A defiant, funny and deeply Jewish novel

The Very Annoying Jew is a newly released comic satire that takes aim at contemporary Jewish life, identity and cultural tensions.

Written by filmmaker and producer Michael Kretzmer, the novel blends sharp social observation with dark humour, offering readers a timely, and deliberately provocative, take on the pressures facing Jews in public and cultural life today.

Kretzmer, an award-winning TV producer and filmmaker perhaps best known in Australian circles for his Holocaust-themed documentary J’Accuse!, brings his cinematic eye to the page. The Very Annoying Jew doesn’t just poke fun at its titular protagonist David Britton, it confronts the reader with the absurdities and anxieties of our times.

Britton is an unlikeable yet watchable central character. A successful TV producer whose personal and professional worlds are collapsing, he is “a dishevelled, dissolute, privileged boomer with a public school education” who seems to have offended everyone, including his wife, colleagues, strangers and even his own staff.

His misfortunes, as Kretzmer slyly points out, are largely deserved.

But, as The Times of Israel reviews, this isn’t merely a character study. The Very Annoying Jew is a “stunning comic novel” that charges head-on into contemporary culture wars, taking on “wokeness, digital media and post-modern antisemitism”.

Reviewer Matthew Kalman notes that Britton is a “worthy heir” to other “immortal” heroes such as Philip Roth’s Nathan Zuckerman in The Counterlife. Where Roth explored the paradoxes of Jewish male identity and the anxieties of assimilation in The Counterlife, Kretzmer’s Britton is immersed in a social media-driven world in which every grievance is amplified, and every joke can become a battleground. Kalman calls this “a timely, funny, searing critique of modern memedom”, where Kretzmer holds up a mirror to our own behaviours.

Kretzmer himself has written candidly about the process of finding his narrative voice, a journey he says took decades and was only unlocked when he “became a Jew again”. In an essay for The Jewish Chronicle, he recalls years of abandoned manuscripts before discovering the unique voice that finally shaped The Very Annoying Jew.

While not autobiographical, Kretzmer acknowledged that he shares many things with Britton, most significantly, his return to Judaism.

“I too found my way back to the Jewish family after leaving for many years in the hope of becoming a man of the secular world. Judaism does not easily surrender its souls,” he wrote in The Jewish Chronicle. “To my mind, Britton is a worthy Jewish hero.”

But as Kretzmer pointed out, he wanted Britton to be more than “cartoon funny”. He wanted him to have a kind heart.

And according to reviews, Kretzmer has achieved that, with one reviewer referring to the book as “both melancholic and explosively funny”, saying “it’s a work that captures, with remarkable precision, the neuroses of these nerve-wracking times, finally responding to the present moment in its own language”.

The Very Annoying Jew also feels deeply self-aware of its place within Jewish comedic tradition. For generations, Jewish humour has balanced honest self-reflection with a strong sense of communal identity, using comedy as a way to challenge and then ultimately affirm Jewish life and experience.

In recent years, as Jewish writers and performers grapple with rising antisemitism, works like Kretzmer’s remind Jews all around the world that comedy remains one of the community’s sharpest tools for both survival and understanding.

The Very Annoying Jew marks Kretzmer’s first work of fiction after a long career in television and documentary filmmaking, and arrives at a time when Jewish writers are increasingly responding to antisemitism and cultural debate. The novel brings that conversation into the realm of popular literary satire, offering readers a sharply observed story shaped by the pressures of the present day.

The Very Annoying Jew is available to purchase online.