Jews Don't Count

by David Baddiel

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.