Jews Don't Count

by David Baddiel

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.