More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
First, it is always dangerous, however cleverly you word it, to say Jews are rich. Jews aren’t rich, particularly. Some are. And some aren’t.
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.
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. This is partly because anti-Jewish racism is not, in many people’s minds, racism at all. It has, after all, a different name, and one hears talk all the
...more
Except anti-Semitism 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.
If it is problematic for a non-minority actor to portray the experience of a minority, it is problematic for all those actors listed in that letter to The Stage to play Jews, and for non-Jewish musical theatre performers to sing songs like ‘Four Jews in a Room, Bitching’ in Falsettos.
The point is, history is not past. Its effects live in the present.
