Jews Don't Count

by David Baddiel

Despite the – not mythic, completely true – fact that Jews are obsessed with food, and despite the appropriation of bagels, chopped liver, schmaltz herring, chicken soup and salt beef by many, many non-Jewish outlets, particularly in America, I found not a single blogpost or newspaper article or tweet complaining about this, or even simply identifying it as a thing.

Is this more to do with assimilation? Like the Irish in Boston, Jewish diaspora became strongly part of the identity of the city and snowballed out. I don't know for sure, but I think there is something different than appropriation and closer to diaspora Irish going on here.

They were articles angrily accusing Jews, Israelis to be specific, of appropriating Palestinian food. Jews, in other words, even in the left-field arena of recipe stealing, are identified as the stealers, not the stolen from: the oppressors, not the victims.

The process of Israeli nation building and the widee project they have going on is nothing to do with the Jewish people, many of whom oppose it. The conflation of the two is troubling and, arguably, antisemitic...

This is a common meme on social media. The quote is attributed to Voltaire – who, indeed, was antisemitic, thinking that Jews were too ‘Asiatic’ ever to integrate into Europe and ‘deserved to be punished’ for that failure – but really, he’s just there to give the words a spurious legitimacy. In fact the quote comes from Kevin Strom, an American white supremacist and neo-Nazi, and it shows the key element of such utterances: defiance.

This point is uncontroversially true. Left social media use this meme and quote all the time and should know better.

Jews don’t count meant that for a long time it looked like the film wasn’t going to get made until, amazingly, Gary Lineker, an ex-Spurs player, agreed to take part.

Why "amazingly"? This seems like exactly the kind of thing Linaker would do. Maybe he was less vocal in 2008?

If there was a club from a part of London that was thought of as predominantly Black, and the mainly white fanbase of that club decided to call themselves the N-words, or the N-word army, and that led to opposing fans chanting racist hate songs based around the N-word back at them, it would be stopped and the club shut down immediately. So by calling the film The Y-Word, we were saying maybe the hate words for Jews – and Yid is one, daubed as it was across the East End by Oswald Mosley’s blackshirts in fascist marches before the Second World War – need to be considered as equally unmentionable as the hate words for other ethnic minorities.

would not do that with the P-word, and certainly not the N-word. Which suggests a hierarchy of offence: a hierarchy that exists even now, even in this book that I’m writing. Yid is considered not as bad hate speech as the P-word or the N-word.

In this case, I think the difference is not a hierarchy, but that a group can use their slur but those outside cannot. We don't use either word for the same reason I wouldn't use the Y-word (or a F-word frim an Irish context) but you can use it, especially in illustration. I actually agree with the point that people would use it, but I think the logic is a bit weak here simply because groups do use language outsiders shouldn't.

Forget the spurious argument about OK-ness. Consider the fact that he was just fine to say the word, to let it pass his lips. And how un-fine he would be to do so with the P-word or the N-word.*

Here the point is made in a much better way.

like many left-wing Jews, carries particular shame around Israel,

Hmmm... I wonder if there will be a theme of highlighting when Jewish people disagree with Israel as a negative point

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.

There was no Asian or Black Interest Section in that Waterstones.

I think this is exactly what all the BLM stands were. Although I don't think I've seen "Jewish interest" in any Waterstones.

They might decide to not actively exclude Jews, once someone like me points out to them that Jews are actually an ethnic minority, who get discriminated against and suffer racism. But that acceptance would be accompanied, I would suggest, by a kind of oh yeah, I suppose so, never really thought about it like that shrug.

Again, there's something about assimilation and the view of Jewish as a religion and not an ethnicity in the UK that's not being grappled with here. As in the above section with the "white Jewish" American professor, it feels like David is trying to push an almost universal, perhaps essentialist, Jewishness which I think the people he's called "self-hating" would reject.

freedom of information request by the Union of Jewish Students revealed that only 29 out of 133 universities had adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, and that 80 of them said they had no current plans to do

Going to leave the definition unexamined then? Is this not the one referencing Israel?

when the Conservative Party raises Cain about offences against Jews but ignores Islamophobia in its own ranks, it marks antisemitism as the favoured racist issue of the right.

I think it's more important that the Tories raise issues about Labour antisemetism, but never do anything to investigate their own ongoing antisemetism, nor do Labour seem to call for it.

But the reclaiming of Him* as non-white, in truth, bypasses that, because it has no political impact, no revolution, to reiterate Jesus’s Jewishness.

For someone very on Twitter and apparently nit concerned with mainstream media, this does seem to overlook that folks have been using Jesus as "Middle Eastern Jew" as part of the long list of why evangelical and republian politicians in the US for along time, even before BLM.

Twitter, a site that you can be ejected from for accidentally misgendering a trans person, issued no suspension or even reprimand.

This is a weird statement that I'm not even sure was true on old Twitter, the right certainly believed it, but Twitter was never a good moderator.

the idea that I should care more about the Palestinians smacks of something weird. It smacks of an idea that somehow Jews – non-Israeli Jews – must apologise for Israel: that Jews – non-Israeli Jews – should feel a little bit ashamed of Israel, and must, before they are allowed into any kind of public conversation, make some kind of supplicant-like statement to that effect.

I am not responsible for those actions and expecting that I should feel so is racist.

To be perfectly honest, I think a fair amount of Jews on the left are just ashamed of being Jewish.

... I dunno about this one.

It doesn’t matter how clearly decent and valuable J. K. Rowling’s work and life was before she got involved in the trans debate.

I'm not sure how "clearly decent" any of it was... Least not the antisemetic and racist tropes