Jews Don't Count

by David Baddiel

Jews are the only objects of racism who are imagined – by the racists – as both low and high status. Jews are stereotyped, by the racists, in all the same ways that other minorities are – as lying, thieving, dirty, vile, stinking – but also as moneyed, privileged, powerful and secretly in control of the world. Jews are somehow both sub-human and humanity’s secret masters.

campaigning organisation Kick It Out. Their attitude was entirely doubtful. Their basic position was: does this really matter? There was still abuse going on from the terrace towards Black players, and they had a campaign about to start on homophobia. Won’t a campaign about antisemitism defocus the more important messages?

but the Y-word isn’t as bad as the N-word? I said: why not? He said: because Jews are rich.

It still seems to me an amazing thing for an avowed anti-racist to say (not least because of its implicit assumption that Black people can never be rich). What my friend was saying is that because Jews are – come on, we all know they are – comfortable, privileged and moneyed, they don’t need, not really, the protections of anti-racism, the ones most promoted by the left.

It doesn’t matter how rich you are, because the racists will smash in the door of your big house that they know you don’t deserve anyway and only own because you’re Jews.

So it’s interesting that those concerned about offence tend to say ‘Jewish people’ rather than ‘Jew’. Because even though it is the correct word, and not a slang word coined by racists, the deep burial of it in a bad place in the Christian unconscious means that it feels insulting anyway.

It is a progressive article of faith – much heightened during the Black Lives Matter protests following the murder of George Floyd in 2020 – that those who do not experience racism need to listen, to learn, to accept and not challenge, when others speak about their experiences. Except, it seems, when Jews do. Non-Jews, including progressive non-Jews, are still very happy to tell Jews whether or not the utterance about them was in fact racist.

Except antisemitism has very little to do with religion. As I have often said, I’m an atheist and yet the Gestapo would shoot me tomorrow.* Racists who don’t like Jews never ask the Jew they are abusing how often they go to synagogue. They just see the Jewish name and they know. Which is why it’s racism. One’s Jewishness, just like one’s skin colour, is an accident of birth, and as far as the racists are concerned – and they, sadly, are the people that matter as far as racism goes – you can never lose either.

When my progressive friend says ‘But the Y-word isn’t as bad as the N-word?’, however stunned I might be, at some level I’m not. At some level, actually, I’m grateful to him for laying out the discrepancy in attitude towards different racisms so clearly. And that thought is: Yes, all right, antisemitism isn’t nice but let’s not compare it to racism against Black and Brown people. Jews are, after all, white. Aren’t they?

Let me ask you, dear reader, a straight question: do you think of Jews as BAME?

softcore Holocaust denial, which would include, and I quote, ‘Yes, but look at you now.’ Meaning: come on Jews, you’re OK now. You’re rich, you’re powerful, you’ve got Israel. Basically, it’s non-Jews saying, enough already.