Jews Don't Count Quotes

“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.”
― David Baddiel, Jews Don't Count

“Jews are somehow both sub-human and humanity’s secret masters. And it’s this racist mythology that’s in the air when the left pause before putting Jews into their sacred circle.”
― David Baddiel, Jews Don't Count

“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, in this context Krug’s Jewishness enhances the story.”
― David Baddiel, Jews Don't Count

“in 2018, 60 percent of all religiously motivated hate crimes in the United States were perpetrated against Jews (by contrast 18.6 percent targeted Muslims).”
― David Baddiel, Jews Don't Count

“I said earlier that being white was not just about skin color, but about security. That’s what white privilege represents. White really means: safe.”
― David Baddiel, Jews Don't Count

“The world had moved on. But it seems that it had forgotten something; it had left one racism behind.”
― David Baddiel, Jews Don't Count

“It smacks of an idea that somehow Jews—non-Israeli Jews—must apologize for Israel: that Jews—non-Israeli Jews—should feel a little bit ashamed of Israel, and must, before they are allowed into any kind of public conversation, make some kind of supplicant-like statement to that effect.”
― David Baddiel, Jews Don't Count

“The idea that collective responsibility is racist has got lost in the righteous fury.”
― David Baddiel, Jews Don't Count

“What they tend to say is: we stand against antisemitism and all types of racism. As a mantra, this was heard again and again between 2015 and 2019, and continues to be in the ongoing arguments around Corbyn at the time of writing. It sounds good. It sounds right. But to these ears, the reflex need always to follow the phrase antisemitism with “and all types of racism” is the left’s All Lives Matter.”
― David Baddiel, Jews Don't Count

“But still: antiracists need to listen more to the enemy. Because antiracism only exists to fight racists; it only has meaning oppositionally. If there were no racists, there would be no antiracists. And the racists say: Jews are not white. The Nazis said it all the time—the project of the Jews, as far as they were concerned, was to undermine the Aryan white races. And the exclusion of Jews from the category of whiteness is still key to present-day white supremacists.”
― David Baddiel, Jews Don't Count

“being white is not about skin color, but security. It means you are protected because you are a member of the majority culture.”
― David Baddiel, Jews Don't Count

“This very subject—the inequity of offense 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.”
― David Baddiel, Jews Don't Count

“I can’t really speak for the right, but it seems to me that people on the right are less bothered about a virtuous self-image.”
― David Baddiel, Jews Don't Count

“A study by the non-partisan wealth research firm New World Wealth found that 56.2 percent of the 13.1 million millionaires in the world were Christian, while 6.5 percent were Muslim, 3.9 percent were Hindu, and 1.7 percent were Jewish. In the U.S., 48 percent of Hindus have a yearly household income of $100,000 or more, and 70 percent have at least $75,000, which makes them the highest-earning ethnic group. But”
― David Baddiel, Jews Don't Count

“This has the effect, paradoxically, and despite all the noise around the issue, of making Jews – the real individuals caught in the cross-fire, that is – feel that they count even less than they did at the start. As, for example, a progressive Jew who might support the attempt to rid the Labour Party of antisemitic elements, it makes you feel like your reality doesn’t figure in this fight at all. It makes you feel, in fact, like the people that are being fought about aren’t you at all.”
― David Baddiel, Jews Don't Count

“Unfortunately, the separation of antisemitism from racism also creates for some a sense that it is a different thing entirely.”
― David Baddiel, Jews Don't Count

“A sacred circle is drawn around those whom the progressive modern left are prepared to go into battle for, and it seems as if the Jews aren't in it.”
― David Baddiel, Jews Don't Count

“The point is, history is not past. It's effects live in the present.”
― David Baddiel, Jews Don't Count

“It doesn't matter how rich you are, because 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.”
― David Baddiel, Jews Don't Count

“This is at the very heart of Hadley Freeman, the Guardian writer’s anger and hurt. Progressive Jews, Jews who would never want in any way to minimize the struggle of other minorities, are cowed from talking about their sense of not being cared for by their own comrades because of this. They feel cast out and alienated from their spiritual home, and they can’t even express that for fear of being accused of racism.”
― David Baddiel, Jews Don't Count

“As regards the controversial area of minority casting, 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.”
― David Baddiel, Jews Don't Count

“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.”
― David Baddiel, Jews Don't Count

“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. You have to listen to the people being talked about rather than the talker—and the power, throughout history, has tended to be with the talker, the person with the platform, rather than the talked-about, who are usually the ones affected.”
― David Baddiel, Jews Don't Count

“To fight antisemitism, you have to be aware of how the antisemites see Jewishness, which is as a thing in your blood, not your spiritual soul.”
― David Baddiel, Jews Don't Count

“Well, 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, in this context Krug’s Jewishness enhances the story.”
― David Baddiel, Jews Don't Count

“The Talmud is a book of exegesis of the Old Testament, codified in the fourteenth century and containing the basis of all the archaic rules and laws of Judaism:”
― David Baddiel, Jews Don't Count

“why a difference in kind should equate to a difference in significance.”
― David Baddiel, Jews Don't Count

“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. You have to listen to the people being talked about rather than the talker – and the power, throughout history, has tended to be with the talker, the person with the platform, rather than the talked-about, who are usually the ones affected.”
― David Baddiel, Jews Don't Count

“Anti-Semitism is a second-class racism.”
― David Baddiel, Jews Don't Count

“Just as a particular racism can only really be defined by the victims of that racism, the deep truth of identity is only available to those who live that identity. 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 channeling it through an actor who hasn’t lived it.*”
― David Baddiel, Jews Don't Count