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You don't have to be Jewish to understand the history of Europe in the 20th century, but it helps.

I have a 10-year track record of writing for the Jewish community.

The history of the Jews has been written overwhelmingly by scholars of texts - understandably given the formative nature of the Bible and the Talmud. Seeing Jewish history through artifacts, architecture and images is still a young but spectacularly flourishing discipline that's changing the whole story.

The funny thing is that I write and I act a lot about being Jewish, but I don't really think about it as a regular person.

Jewish history turns out not to be an either/or story - as in, either pure Judaism detached from its surroundings or else assimilation - but rather, for the vast majority, the adventure of living in between.

Jewish history has been in my cultural DNA since I was a child growing up in post-war London. In the midst of that dark, gray, lamenting monochromatic world of the '50s, I had a sense that both Jewish and English history were full of color and light and animation.

I understood when I was quite small that there were two special things about the Jews. That we'd endured for over 3,000 years despite everything that had been thrown at us, and that we had an extraordinarily dramatic story to tell.

Since 1985, I have written about contemporary Jewish practice and the Jewish community.

Every leaving of a Jewish community is a most difficult thing.