Jews Don't Count

by David Baddiel

But it misses out one persecuted minority, one of the most persecuted minorities in history. Now.

who prefaced the readings with his theory of how the highly prevalent, fashionable antisemitism of the time informed and possibly even enhanced Eliot’s work.

make antisemitism into art.

however great the writer, however great the writing, no other minority group would be compared to rats, or envisaged as any similar negative racist stereotype, on Radio 4.

when, in Oliver Twist, in plain sight, for years and years and years, has been Fagin. But maybe he doesn’t count.

racism. It’s not as important—it’s still bad—but it’s not as important as some other forms of racism,”

So actually, when I say “Sometimes you hear it out loud,” what I really heard was the silence.

chants—“Spurs are on their way to Auschwitz,” for example—and hissing to simulate the noise of gas chambers.

it had left one racism behind.

When people talk about antisemitism, what they tend to mean is an active process.

But at what point does that neglect—given that we live in a time when almost any microaggression against a minority can be flagged as racism—shade back into racism? How macro does an aggression against Jews have to be to be seen as an aggression?

“call themselves Yids.” Forget the spurious argument about OK-ness. Consider the fact that he was just fine to say the word, to let it pass his lips. And how un-fine he would be to do so with the P-word or the N-word.*

What about the Redskins team?! Still offensive and that's it's official name.

because Jews are rich.

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. Islamophobia and racialised xenophobia has a much greater proximity to shaping policy, particularly related to immigration, integration and criminal justice.”* The suggestion here is that, because Jews are materially better off—I’m not sure what else “without aspects of material dispossession” means—than other ethnic minorities, it is a lesser form of racism. It all comes down to money.

Because money doesn’t protect you from racism.

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.

They get to say what is and isn’t racist, and Piers Morgan does not.

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 “antisemitism and racism.” That has value, in some ways, because not all racisms are the same. Racism against people of color is different in kind to racism against Jews.

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 color, 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.

To put it stupidly, how could someone so apparently left-wing be accused of something so apparently right-wing?

being white is not about skin color, but security. It means you are protected because you are a member of the majority culture. Protected, that is, from prejudice, discrimination, second-class citizenship, dispossession, and genocide. Which Jews—as, perhaps, you’ve guessed I was about to say—have not always been.

I acknowledge, of course, that Jews can “pass” as non-Jews, and therefore can, except in historical cases, when their ethnicity has been forcibly outed by the legal imposition on their clothing of yellow stars or other insignia, avoid the kind of immediate, on-sight racism that people of color daily suffer from.

In fact, this exclusion of Jews from whiteness is fundamental to the ideology of white supremacists.

what is the external reason for this throughout-history racism against Jews?

why are majority cultures always in need of a minority to fear and loathe?

You’re rich, you’re powerful, you’ve got Israel. Basically, it’s non-Jews saying, enough already. I see it, very subtly, in Ash Sarkar saying “at this point in history” in the sentence “Antisemitism, at this point in history, is primarily experienced as prejudice and hostility towards Jews as Jews, largely without aspects of material dispossession.”

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

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