Jews Don't Count

by David Baddiel

In 1977, on Play for Today, the BBC screened Jack Rosenthal’s play Bar Mitzvah Boy. It won that year’s BAFTA for best single play. Two years earlier, Play for Today had screened Rosenthal’s The Evacuees, a drama about two Jewish children forced to live with non-Jewish foster parents during the Second World War. It also won a BAFTA, and an international Emmy. But more importantly for me, as a young teenager in London, both of these plays were the first real example of representation of my life, on TV. They were the first time I had seen the British-Jewish experience accurately portrayed anywhere in the culture.

as their racism is active and obvious, and also, to be honest, not mine to talk about. I want to talk about antisemitism and, most importantly, the antisemitism that needs to be deconstructed, which blatant far-right anti-Jewish statements do not.

Why? Well, there are lots of answers. But the basic one, underpinning all others, is that 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.

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.

I mean that being white is not about skin colour, but security. It means you are protected because you are a member of the majority culture. Protected, that is, from prejudice, discrimination, second-class citizenship, dispossession and genocide. Which Jews – as, perhaps, you’ve guessed I was about to say – have not always been. So what Mear was doing by ignoring that historical truth about Jews – by calling them ‘white’ – was reinforcing his credentials as Fighter for the Oppressed.

When it is pointed out to him that sometimes anti-capitalism blurs into antisemitism, his first instinct is to protect the anti-capitalism and dismiss the antisemitism with irritation.

Jews are not trying to replace whites with Jews. They are trying to replace whites with Browns and Blacks, and pulling the strings to do so. This conspiracy theory has deep roots in the far right. It is the reason why eleven Jews were murdered in Pittsburgh in 2018.

Jews, for the racists, don’t have a skin colour. That’s part of their dastardly power. Jews are invisible, working their terrible magic behind the global scenes, and they don’t even have a visual mark. Unless, of course, you’re one of those specific racists with the superpower to spot that underneath, Jews are lizards.

As has become clearer recently, there are particular and pressing dangers involved with being Black that all people do not have to deal with, and the statement #AllLivesMatter is simply a bad faith way of blanketing over that. Similarly, in Luciana Berger’s post, there were examples of anti-Jewish racism that all women do not experience. And in making this about all women, Diane Abbott was neatly sidestepping the antisemitism.

But to these ears, the reflex need always to follow the phrase antisemitism with ‘and all types of racism’ is the left’s All Lives Matter.