Jews Don’t Count by David Baddiel
This Sunday Times Political Book of the Year 2021 is really an extended essay. It is very well written, forensically argued and strikes me as uncontroversial in its conclusions. Nevertheless, its publication aroused a great deal of discussion, as you have probably picked up in the media, and which, of course seems to prove Baddiel’s central contention: in the current focus on identity politics and the fight to hear the voices of a whole range of disadvantaged groups, Jews are invisible, or seen as somehow not a proper member of the minority groups for whom progressive people go into battle.
As Baddiel admits, this book is not aimed at the boneheads with racist views – what’s the point. Instead it is written for those people with whom he would broadly align politically -anti-racists who would describe themselves as progressives and who will gleefully and smugly inform you that they are on the right side of history. It is from them that Baddiel believes Jews get a raw deal. As he systematically examines, this is sometimes due to an unconscious underestimation but, more often, it is because of dangerous assumptions about Jews and confused thinking about hierarchies of disadvantage.
Before he develops this point, however, he amasses plenty of evidence of the way antisemitism is not treated as seriously as racism and other prejudiced behaviour. He looks, for example, at blatant antisemitic comments from famous people such as T. S. Eliot and Alice Walker and shows how this has barely impingeg on their reputations. The sort of crass prejudice they espouse would see them permanently cancelled if made about people of colour, trans people and any of the other “legitimate” (my adjective) groups of victims.
Often, well-meaning people from the progressive camp set out in strong terms their criticism of a whole range of discrimination and support for the disadvantaged, yet simply forget to mention Jews. Baddiel points out the problem caused by the use of the term antisemitism as it is separated from more powerfully generic nouns such prejudice, discrimination and racism. Incidentally, he addresses the issue of antisemitism being a religious prejudice not a racist one by hypothesising that his own well-known atheism would not have deterred the Nazis from putting him in a concentration camp.
This first section of the book has power because of the rise in recent years in antisemitic attacks across Europe and hardening views about Jews that he identifies from recent social surveys. However, I found the second half more interesting when he tries to explain why this is the case.
The fact is that progressives don’t consider antisemitism to be as worrying, dangerous or important as homophobia, racism, misogyny and transphobia. Think, for example, about the relative sensitivity shown when people refer to the N word in comparison to the Y word. Why do such online defenders of the disadvantaged, such as Ash Sarkar, whose good intentions Baddiel acknowledges, create this hierarchy of disadvantage. Well, some progressives fall into centuries old stereotypes that equate Jews with power and wealth – how can they be victims, is the assumption, when they run the world? Then there’s the sometimes deliberate and sometimes moronic blurring of anti-zionism and antisemitism. Corbyn and his faction in the Labour Party swallowed this double whammy and that’s why he simply didn’t register how distasteful the antisemitic portrayal of evil capitalists was in street artist Mear One’s mural.
There’s also a fascinating and significant discussion about whiteness linked to this idea of power. Baddiel explains the subtle way Jews are portrayed as white and not white depending on the nature of the attack – are they omnipotent manipulators of the world order or a rat-like pestilence?
There are no real solutions here, and I don’t think that’s Baddiel’s point. It’s a frustrated cry about the unfair assumptions, subtle distinctions and continuing prejudice of Jews by influential people who should know better. The biggest revelation, for me, however, was the examination of the online world and, in particular Twitter. I’m afraid it seems ghastly and the arguments raging there seem to be impacting on more nuanced, thoughtful discussion in a destructive manner.