Jews Don't Count

by David Baddiel

it is strange that Ian Driver had to go all the way to a relatively obscure piece of writing by Dickens to become inflamed by his racism, when, in Oliver Twist, in plain sight, for years and years and years, has been Fagin.

it’s rare that someone just comes out with it: Antisemitism is a second-class racism.

the Tottenham Hotspur football club (known as Spurs) is located in an area of London that is fairly well populated by Jews. For this reason, Spurs fans both self-identify and are identified by others as a ‘Jewish’ club – even though the vast majority of them aren’t Jewish –

We envy and resent people with money.

we particularly envy and resent people with money around whom we can create narratives, racist narratives,

these aren’t fantasies of richness, but of miserliness: of a pinched, obsessive, inhuman ability to run, leap, grab and keep money.

claimed that there is nothing racist about the treatment of Meghan Markle

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.

He’s an Antisemite vs No He Isn’t, It’s a Disgusting Smear:

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the fake text from 1903 that purports to reveal a Jewish plot for world domination.

Our artistic tradition – look at Punch and Judy, look at witches, look at pantomime, look at Bond villains – depicts evil as swarthy and hook-nosed.

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

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.

Just one of the four family members portrayed in the only long-running sitcom on British TV that could claim to be ostensibly Jewish, Channel 4’s Friday Night Dinner, Tom Rosenthal, is actually Jewish, and he has renounced that heritage in interviews.

It is my position that racism should not be a competition: that all racisms should be regarded as equally bad. ‘Should’ is the key word here. There is an inequity, even if that inequity may be felt differently in different quarters. For example, some Muslims feel strongly that Islamophobia doesn’t get the attention that antisemitism receives in the news media in general. But this polemic is very specifically about progressives: it’s not about the mainstream media. And it’s written from the point of view, to use a phrase much beloved of progressives, of my lived experience: the lived experience of a Jew who feels as most Jews do that the reaction of progressives, to antisemitism, is that it doesn’t matter very much.

International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism,

‘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. It’s what we now call victim-blaming, although that isn’t a term that, say, Adolf Hitler would have been familiar with when he claimed in Mein Kampf that the Jew ‘was only and always a parasite in the body of other peoples’.

Godwin’s Law is an internet adage that states: in any online argument, eventually, someone will analogise what is being discussed to the Nazis, at which point the discussion will be over.

The point is, history is not past. Its effects live in the present.

White really means: safe. How safe do Jews feel right now?

This – a handful of the total incidents – is why Jews don’t feel white, if by white you mean safe. And as for me: I didn’t feel white when, as a twelve-year-old at a new school, a teacher was overheard to say of me, venomously, ‘Jew’, and another teacher replied: ‘Of course.’ I didn’t feel white when, loving T. S. Eliot as a teenager, I discovered that he considered Jews to be lower than rats. I didn’t feel white when I was being beaten up in London by skinheads in the 1970s, however much I might later convert it into comedy. I didn’t feel white when a man behind me at Stamford Bridge shouted repeatedly ‘Fuck the fucking Jews!’ I didn’t feel white when I received furious tweets to tell me Mear One’s mural isn’t antisemitic, but, rather, justifiably shows ‘Zionist greed’. And, as the examples of Jews not counting have built up, I haven’t felt all that white writing this book.