Jews Don't Count

by David Baddiel

But it is going to be an attempt to pinpoint something that I think is key to modern anti-Semitism, which is the left’s confusion over it. By the left, what I really mean is progressives: the coalition – some of whom may not be classically left-wing – of those who would define themselves as being on the right side of history.

I want to talk about anti-Semitism and, most importantly, the anti-Semitism that needs to be deconstructed, which blatant far-right anti-Jewish statements do not. What we have looked at so far are examples of Jews being left out: left out, by the left, of identity politics. Identity politics, for anyone who doesn’t know, is a politics whereby traditional things that the left and right fight about – basically economics – get surpassed by issues like racism and disablism and homophobia. The duty of the left becomes less about supporting the working man (although many left thinkers would say that economic injustice goes hand in hand with injustices perpetrated against minorities, which I agree with) and more about the championing of people of colour, and gays, and trans people – all the people named by Dawn Butler. This is the good fight, and the left is always a fight-y space, defined by its rebelliousness. I use the phrase ‘good fight’ advisedly. The left have always thought of themselves as the good guys. I lean politically towards the left (as a teen, I was going to Young Communist meetings) and so I can’t really speak for the right, but it seems to me that people on the right are less bothered about a virtuous self-image.

With the transition to identity politics the left’s cause has become fragmented. It has become less about fighting for the masses and more about specific minorities.

A sacred circle is drawn around those whom the progressive modern left are prepared to go into battle for, and it seems as if the Jews aren’t in it. 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. And it’s this racist mythology that’s in the air when the left pause before putting Jews into their sacred circle. Because all the people in the sacred circle are oppressed. And if you believe, even a little bit, that Jews are moneyed, privileged, powerful and secretly in control of the world … well, you can’t put them into the sacred circle of the oppressed. Some might even say they belong in the damned circle of the oppressors.

The reason far-right and progressive left activists might conjoin over this idea of fighting back against mythical, sacrosanct secret rulers is that both like to see themselves as rebels, as fighters against power, and Jews, uniquely among minorities in the west, are associated with power.

This comes back to what I said earlier about the difference between the active quality of traditional far-right anti-Jewish racism and the passive nature of the progressive neglect of Jewish sensibilities.

It was trying to question why there is not a level playing field around racism. Why some racisms seem to be thought of as more important – more offensive, more troubling, more in need of being shut down – than others.

But you’ll notice that in the last paragraph, I did just write the word ‘Yid’ in full. And I have already, in this book, written it out. I 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.

This very subject – the inequity of offence that right-thinking people take around differing hate words – came up when a friend of mine, a man who very much would be thought of as a progressive, questioned me about this central premise of the film. He said: 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.

This ability to hide is important in the omission of Jews from identity politics, because most identities, sexual ones aside, are fairly impossible to hide. Jews can hide; they can pass as non-Jews. So the assumption appears to be that because they are not immediately visible, they don’t suffer racism. Jews don’t really suffer from being considered different, because they don’t look different. But consider what the woman at the wedding said. She doesn’t tell people she’s Jewish, because ‘people don’t like them’. Which would suggest that Jews don’t really suffer from being thought of as different as long as people don’t know they’re Jews: as long as they, like gays in the closet, hide. Which means that Jews are only OK as long as they can pass as non-Jews, and that Jews – once identified as such – will be thought of as different.

‘Jew’ has a strange status, as a bad word.

The problem is that Jews occupy a socio-cultural grey area. Jews, although marginal, are not thought of as marginalised. Which means Jews can’t be seen as representative of a modern Britain that is intent on shifting marginalised experiences into the mainstream. Jews, therefore, as far as progressives are concerned, don’t represent anything outside of themselves. No victory is claimed by championing their experience, and this leads to a subtle – and unconscious – exclusion.

We live in a culture now where impact is more important

than intent; where how things are taken is more significant than how they are meant. You have to listen to the people being talked about rather than the talker – and the power, throughout history, has tended to be with the talker, the person with the platform, rather than the talked-about, who are usually the ones affected.

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 time of ‘anti-Semitism and racism’. That has value, in some ways, because not all racisms are the same. Racism against people of colour is different in kind to racism against Jews. The question in this book is why a difference in kind should equate to a difference in significance.

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.

But Jews are not white. Or not quite. Or, at least, they don’t always feel it.

Because anti-racism only exists to fight racists; it only has meaning oppositionally. If there were no racists, there would be no anti-racists. And the racists say: Jews are not white. The Nazis said it all the time – the project of the Jews, as far as they were concerned, was to undermine the Aryan white races. And the exclusion of Jews from the category of whiteness is still key to present-day white supremacists.

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.

Either way, racists say Jews aren’t white. Problem is, progressives, in general, tend to think they are white and, therefore, not really deserving of the protections progressive movements offer to non-white people facing racism.

Schrödinger’s Whites, a brilliant conceit that I am not responsible for, in which Jews are white or non-white depending on the politics of the observer,

I am arguing not for another person’s experience of racism to be lessened in significance but for the awareness of something similar happening to Jews to be heightened. But what that reaction – ‘you’re throwing us under the bus’ – suggests to me, really, is that by comparing another minority’s experience of racism to that of Jews, I am belittling it. Because a Jew’s experience of racism can’t be that bad. Sometimes I use the phrase, on being told, as a Jew, how much worse racism is for people of colour, ‘it’s not a competition’. But I use this knowing that for many, it is: that there is a hierarchy of racisms and some are more important than others.

the lived experience of a Jew who feels as most Jews do that the reaction of progressives, to anti-Semitism, is that it doesn’t matter very much.

The move to reclassify Jesus as non-white is good and historically accurate. The erasure at the same time of his Jewishness is neither. It accords in fact with centuries of the Church doing the same.

Only offending against one type of anti-racism can lead to cries for the cancellation of your ability to speak about racism at all.

It is a stone-cold progressive trope that inverse racism does not exist: that, because of the power structures that western culture is built upon, it’s not possible for a black person to be racist about a white person, and crying inverse racism indicates mainly that the person crying is themselves a racist, or, at least, displaying White Fragility and White Privilege simultaneously.

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

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.

To be perfectly honest, I think a fair amount of Jews on the left are just ashamed of being Jewish. I think Jews on the left have to some extent absorbed the myths about Jews being rich capitalist power mongers, and so therefore make a special point of how un-Jewish they are, the objective corollary of which is hating Israel.

It points out something key about anti-Semitism, which is a deep resistance to the idea of it as what you might call a stand-alone racism. The Jews must always be in some way responsible. If it’s not bankers and capitalism, it’s Israel.

because the one thing I know about anti-Semitism is that the anti-Semite believes the Jew never changes, which is the reason they might be persecuted throughout history.*

a word the anti-Zionists use a lot, disproportionate.

Not to put too fine a point on it, if Corbyn’s blind spot was about racism towards black or brown minorities – or indeed, say, trans people, as the Labour MP Rosie Duffield could evince in the extreme and angry progressive reactions she has got to supporting J. K. Rowling against some of the attacks on her – I don’t believe that any progressive would still be describing him, despite this, as a thoroughly decent person.