Of all the academics I’ve encountered (and there’s a lot of them) Keith Khan-Harris surely has the best list of research interests: one that includes the culture and politics of Judaism, extreme metal subcultures, and the Luxembourg water skiing scene. A Cambridge alumnus, Kahn-Harris is a sociologist and writer, and someone who’s had a somewhat unconventional career in and out of academia. As we sit down for a chat, I’m keen to find out more about what, if anything, connects these interests, and about his upcoming book, Everyday Jews.

First, the book. Khan-Harris, who is himself Jewish, says that “the book is a reaction to my increasing sense that Jews are becoming incredibly public.” He explains that with global attention on issues of antisemitism and the Israel-Palestine conflict, “the eyes of the world are on us.” Khan-Harris wants to balance this out by focusing on the elements of Jewish life that are “mediocre, boring, and mundane.” To this end, the book explores the fact that some Jewish music isn’t very good (“We aren’t all Lenard Cohen or Bob Dylan!”), some Jewish food is disgusting, and some Jewish architecture is ugly. More seriously, the book aims to challenge the idea, which Khan-Harris believes is widespread amongst Jews, that “being public is always good for us.”

“I’ve never wanted to be just be one thing. The world’s too interesting for that”

Khan-Harris is a sociologist by training, studying SPS (the ancestor of HSPS) at Cambridge. He tells me that although Everyday Jews is not a work of social science, strictly speaking, that intellectual background is still relevant because the book is motivated by “a curiosity about everyday life and the less noticed aspects of human existence that may nonetheless be incredibly important.” The same is true of some of his other work, like his research on extreme metal subcultures: “Even in the most transgressive areas of metal culture, people still need to take care of business. They still need to do the everyday stuff […] but in the way these sorts of cultures are depicted, it doesn’t really figure.”

Although he has a PhD and has taught at various higher education institutions like Birkbeck, Goldsmiths, and the Open University, Khan-Harris hasn’t followed a conventional academic path and also works as a freelance writer. He says, “there are things about academia that are a bit constraining, and one of them is, for example, that you really have to write in a certain kind of way. Writing a book like Everyday Jews doesn’t give you any brownie points in academia. I wanted to be able to be free to work with different sets of people in different audiences, and not just do the standard academic thing.”

I suggest that this might be of interest to a lot of students, whether they are considering a career in academia or elsewhere, who want to avoid being slotted into a box, and Khan-Harris agrees: “I’ve never wanted to be just be one thing. The world’s too interesting for that.”

One common theme in Khan-Harris’ work is an interest in ‘small worlds’ – niche subcultures and communities. Extreme metal is an example of that, but he also wrote part of a book in which he interviewed the top water skier in Luxembourg and the most powerful politician in the tiny channel island of Alderney. “I’m interested in communities,” he says, “in what people do together, particularly when that’s doing things they don’t have to do – so I’m interested in volunteers.”

“I’m motivated by a curiosity about everyday life and the less noticed aspects of human existence”

To an extent this sounds familiar. Cambridge is itself a small world, as evidenced by the number of people Khan-Harris managed to run into during his time here. “Rob Webb was in the year below and he actually wrote a sketch for me, so that’s my claim to fame. Two years below me was Konnie Huq from Blue Peter.” 

As the conversation draws to a close, we return to Everyday Jews. I ask Khan-Harris who he thinks will read it. He laughs: "I’m greedy, I’d like both Jews and non-Jews." He acknowledges that the Jewish community, where he is better known, will be the bulk of the readership, but argues “if you’re not Jewish and you’re curious, the book might be eye opening in some degree. Certainly, if you did Jewish GCSE religious studies, you definitely should read my book, because the syllabus gives this really odd impression of what being Jewish is actually about.”

In some ways it seems an intrinsically strange position for a sociologist to take – to write a whole book arguing that a certain group of people are actually less interesting than people think. But Khan-Harris is adamant: “If we don’t see the dull, everyday aspects of different communities and peoples, then we are missing something really important.”

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