Jews Don't Count

by David Baddiel

Anyone occupying this square of characteristics is considered, by those who assume that all social structures are underpinned by power, privileged. White-male-cis-hets have four head starts in life.

To simplify considerably, Julius believes that Eliot was such a great poet that he could – almost uniquely, although there is of course The Merchant of Venice – make anti-Semitism into art.

Anti-Semitism is a second-class racism.

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.

the difference between the active quality of traditional far-right anti-Jewish racism and the passive nature of the progressive neglect of Jewish sensibilities.

Antisemitism, at this point in history, is primarily experienced as prejudice and hostility towards Jews as Jews, largely without aspects of material dispossession (such as structural unemployment) that manifest in other forms of racism.

A study by the non-partisan wealth research firm New World Wealth found that 56.2 per cent of the 13.1 million millionaires in the world were Christian, while 6.5 per cent were Muslim, 3.9 per cent were Hindu and 1.7 per cent were Jewish.

Because money doesn’t protect you from racism.

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.

it’s not an insult to link Jews with money, because money’s a good thing, isn’t it? In a capitalist society, we admire people with money. Except of course, we don’t. We envy and resent people with money.

Significantly, one of the things that marks Jewishness out as different from other ethnicities is that it can be hidden.

Jews don’t really suffer from being thought of as different as long as people don’t know they’re Jews:

‘Jew’ has a strange status, as a bad word. All other minorities, in the process of reclaiming hate speech, are working with words that aren’t actually the words in the dictionary that describe them. They are reclaiming slang insults. Jew is actually what I am.

Jews, therefore, as far as progressives are concerned, don’t represent anything outside of themselves.

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.

those who do not experience racism need to listen, to learn, to accept and not challenge, when others speak about their experiences.

When online I talk about racism against Jews, people – from both left and right – sometimes decide to object by saying that Jews are not a race and therefore cannot suffer racism.

they downgrade the category of anti-Semitism to that of religious intolerance. Which gives them more of a free hand with Jews, as religious intolerance is not as bad as racism. (In fact, religious intolerance could almost be seen as a good thing in this view, religion being a belief system with power and money attached, worthy of satire and mockery.)

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.

He doesn’t see that the mural could be a cover of almost any reprint of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the fake text from 1903 that purports to reveal a Jewish plot for world domination.

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

a conspiracy theory, called the Great Replacement, which states that Jews are secretly masterminding the promotion of immigration and multiculturalism in order to undermine, and eventually replace, Aryan whites.

Jews are invisible, working their terrible magic behind the global scenes, and they don’t even have a visual mark.

according to the law of 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,

Jew remains the only minority – and now we’re talking beyond ethnic, to include disabled, trans, autistic and many other categories – where you don’t have to cast the actor in line with the real thing.

To shake up privilege, you need the privileged: you need them to feel ashamed. You need the privileged, white, straight, cis-gendered, able-bodied to feel shame and anger on behalf of the minority that’s being in some way traduced by them. And the privileged, white, straight, cis-gendered, able-bodied majority never feel these things when the minority being traduced is Jews; because they think that Jews are just … them. They don’t see enough difference.

The last one has a few more stereotypes in it – ‘Showbiz is so Jewish!’ – and says that Jews, far from being discriminated against, have ‘performed overtly, or covertly, over the years under gentile names’ – which is to suggest that Jewish actors changing their names was something Jews did as a secret operation to colonise the industry undercover, not a thing they had to do, because of racism: because a WASP audience would accept a star called Kirk Douglas, but not one called Izzy Danielovitch.

the hierarchy of racism. Blackface is more offensive than Jewface.

But an actor can imitate without make-up. It’s JewVoice, JewExpression, JewStoopedandShruggingBody. It’s NebbishBeing.

when you cartoon the Jewishness, and you yourself are not Jewish, what is that if not minstrelsy in another form?

The progressive idea that you should only cast minority actors to play those minorities has a two-fold motivation. It is partly an employment issue, a push-back against a previous open-to-all tradition that meant there was less work for minority actors. But it is also, and I would say at its core more so, about respect. There is something disrespectful, the reaction against Halle Berry and Scarlett Johansson suggests, about casting a cis actress in a transgender part.

Casting a non-minority actor to mimic that identity feels, to the progressive eye, like impersonation, and impersonation carries with it an element of mockery: or at least, it is reductive, lessening the complexity of that experience by channelling it through an actor who hasn’t lived it.

what the people demanding apologies from me want is not apologies. What they seem to want, really, is silence.

If a non-Israeli Jew does feel responsible, it is internalised racism. To be perfectly honest, I think a fair amount of Jews on the left are just ashamed of being Jewish.

The Jews must always be in some way responsible.

Tonge’s implication in her question – ‘Why have the Jewish people been persecuted throughout history?’ – is that there must be some reason for this persecution, and the fault lies with the Jews.

all majority cultures need to have an alien hate object, and for Christian cultures, in particular, that position has long been filled by Jews.

the question Tonge says she’d like answered is not one about the psycho-social power structures that perpetuate racism against Jews but: what is it that the Jews do – always, eternally, throughout history – to make themselves so eminently persecutable? And that the answer – the unsayable answer – she so desperately claims to want (‘I never get an answer!’) is in fact one she has absolutely at the ready, and it’s an image in her head not dissimilar to the mural that Mear One painted on that wall of Jewish bankers playing Monopoly on the backs of the world’s poor.

What is it in the psychosis of the mainstream that requires Emmanuel Goldstein and his Two Minutes Hate?

what is it about the Jews that makes them so hateful?

when you are talking about anti-Semitism, it is always OK to refer to the Nazis.

history is not past. Its effects live in the present.

being white was not just about skin colour, but about security. That’s what white privilege represents. White really means: safe.