Loving Strangers

A family memoir that builds a bridge across the terrible divides of our times. It’s a Jewish book, but not Just a Jewish book. It moves Jewish writing away from its customary setting of the Holocaust and Europe, transporting Jewish identity instead to Iraq, India, China and Singapore: places and cultures that most people (including Jews themselves) don’t associate with Jewish identity. It shows Jews integrating with others, not divisive, not separate: not antagonistic. The issue of intermarriage is increasingly important for all racial groups and this book speaks beyond the Jewish community, in relation to how we treat strangers in the form of immigrants and other communities.

Loving Strangers has already won the Hazel Rowley Prize (US, 2020) for the best proposal for a first-time biographer and was shortlisted for the Tony Lothian Prize (UK, 2019) for the best unpublished biography.

Author Biography

Jay Prosser is a Reader in Humanities at the University of Leeds, where he specialises in Jewish studies and creative nonfiction. He has published academic books, including the first study of transsexual life writing, ‘Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality’ (1998; Columbia UP), a book that continues to sell very well 25 years after publication; and ‘Light in the Dark Room: Photography and Loss’ (2004; Minnesota UP), an exploration of how writers have used photographs. He has worked on a book with Amnesty International examining the value of photographs of atrocity in our news media (Picturing Atrocity; Reaktion; 2012) and edited collections, including C20th American fiction, and gender and narrative. He has specialised in writing about Jews in Asia and Jews’ relations with other groups, particularly Arabs and Muslims.