Published: 16 February 2026
Last updated: 16 February 2026
I’m heading to Australia and I’ve found myself thinking about fantasy. I know. As a literary genre, fantasy is not really our thing. George RR Martin, who bewitched the world with Game of Thrones, is not Jewish. Nor was Terry Pratchett, who cast a spell with his Discworld novels. CS Lewis, he of the Narnia stories, was a committed Christian, while JRR Tolkien, the granddaddy of the genre, was the source of perhaps the most admirable disavowal of Jewish identity ever formulated. (When a Berlin publishing house considered producing a German edition of the Hobbit in 1938, they first asked for proof that Tolkien was fully Aryan. “If I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin,” read his drafted response, “I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people.”)
From the end of the 19th century, there came a serious effort to turn that fantasy into reality – culminating in the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 – but, at the same time, a rival fantasy was emerging. For many of the Jews of Eastern Europe, the dream lay not so much in the Middle East but across the Atlantic: to them, the United States was the goldene medina, a land so bursting with opportunity that the streets were paved in gold.