percentage of GDP is the second-highest in the world; it has more scientists and engineers per head than anywhere else; and a booming ecosystem of research institutes and venture capital helps to fuel technology transfer and outside investment — especially from America.

From Teva Pharmaceutical to Elbit Systems to Mobileye, its recent industrial achievements are remarkable. All this derives from brainpower, for Israel has no natu-ral resources and is surrounded by hostile neighbours.

It is proof of the power of techni-cal education, immigration and the benefits of the right sort of military service.

The book Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle, by Dan Senor and Saul Singer, says that another key factor is the cluster effect of having so many high-tech companies, suppliers, researchers and investors concentrated in a small area.

But Israel’s economic success is also about the Jewish spirit of enterprise. This was brought home to me by Derek Taylor’s book Thank You for Your Business: The Jewish Con-tribution to the British Economy — a remarkably thorough survey of just how many companies have been founded, co-founded and/or run by Jewish entrepreneurs over the past century or so in this country.

It is an epic list, from Triumph Motorcycles to Granada TV, from Coats Viyella to Bunzl, from Tesco to Lex, from Photo-Me to Ladbrokes, from Hammerson to Odeon, from Sage to St Ives, from Compass to Carpetright, from Glaxo to Reuters, from Harland and Wolff to Kangol,

emphasises the importance of religion and family among the high achievers.

But that cannot possibly be the full explanation; many other eth-nic minorities could say the same thing, yet none can claim such an extraordinary economic impact, despite a British population of only about 300,000 Jews.

Education and a desire for self-improvement are seen as character-istic of all prosperous, advancing societies, especially among striving immigrants.

But for most of the 20th century, Jews were under-represented in

BUSINESS LUKE JOHNSON

COMMENT

‘

Vibrant: the start-up culture of Tel Aviv.Right: Luke Johnson

It’s great to just stumble across things, you can still dig up great stuff

other great public institutions — “showing that it is still possible, with knowledge and love, to put together outstanding collections of art that demonstrate the highest level of creativity in many different periods of history”.

These will include categories of objects never seen at Frieze before, from unfashionable Italian maiol-ica — “When did you last see an exhibition of maiolica?” he barks — to Egyptian carvings to Paleolithic stones.

There will be German Expression-ist portraits from the likes of Kirch-ner, Grosz and Beckmann based on the Renaissance tradition of “kop-fe”, or woodcut heads; and perhaps

of special interest to Jewish visitors a selection of Japanese netsuke, the kimono ornaments so beloved to the artist and writer Edmund de Waal’s Jewish family and elo-quently described by him in his memoir The Hare With Amber Eyes. Crucially for Frieze, his co-curators are European gallerists who would not otherwise have a presence at the show (the netsuke are from the London dealer Sydney Moss).

Yet Collections is an oddly named project for a man who says he’s opposed to the idea of setting out to make formal acquisitions and categorise them: “It’s better to just stumble across things — and you can still dig up some great stuff in

Portobello, if you know what you’re looking for, like the Ruisdael print I picked up of a Dutch 17th-century Jewish cemetery. Two prints were made, and now I have the pair.”

They are among a few items of Judaica he’s surprisingly proud to own for a man who can’t abide synagogues: “The last time I put my head in was Yom Kippur about 15 years ago,” he says of the old Dean Street shul down the road from his flat. “I found it intellectually embarrassing.” On the other hand, he says: “I would never deny my Jewishness.”

He has, however, denied the right of Holocaust victims to restitution of their looted art at the expense of

universities in Britain, suggesting that conventional attainment was not the reason they progressed in the commercial world.

A propensity for self-employment was clearly important, perhaps reflecting the culture of individualism so apparent in modern Israel, as well as the lack of a traditional hierarchy.

Similarly, among many immigrants there is a tendency towards risk-taking as a way of life, because these are self-selecting adventurers who have taken the plunge and moved country — and probably have little to lose, and perhaps no choice.

I wonder if DNA is on their side. The earliest agricultural societies settled in the Levant, in about 10,000BC, during the New Stone Age. By cultivating cereals and domesticating livestock, these Neolithic farmers were probably the world’s first entrepreneurs. They established the principle of deferred gratification for greater gain, as opposed to the nomadic lifestyle that was prevalent until then.

So, almost certainly, groups such as the Jews, Armenians and Lebanese have been developing enterprises and trading goods longer than any others. All these ethnic groups have diaspora who exhibit exceptional capabilities in capitalism.

Of course, they have high performers in many other walks of life, but it is business that interests me.

Ultimately I think it is culture and communities that matter most for any cohort of would-be entrepreneurs. Role models, local networks, hard work and a respect for accomplishment are vital. The external environment is crucial too — Jews have done well in Britain as we have the rule of law and strong property rights.

Israel is not a perfect society: I visited the West Bank, thanks to some Jewish philanthropists, and saw some of the challenges faced by the Palestinian community.

Perhaps Israel’s ingenious entrepreneurs can also solve the political problems of the Holy Land, and find an outcome in which all religions live in harmony.

Luke Johnson is chairman of Risk Capital Partners and the Centre for Entrepreneurs.The Sunday Times/News Syndication

from EMI to Shell… and many hundreds of other significant com-panies.

A large proportion of the entre-preneurs responsible for these businesses were first or second-generation immigrants, many from modest backgrounds.

I have spent much of my busi-ness career in partnership with very able Jewish entrepreneurs, so I can testify as to their capabilities and ambition.

Of course, the question that really fascinates me is this: what is the magic they possess that means so many do well in business? Taylor

The real reason Israel works? It’s in the DNA

‘Taking risks has become a way of life

PHOTOS: FLASH 90/THE TIMES TOM PILSTON

36 LIFE THEJC.COM THE JEWISH CHRONICLE 9 OCTOBER 2015

rise, called me at the isolated Span-ish villa where my family had been spending the summer.

Up popped Emma, a new friend and colleague who, within seconds of a desperate text from me, pulled in a favour (and spent a fortune) to fly me home on the busiest day of the tourist calendar, after I’d been told no seat was available. And Lisa, my schoolmate’s wife whose con-stant stream of hot food, candles, prayer books and advice helped my father, brother and I concentrate on other things. There was the rabbi I barely know who interrupted her holiday to be a therapist and the rabbi we’ve come to know who guided us through a bewildering maze of religiosity. Neighbours who I’d never met coming to offer sus-tenance, people I’d not seen in dec-

ades whose wisdom I know I’ll need as the weeks and months unfurl.

And Leonard, a jocular, grey-haired ball of energy and a volun-teer from our local synagogue who, I later learned, was roused from his bed on that fateful night by a doc-tor who saw that my father needed help. Devastated, confused and suddenly totally alone after 50-odd years of devoted companionship, it was Leonard who held Dad’s hand. Forms were filled in, state-ments given and all the depressing formalities adhered to before eve-ryone, my mother included, could be ‘‘released’’. But it was a total stranger whose generosity of spirit made it happen.

All these cogs and more in the Jewish ‘‘system’’ — replicas of which exist in all religions — suddenly

clicked seamlessly. The machine took over. A vacuum was filled instantly. People helped for no other reason than wanting to. They weren’t encouraged, or told to, or enticed to by the promise of congratulatory pats on the back, baubles and ermine.

They were not ‘‘big’’ gestures but small ones — often tiny, momen-tary ones. It was not the kind of behaviour that defines ‘‘society’’ but instead defines us as people, con-nects us intimately to one another.

Not under a vast, well-funded umbrella or in front of a grand canvas constructed by government agencies but simple, quiet, pro-found connections that may last a minute or a lifetime.

In fact the whole experiece was so un-Cameronesque as to make

at HMV on Oxford Street, but they had no jobs so I went around the corner to Agnews,” he explains, leading me around the corner him-self to his warren of a Dickensian walk-up duplex, every inch of wall covered with a range of visual treas-ures spanning at least six centuries. “Just don’t call me a collector,” he snaps. “I just find things I love and buy them, like I just fell into the world of art.”

Although his mother, who arrived as a refugee from Hungary one month before war broke out, played her part in stimulating his interest, he concedes: “Jews are

very good, even when there’s very little money around, in seeking out culture. My mother took me to the National Gallery, we went to Ken-wood, and by the age of nine I was taking myself to the theatre to see Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier.”

Born in 1944, Rosenthal got a state education at St Saviours pri-mary school in Warwick Avenue — “at the time when the area was still slummy” — and Westminster City School, while his father, who arrived in the UK during the war with the Free Cezch Army, ran a restaurant for Czech refugees, “and was a bit of a gambler”. But even before he had left university in Leicester, the young history

undergraduate was organising his first art exhibition, Artists in Cornwall, for the Leicester Museum and Art Gallery. No wonder Agnews snapped him up on the spot for a holiday job that lasted three years.

Knighted in 2007, Rosenthal is universally acknowledged with having put London at the centre of the art world during his RA years, championing artists originally reviled by the establishment, from Damien Hirst to Tracey Emin to Sarah Lucas, from whom he has just commissioned a new sculpture for the smart new Nine Elms develop-ment abutting the new US Embassy site.

It’s just one of the diverse consul-

tations into which he has thrown himself between assembling shows everywhere from Berlin to Istanbul, sorting out a Warhol exhibition this winter for the Ashmolean and flying to and from Madrid, where his wife of 25 years, Manuela Mena Marques, mother of their two Lon-don-based daughters, is a curator at the Prado.

But now he is getting ready to step out in London again, making his next major appearance in the capital at the Frieze London Art Fair in Regent’s Park this month with an audacious project.

He is curating eight little col-lections he believes would be worthy of space in the V&A, RA or

THERE’S BEEN a lot of talk at the Conservative Party Conference of whether David Cameron is any closer to realising his grand ambi-

tion for a ‘‘Big Society’’. This is the vague notion espoused by the Prime Minister (before he had the power to do anything about it) that we’re a nation that nurtures each other, that cares.

Well, the other week I came face to face with it — and it was not a pleasant experience. Neither was it big or much of a society, to be honest. But it was there, an invis-ible force of human nature that suddenly sprang into action, envel-oping me in a cloak of uncalled-for compassion.

My mother, Philippa, died of a heart attack. She never made it into the operating theatre at the Royal Free Hospital in North London having been rushed there by ambu-lance after complaining of stomach pains. She slipped away close to midnight, holding my father’s hand as a phalanx of doctors and nurses frantically tried to save her.

She was 80 and the kind of per-son who never made a fuss. I’m sure she’d hate me writing about her as part of some mawkish eulogy, so suffice it to say that she lived a good, long, honest and remarkably happy life. Don’t moan, she said, play with the hand you’re dealt with, be stoic to the last and try not to spoil it by being overly emotional.

So I won’t. Because although this piece is inspired by her, it isn’t really about her. It’s about us and our place in a so-called Big Society, presumably one that doesn’t need a harrowing image of a drowned child to wake us from our selfish slumber and do something worth-while. Except, as we have seen these past few weeks with the refugee cri-sis, it’s not quite that simple. Those values certainly exist, yet politicians are worryingly out of kilter with popular sentiment.

My, or our, experience (I include my 89-year-old father and younger brother in this) provides some evi-dence as to why that should be so. It began the moment my mother drew her last breath— though for me it started the morning after when Dad, having waited until sun-

PHOTO: AP

COMMENT

This is our Big SocietyScarred: David and Samantha Cameron see the Big Society through the prism of their own loss

I can’t abide shul but I’d never deny my heritage

TESTIMONY GRANT FELLER

‘Even when there’s no money, Jews are good at seeking culture

CONTINUED FROM P41

absurd his desire to claim owner-ship for a series of selfless actions simply by reimagining them in his own image. And it made me realise why government often fails to inspire, match or even emulate the unthinking decency we show to each other.

Politicians boast of their listen-ing skills and ability to react to the will of the people, but that’s rarely the case. More often than not, like reeds in the wind, we bend to their will. When it does happen — as has been the case following the images of three-year-old Syrian Aylan Kurdi lying face down in the sand on a Turkish beach — our elected offi-cials, as if reluctantly prised free of their protective bubble, suddenly appear disengaged from reality.

I have no doubt that Cameron, scarred by his own personal trau-ma, is well-meaning, but he and his advisers have tried to latch on to something that already works and burdened it with the kinds of rules, politics and economies that encour-age people to pursue vanity-fuelled ego trips. Precisely the opposite of what motivated Leonard, Emma, Lisa and the rest of my small society of temporary shoulders.

Perhaps there was never a halcyon era when a ‘‘big society’’ picked up the pieces in a mass wave of selfless do-gooding. It was always little, meaningful connections that warranted only minimal thanks. I suspect that the difference is that my parents and grandparents were guided by a political establishment that understood why morality is a more important indicator of one’s humanity than quotas, budgets and delegation — often to organisations that operate with little oversight.

If the laudable ethos of the Big Society reveals anything, it is that our institutions and their leaders, more than ever in history, lack the moral compassion to make it work. Yet we as individuals have buckets of it — one only need see the grass roots movement whose generosity of spirit and outrage at political foot-dragging has compelled our government to take action over tackling this century’s most signifi-cant humanitarian crisis.

It’s ironic that Mum always taught me not to make a fuss about things, to stiffen upper lips and keep schtum when things weren’t going your way. Yet sometimes the most human thing is to do the opposite. It’s why we know what’s right and politicians sometimes haven’t a clue.

LIFE 37THEJC.COMTHE JEWISH CHRONICLE 9 OCTOBER 2015

public institutions like the Belve-dere in Vienna, which lost the stun-ning gilded Klimt portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer that once sat beside The Kiss in a room that no longer knocks visitors’ socks off.

Rosenthal outraged many Jews by writing in The Art Newspaper: “Grandchildren or distant relations of people who had works of art or property taken away by the Nazis do not now have an inalienable right to ownership…If valuable objects have ended up in the public sphere, even on accounts of the ter-rible facts of history, then that is the way it is.”

But you need to read between the lines, because his real argument is

that when looted art that, like the Klimt, is a representation of an era of Jewish history, the community is the loser if the art disappears back into the private sphere.

It is why he quickly adds a rider to the last outrageous thing he says to me about Israel being “Hitler’s last revenge”.

“By which I mean simply the grief the country has caused its own people as well as its neigh-bours with all the troubles and hos-tility. However, I can understand completely why Israel exists and that its setting up was completely inevitable.”

Sir Norman Rosenthal is nothing if not an iconoclast.

FEATURES

I RECENTLY SPENT some time in Israel. It is an astonish-ing country, buzzing with energy and confidence, a magnet for talent and investment — a cauldron of innovation. Meeting entrepreneurs and inves-

tors there, I was inspired and impressed.

Whether it is in aerospace, clean-tech, irrigation systems, software, cybersecurity, pharma or defence systems, Israel is a world-class player. It is an example of how small nations can triumph despite the odds.

Its spending on research and development as a percentage of GDP is the second-highest in the world; it has more scientists and engineers per head than anywhere else; and a booming ecosystem of research institutes and venture capital helps to fuel technology transfer and outside investment — especially from America.

From Teva Pharmaceutical to Elbit Systems to Mobileye, its recent industrial achievements are remarkable. All this derives from brainpower, for Israel has no natu-ral resources and is surrounded by hostile neighbours.

It is proof of the power of techni-cal education, immigration and the benefits of the right sort of military service.

The book Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle, by Dan Senor and Saul Singer, says that another key factor is the cluster effect of having so many high-tech companies, suppliers, researchers and investors concentrated in a small area.

But Israel’s economic success is also about the Jewish spirit of enterprise. This was brought home to me by Derek Taylor’s book Thank You for Your Business: The Jewish Con-tribution to the British Economy — a remarkably thorough survey of just how many companies have been founded, co-founded and/or run by Jewish entrepreneurs over the past century or so in this country.

It is an epic list, from Triumph Motorcycles to Granada TV, from Coats Viyella to Bunzl, from Tesco to Lex, from Photo-Me to Ladbrokes, from Hammerson to Odeon, from Sage to St Ives, from Compass to Carpetright, from Glaxo to Reuters, from Harland and Wolff to Kangol,

emphasises the importance of religion and family among the high achievers.

But that cannot possibly be the full explanation; many other eth-nic minorities could say the same thing, yet none can claim such an extraordinary economic impact, despite a British population of only about 300,000 Jews.

Education and a desire for self-improvement are seen as character-istic of all prosperous, advancing societies, especially among striving immigrants.

But for most of the 20th century, Jews were under-represented in

BUSINESS LUKE JOHNSON

COMMENT

‘

Vibrant: the start-up culture of Tel Aviv.Right: Luke Johnson

It’s great to just stumble across things, you can still dig up great stuff

other great public institutions — “showing that it is still possible, with knowledge and love, to put together outstanding collections of art that demonstrate the highest level of creativity in many different periods of history”.

These will include categories of objects never seen at Frieze before, from unfashionable Italian maiol-ica — “When did you last see an exhibition of maiolica?” he barks — to Egyptian carvings to Paleolithic stones.

There will be German Expression-ist portraits from the likes of Kirch-ner, Grosz and Beckmann based on the Renaissance tradition of “kop-fe”, or woodcut heads; and perhaps

of special interest to Jewish visitors a selection of Japanese netsuke, the kimono ornaments so beloved to the artist and writer Edmund de Waal’s Jewish family and elo-quently described by him in his memoir The Hare With Amber Eyes. Crucially for Frieze, his co-curators are European gallerists who would not otherwise have a presence at the show (the netsuke are from the London dealer Sydney Moss).

Yet Collections is an oddly named project for a man who says he’s opposed to the idea of setting out to make formal acquisitions and categorise them: “It’s better to just stumble across things — and you can still dig up some great stuff in

Portobello, if you know what you’re looking for, like the Ruisdael print I picked up of a Dutch 17th-century Jewish cemetery. Two prints were made, and now I have the pair.”

They are among a few items of Judaica he’s surprisingly proud to own for a man who can’t abide synagogues: “The last time I put my head in was Yom Kippur about 15 years ago,” he says of the old Dean Street shul down the road from his flat. “I found it intellectually embarrassing.” On the other hand, he says: “I would never deny my Jewishness.”

He has, however, denied the right of Holocaust victims to restitution of their looted art at the expense of

universities in Britain, suggesting that conventional attainment was not the reason they progressed in the commercial world.

A propensity for self-employment was clearly important, perhaps reflecting the culture of individualism so apparent in modern Israel, as well as the lack of a traditional hierarchy.

Similarly, among many immigrants there is a tendency towards risk-taking as a way of life, because these are self-selecting adventurers who have taken the plunge and moved country — and probably have little to lose, and perhaps no choice.

I wonder if DNA is on their side. The earliest agricultural societies settled in the Levant, in about 10,000BC, during the New Stone Age. By cultivating cereals and domesticating livestock, these Neolithic farmers were probably the world’s first entrepreneurs. They established the principle of deferred gratification for greater gain, as opposed to the nomadic lifestyle that was prevalent until then.

So, almost certainly, groups such as the Jews, Armenians and Lebanese have been developing enterprises and trading goods longer than any others. All these ethnic groups have diaspora who exhibit exceptional capabilities in capitalism.

Of course, they have high performers in many other walks of life, but it is business that interests me.

Ultimately I think it is culture and communities that matter most for any cohort of would-be entrepreneurs. Role models, local networks, hard work and a respect for accomplishment are vital. The external environment is crucial too — Jews have done well in Britain as we have the rule of law and strong property rights.

Israel is not a perfect society: I visited the West Bank, thanks to some Jewish philanthropists, and saw some of the challenges faced by the Palestinian community.

Perhaps Israel’s ingenious entrepreneurs can also solve the political problems of the Holy Land, and find an outcome in which all religions live in harmony.

Luke Johnson is chairman of Risk Capital Partners and the Centre for Entrepreneurs.The Sunday Times/News Syndication

from EMI to Shell… and many hundreds of other significant com-panies.

A large proportion of the entre-preneurs responsible for these businesses were first or second-generation immigrants, many from modest backgrounds.

I have spent much of my busi-ness career in partnership with very able Jewish entrepreneurs, so I can testify as to their capabilities and ambition.

Of course, the question that really fascinates me is this: what is the magic they possess that means so many do well in business? Taylor

The real reason Israel works? It’s in the DNA

‘Taking risks has become a way of life

PHOTOS: FLASH 90/THE TIMES TOM PILSTON

36 LIFE THEJC.COM THE JEWISH CHRONICLE 9 OCTOBER 2015

rise, called me at the isolated Span-ish villa where my family had been spending the summer.

Up popped Emma, a new friend and colleague who, within seconds of a desperate text from me, pulled in a favour (and spent a fortune) to fly me home on the busiest day of the tourist calendar, after I’d been told no seat was available. And Lisa, my schoolmate’s wife whose con-stant stream of hot food, candles, prayer books and advice helped my father, brother and I concentrate on other things. There was the rabbi I barely know who interrupted her holiday to be a therapist and the rabbi we’ve come to know who guided us through a bewildering maze of religiosity. Neighbours who I’d never met coming to offer sus-tenance, people I’d not seen in dec-

ades whose wisdom I know I’ll need as the weeks and months unfurl.

And Leonard, a jocular, grey-haired ball of energy and a volun-teer from our local synagogue who, I later learned, was roused from his bed on that fateful night by a doc-tor who saw that my father needed help. Devastated, confused and suddenly totally alone after 50-odd years of devoted companionship, it was Leonard who held Dad’s hand. Forms were filled in, state-ments given and all the depressing formalities adhered to before eve-ryone, my mother included, could be ‘‘released’’. But it was a total stranger whose generosity of spirit made it happen.

All these cogs and more in the Jewish ‘‘system’’ — replicas of which exist in all religions — suddenly

clicked seamlessly. The machine took over. A vacuum was filled instantly. People helped for no other reason than wanting to. They weren’t encouraged, or told to, or enticed to by the promise of congratulatory pats on the back, baubles and ermine.

They were not ‘‘big’’ gestures but small ones — often tiny, momen-tary ones. It was not the kind of behaviour that defines ‘‘society’’ but instead defines us as people, con-nects us intimately to one another.

Not under a vast, well-funded umbrella or in front of a grand canvas constructed by government agencies but simple, quiet, pro-found connections that may last a minute or a lifetime.

In fact the whole experiece was so un-Cameronesque as to make

at HMV on Oxford Street, but they had no jobs so I went around the corner to Agnews,” he explains, leading me around the corner him-self to his warren of a Dickensian walk-up duplex, every inch of wall covered with a range of visual treas-ures spanning at least six centuries. “Just don’t call me a collector,” he snaps. “I just find things I love and buy them, like I just fell into the world of art.”

Although his mother, who arrived as a refugee from Hungary one month before war broke out, played her part in stimulating his interest, he concedes: “Jews are

very good, even when there’s very little money around, in seeking out culture. My mother took me to the National Gallery, we went to Ken-wood, and by the age of nine I was taking myself to the theatre to see Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier.”

Born in 1944, Rosenthal got a state education at St Saviours pri-mary school in Warwick Avenue — “at the time when the area was still slummy” — and Westminster City School, while his father, who arrived in the UK during the war with the Free Cezch Army, ran a restaurant for Czech refugees, “and was a bit of a gambler”. But even before he had left university in Leicester, the young history

undergraduate was organising his first art exhibition, Artists in Cornwall, for the Leicester Museum and Art Gallery. No wonder Agnews snapped him up on the spot for a holiday job that lasted three years.

Knighted in 2007, Rosenthal is universally acknowledged with having put London at the centre of the art world during his RA years, championing artists originally reviled by the establishment, from Damien Hirst to Tracey Emin to Sarah Lucas, from whom he has just commissioned a new sculpture for the smart new Nine Elms develop-ment abutting the new US Embassy site.

It’s just one of the diverse consul-

tations into which he has thrown himself between assembling shows everywhere from Berlin to Istanbul, sorting out a Warhol exhibition this winter for the Ashmolean and flying to and from Madrid, where his wife of 25 years, Manuela Mena Marques, mother of their two Lon-don-based daughters, is a curator at the Prado.

But now he is getting ready to step out in London again, making his next major appearance in the capital at the Frieze London Art Fair in Regent’s Park this month with an audacious project.

He is curating eight little col-lections he believes would be worthy of space in the V&A, RA or

THERE’S BEEN a lot of talk at the Conservative Party Conference of whether David Cameron is any closer to realising his grand ambi-

tion for a ‘‘Big Society’’. This is the vague notion espoused by the Prime Minister (before he had the power to do anything about it) that we’re a nation that nurtures each other, that cares.

Well, the other week I came face to face with it — and it was not a pleasant experience. Neither was it big or much of a society, to be honest. But it was there, an invis-ible force of human nature that suddenly sprang into action, envel-oping me in a cloak of uncalled-for compassion.

My mother, Philippa, died of a heart attack. She never made it into the operating theatre at the Royal Free Hospital in North London having been rushed there by ambu-lance after complaining of stomach pains. She slipped away close to midnight, holding my father’s hand as a phalanx of doctors and nurses frantically tried to save her.

She was 80 and the kind of per-son who never made a fuss. I’m sure she’d hate me writing about her as part of some mawkish eulogy, so suffice it to say that she lived a good, long, honest and remarkably happy life. Don’t moan, she said, play with the hand you’re dealt with, be stoic to the last and try not to spoil it by being overly emotional.

So I won’t. Because although this piece is inspired by her, it isn’t really about her. It’s about us and our place in a so-called Big Society, presumably one that doesn’t need a harrowing image of a drowned child to wake us from our selfish slumber and do something worth-while. Except, as we have seen these past few weeks with the refugee cri-sis, it’s not quite that simple. Those values certainly exist, yet politicians are worryingly out of kilter with popular sentiment.

My, or our, experience (I include my 89-year-old father and younger brother in this) provides some evi-dence as to why that should be so. It began the moment my mother drew her last breath— though for me it started the morning after when Dad, having waited until sun-

PHOTO: AP

COMMENT

This is our Big SocietyScarred: David and Samantha Cameron see the Big Society through the prism of their own loss

I can’t abide shul but I’d never deny my heritage

TESTIMONY GRANT FELLER

‘Even when there’s no money, Jews are good at seeking culture

CONTINUED FROM P41

absurd his desire to claim owner-ship for a series of selfless actions simply by reimagining them in his own image. And it made me realise why government often fails to inspire, match or even emulate the unthinking decency we show to each other.

Politicians boast of their listen-ing skills and ability to react to the will of the people, but that’s rarely the case. More often than not, like reeds in the wind, we bend to their will. When it does happen — as has been the case following the images of three-year-old Syrian Aylan Kurdi lying face down in the sand on a Turkish beach — our elected offi-cials, as if reluctantly prised free of their protective bubble, suddenly appear disengaged from reality.

I have no doubt that Cameron, scarred by his own personal trau-ma, is well-meaning, but he and his advisers have tried to latch on to something that already works and burdened it with the kinds of rules, politics and economies that encour-age people to pursue vanity-fuelled ego trips. Precisely the opposite of what motivated Leonard, Emma, Lisa and the rest of my small society of temporary shoulders.

Perhaps there was never a halcyon era when a ‘‘big society’’ picked up the pieces in a mass wave of selfless do-gooding. It was always little, meaningful connections that warranted only minimal thanks. I suspect that the difference is that my parents and grandparents were guided by a political establishment that understood why morality is a more important indicator of one’s humanity than quotas, budgets and delegation — often to organisations that operate with little oversight.

If the laudable ethos of the Big Society reveals anything, it is that our institutions and their leaders, more than ever in history, lack the moral compassion to make it work. Yet we as individuals have buckets of it — one only need see the grass roots movement whose generosity of spirit and outrage at political foot-dragging has compelled our government to take action over tackling this century’s most signifi-cant humanitarian crisis.

It’s ironic that Mum always taught me not to make a fuss about things, to stiffen upper lips and keep schtum when things weren’t going your way. Yet sometimes the most human thing is to do the opposite. It’s why we know what’s right and politicians sometimes haven’t a clue.

LIFE 37THEJC.COMTHE JEWISH CHRONICLE 9 OCTOBER 2015

public institutions like the Belve-dere in Vienna, which lost the stun-ning gilded Klimt portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer that once sat beside The Kiss in a room that no longer knocks visitors’ socks off.

Rosenthal outraged many Jews by writing in The Art Newspaper: “Grandchildren or distant relations of people who had works of art or property taken away by the Nazis do not now have an inalienable right to ownership…If valuable objects have ended up in the public sphere, even on accounts of the ter-rible facts of history, then that is the way it is.”

But you need to read between the lines, because his real argument is

that when looted art that, like the Klimt, is a representation of an era of Jewish history, the community is the loser if the art disappears back into the private sphere.

It is why he quickly adds a rider to the last outrageous thing he says to me about Israel being “Hitler’s last revenge”.

“By which I mean simply the grief the country has caused its own people as well as its neigh-bours with all the troubles and hos-tility. However, I can understand completely why Israel exists and that its setting up was completely inevitable.”

Sir Norman Rosenthal is nothing if not an iconoclast.

FEATURES

I RECENTLY SPENT some time in Israel. It is an astonish-ing country, buzzing with energy and confidence, a magnet for talent and investment — a cauldron of innovation. Meeting entrepreneurs and inves-

tors there, I was inspired and impressed.

Whether it is in aerospace, clean-tech, irrigation systems, software, cybersecurity, pharma or defence systems, Israel is a world-class player. It is an example of how small nations can triumph despite the odds.

Its spending on research and development as a percentage of GDP is the second-highest in the world; it has more scientists and engineers per head than anywhere else; and a booming ecosystem of research institutes and venture capital helps to fuel technology transfer and outside investment — especially from America.

From Teva Pharmaceutical to Elbit Systems to Mobileye, its recent industrial achievements are remarkable. All this derives from brainpower, for Israel has no natu-ral resources and is surrounded by hostile neighbours.

It is proof of the power of techni-cal education, immigration and the benefits of the right sort of military service.

The book Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle, by Dan Senor and Saul Singer, says that another key factor is the cluster effect of having so many high-tech companies, suppliers, researchers and investors concentrated in a small area.

But Israel’s economic success is also about the Jewish spirit of enterprise. This was brought home to me by Derek Taylor’s book Thank You for Your Business: The Jewish Con-tribution to the British Economy — a remarkably thorough survey of just how many companies have been founded, co-founded and/or run by Jewish entrepreneurs over the past century or so in this country.

It is an epic list, from Triumph Motorcycles to Granada TV, from Coats Viyella to Bunzl, from Tesco to Lex, from Photo-Me to Ladbrokes, from Hammerson to Odeon, from Sage to St Ives, from Compass to Carpetright, from Glaxo to Reuters, from Harland and Wolff to Kangol,

emphasises the importance of religion and family among the high achievers.

But that cannot possibly be the full explanation; many other eth-nic minorities could say the same thing, yet none can claim such an extraordinary economic impact, despite a British population of only about 300,000 Jews.

Education and a desire for self-improvement are seen as character-istic of all prosperous, advancing societies, especially among striving immigrants.

But for most of the 20th century, Jews were under-represented in

BUSINESS LUKE JOHNSON

COMMENT

‘

Vibrant: the start-up culture of Tel Aviv.Right: Luke Johnson

It’s great to just stumble across things, you can still dig up great stuff

other great public institutions — “showing that it is still possible, with knowledge and love, to put together outstanding collections of art that demonstrate the highest level of creativity in many different periods of history”.

These will include categories of objects never seen at Frieze before, from unfashionable Italian maiol-ica — “When did you last see an exhibition of maiolica?” he barks — to Egyptian carvings to Paleolithic stones.

There will be German Expression-ist portraits from the likes of Kirch-ner, Grosz and Beckmann based on the Renaissance tradition of “kop-fe”, or woodcut heads; and perhaps

of special interest to Jewish visitors a selection of Japanese netsuke, the kimono ornaments so beloved to the artist and writer Edmund de Waal’s Jewish family and elo-quently described by him in his memoir The Hare With Amber Eyes. Crucially for Frieze, his co-curators are European gallerists who would not otherwise have a presence at the show (the netsuke are from the London dealer Sydney Moss).

Yet Collections is an oddly named project for a man who says he’s opposed to the idea of setting out to make formal acquisitions and categorise them: “It’s better to just stumble across things — and you can still dig up some great stuff in

Portobello, if you know what you’re looking for, like the Ruisdael print I picked up of a Dutch 17th-century Jewish cemetery. Two prints were made, and now I have the pair.”

They are among a few items of Judaica he’s surprisingly proud to own for a man who can’t abide synagogues: “The last time I put my head in was Yom Kippur about 15 years ago,” he says of the old Dean Street shul down the road from his flat. “I found it intellectually embarrassing.” On the other hand, he says: “I would never deny my Jewishness.”

He has, however, denied the right of Holocaust victims to restitution of their looted art at the expense of

universities in Britain, suggesting that conventional attainment was not the reason they progressed in the commercial world.

A propensity for self-employment was clearly important, perhaps reflecting the culture of individualism so apparent in modern Israel, as well as the lack of a traditional hierarchy.

Similarly, among many immigrants there is a tendency towards risk-taking as a way of life, because these are self-selecting adventurers who have taken the plunge and moved country — and probably have little to lose, and perhaps no choice.

I wonder if DNA is on their side. The earliest agricultural societies settled in the Levant, in about 10,000BC, during the New Stone Age. By cultivating cereals and domesticating livestock, these Neolithic farmers were probably the world’s first entrepreneurs. They established the principle of deferred gratification for greater gain, as opposed to the nomadic lifestyle that was prevalent until then.

So, almost certainly, groups such as the Jews, Armenians and Lebanese have been developing enterprises and trading goods longer than any others. All these ethnic groups have diaspora who exhibit exceptional capabilities in capitalism.

Of course, they have high performers in many other walks of life, but it is business that interests me.

Ultimately I think it is culture and communities that matter most for any cohort of would-be entrepreneurs. Role models, local networks, hard work and a respect for accomplishment are vital. The external environment is crucial too — Jews have done well in Britain as we have the rule of law and strong property rights.

Israel is not a perfect society: I visited the West Bank, thanks to some Jewish philanthropists, and saw some of the challenges faced by the Palestinian community.

Perhaps Israel’s ingenious entrepreneurs can also solve the political problems of the Holy Land, and find an outcome in which all religions live in harmony.

Luke Johnson is chairman of Risk Capital Partners and the Centre for Entrepreneurs.The Sunday Times/News Syndication

from EMI to Shell… and many hundreds of other significant com-panies.

A large proportion of the entre-preneurs responsible for these businesses were first or second-generation immigrants, many from modest backgrounds.

I have spent much of my busi-ness career in partnership with very able Jewish entrepreneurs, so I can testify as to their capabilities and ambition.

Of course, the question that really fascinates me is this: what is the magic they possess that means so many do well in business? Taylor

The real reason Israel works? It’s in the DNA

‘Taking risks has become a way of life

PHOTOS: FLASH 90/THE TIMES TOM PILSTON

36 LIFE THEJC.COM THE JEWISH CHRONICLE 9 OCTOBER 2015

rise, called me at the isolated Span-ish villa where my family had been spending the summer.

Up popped Emma, a new friend and colleague who, within seconds of a desperate text from me, pulled in a favour (and spent a fortune) to fly me home on the busiest day of the tourist calendar, after I’d been told no seat was available. And Lisa, my schoolmate’s wife whose con-stant stream of hot food, candles, prayer books and advice helped my father, brother and I concentrate on other things. There was the rabbi I barely know who interrupted her holiday to be a therapist and the rabbi we’ve come to know who guided us through a bewildering maze of religiosity. Neighbours who I’d never met coming to offer sus-tenance, people I’d not seen in dec-

ades whose wisdom I know I’ll need as the weeks and months unfurl.

And Leonard, a jocular, grey-haired ball of energy and a volun-teer from our local synagogue who, I later learned, was roused from his bed on that fateful night by a doc-tor who saw that my father needed help. Devastated, confused and suddenly totally alone after 50-odd years of devoted companionship, it was Leonard who held Dad’s hand. Forms were filled in, state-ments given and all the depressing formalities adhered to before eve-ryone, my mother included, could be ‘‘released’’. But it was a total stranger whose generosity of spirit made it happen.

All these cogs and more in the Jewish ‘‘system’’ — replicas of which exist in all religions — suddenly

clicked seamlessly. The machine took over. A vacuum was filled instantly. People helped for no other reason than wanting to. They weren’t encouraged, or told to, or enticed to by the promise of congratulatory pats on the back, baubles and ermine.

They were not ‘‘big’’ gestures but small ones — often tiny, momen-tary ones. It was not the kind of behaviour that defines ‘‘society’’ but instead defines us as people, con-nects us intimately to one another.

Not under a vast, well-funded umbrella or in front of a grand canvas constructed by government agencies but simple, quiet, pro-found connections that may last a minute or a lifetime.

In fact the whole experiece was so un-Cameronesque as to make

at HMV on Oxford Street, but they had no jobs so I went around the corner to Agnews,” he explains, leading me around the corner him-self to his warren of a Dickensian walk-up duplex, every inch of wall covered with a range of visual treas-ures spanning at least six centuries. “Just don’t call me a collector,” he snaps. “I just find things I love and buy them, like I just fell into the world of art.”

Although his mother, who arrived as a refugee from Hungary one month before war broke out, played her part in stimulating his interest, he concedes: “Jews are

very good, even when there’s very little money around, in seeking out culture. My mother took me to the National Gallery, we went to Ken-wood, and by the age of nine I was taking myself to the theatre to see Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier.”

Born in 1944, Rosenthal got a state education at St Saviours pri-mary school in Warwick Avenue — “at the time when the area was still slummy” — and Westminster City School, while his father, who arrived in the UK during the war with the Free Cezch Army, ran a restaurant for Czech refugees, “and was a bit of a gambler”. But even before he had left university in Leicester, the young history

undergraduate was organising his first art exhibition, Artists in Cornwall, for the Leicester Museum and Art Gallery. No wonder Agnews snapped him up on the spot for a holiday job that lasted three years.

Knighted in 2007, Rosenthal is universally acknowledged with having put London at the centre of the art world during his RA years, championing artists originally reviled by the establishment, from Damien Hirst to Tracey Emin to Sarah Lucas, from whom he has just commissioned a new sculpture for the smart new Nine Elms develop-ment abutting the new US Embassy site.

It’s just one of the diverse consul-

tations into which he has thrown himself between assembling shows everywhere from Berlin to Istanbul, sorting out a Warhol exhibition this winter for the Ashmolean and flying to and from Madrid, where his wife of 25 years, Manuela Mena Marques, mother of their two Lon-don-based daughters, is a curator at the Prado.

But now he is getting ready to step out in London again, making his next major appearance in the capital at the Frieze London Art Fair in Regent’s Park this month with an audacious project.

He is curating eight little col-lections he believes would be worthy of space in the V&A, RA or

THERE’S BEEN a lot of talk at the Conservative Party Conference of whether David Cameron is any closer to realising his grand ambi-

tion for a ‘‘Big Society’’. This is the vague notion espoused by the Prime Minister (before he had the power to do anything about it) that we’re a nation that nurtures each other, that cares.

Well, the other week I came face to face with it — and it was not a pleasant experience. Neither was it big or much of a society, to be honest. But it was there, an invis-ible force of human nature that suddenly sprang into action, envel-oping me in a cloak of uncalled-for compassion.

My mother, Philippa, died of a heart attack. She never made it into the operating theatre at the Royal Free Hospital in North London having been rushed there by ambu-lance after complaining of stomach pains. She slipped away close to midnight, holding my father’s hand as a phalanx of doctors and nurses frantically tried to save her.

She was 80 and the kind of per-son who never made a fuss. I’m sure she’d hate me writing about her as part of some mawkish eulogy, so suffice it to say that she lived a good, long, honest and remarkably happy life. Don’t moan, she said, play with the hand you’re dealt with, be stoic to the last and try not to spoil it by being overly emotional.

So I won’t. Because although this piece is inspired by her, it isn’t really about her. It’s about us and our place in a so-called Big Society, presumably one that doesn’t need a harrowing image of a drowned child to wake us from our selfish slumber and do something worth-while. Except, as we have seen these past few weeks with the refugee cri-sis, it’s not quite that simple. Those values certainly exist, yet politicians are worryingly out of kilter with popular sentiment.

My, or our, experience (I include my 89-year-old father and younger brother in this) provides some evi-dence as to why that should be so. It began the moment my mother drew her last breath— though for me it started the morning after when Dad, having waited until sun-

PHOTO: AP

COMMENT

This is our Big SocietyScarred: David and Samantha Cameron see the Big Society through the prism of their own loss

I can’t abide shul but I’d never deny my heritage

TESTIMONY GRANT FELLER

‘Even when there’s no money, Jews are good at seeking culture

CONTINUED FROM P41

absurd his desire to claim owner-ship for a series of selfless actions simply by reimagining them in his own image. And it made me realise why government often fails to inspire, match or even emulate the unthinking decency we show to each other.

Politicians boast of their listen-ing skills and ability to react to the will of the people, but that’s rarely the case. More often than not, like reeds in the wind, we bend to their will. When it does happen — as has been the case following the images of three-year-old Syrian Aylan Kurdi lying face down in the sand on a Turkish beach — our elected offi-cials, as if reluctantly prised free of their protective bubble, suddenly appear disengaged from reality.

I have no doubt that Cameron, scarred by his own personal trau-ma, is well-meaning, but he and his advisers have tried to latch on to something that already works and burdened it with the kinds of rules, politics and economies that encour-age people to pursue vanity-fuelled ego trips. Precisely the opposite of what motivated Leonard, Emma, Lisa and the rest of my small society of temporary shoulders.

Perhaps there was never a halcyon era when a ‘‘big society’’ picked up the pieces in a mass wave of selfless do-gooding. It was always little, meaningful connections that warranted only minimal thanks. I suspect that the difference is that my parents and grandparents were guided by a political establishment that understood why morality is a more important indicator of one’s humanity than quotas, budgets and delegation — often to organisations that operate with little oversight.

If the laudable ethos of the Big Society reveals anything, it is that our institutions and their leaders, more than ever in history, lack the moral compassion to make it work. Yet we as individuals have buckets of it — one only need see the grass roots movement whose generosity of spirit and outrage at political foot-dragging has compelled our government to take action over tackling this century’s most signifi-cant humanitarian crisis.

It’s ironic that Mum always taught me not to make a fuss about things, to stiffen upper lips and keep schtum when things weren’t going your way. Yet sometimes the most human thing is to do the opposite. It’s why we know what’s right and politicians sometimes haven’t a clue.