Do Jews “not count”?
Last week, the 90s comedian David Baddiel recently presented a documentary on the place of Jews among Britain’s minorities and the question of why, as he sees it, Jews are left out by identity politics which regards the status of “the oppressed” as belonging to people of colour. While he does not mention Jeremy Corbyn in the programme, he was already putting forward the arguments this programme (and his book, Jews Don’t Count) while Corbyn was Labour leader and the perception that “Jews aren’t a minority” or “Jews are white” is one he was criticising back then as well. Towards the end of the programme he meets with Jason Lee, a Black footballer he had parodied, using Blackface, in one of his 90s comedy shows and apologised to him and the two had a discussion about racism and allyship. (They have an hour-long discussion on Lee’s podcast here.) The programme can be viewed in the UK for the next three weeks or so here.
Early on in the programme he talks to a number of prominent Jews about stereotypes of Jews they are aware of and they name some; they mention that they are often contradictory, such as being filthy or vermin and being rich and powerful. He talks to Miriam Margolyes, an actor known for being a bit of a renegade and for falling out with other prominent British Jews for her views on Israel and Palestinian rights, who said that she believed that the British did not really like the Jews but had been unable to say so since the end of the Second World War. Later on in the programme, she took issue with Baddiel’s assertion that, since he felt no connection with Israel and was an atheist (which it turns out she is as well), that he bears no responsibility for whatever goes on there. Margolyes seems to be saying that he should, as Israeli Jews are “his people”.
In response to the notion that Jews are white, he interviews the American Jewish actress and comedian Sarah Silverman who talks about how Jewish women are typecast in certain types of roles and never others, and someone mentions the fact that sometimes Jews escape these roles by changing their names; Wynona Ryder, for example, would not have landed some of her major roles had she used her actual surname, Horowitz. Someone said he had never felt white; he interviews someone who talks about Jews who were murdered by the Klan for allying with Black civil rights workers in the Deep South, and others talk about Jews having been expelled from one country after another, including at one point England. Another contributor (I think it was Stephen Fry) opined that people do not know how frightened Jews are and about the intergenerational trauma they carry “in their bones”.
I’m going to address all these points individually. I was brought up in a Catholic extended family in south London, and went to a very racially mixed Catholic infant and junior school. I was aware of Jews, of course, but there are not many in that area of London (I knew more about Jews in New York, thanks to Judy Blume’s books, than of Jews in London). I was aware that Jews had suffered persecution. I wasn’t aware of the specific nature of stereotypes about Jews until I went to a boarding school in a provincial area, where any boys known to be of any ethnic minority were subjected to a lot of racial name-calling and in some cases physical bullying. This included Jews. I heard ‘Jewish’ used as a synonym for stingy, which I hadn’t before. Even though I’m not Jewish, there was one boy who kept calling me a ‘Yid’ for no apparent reason. The only explanation I can think of was that I was from London, and perhaps people in some provincial areas (in this case, Norfolk) perceive London as foreign, and as I’m not Black, Asian, Greek or (as far as he could tell) Irish, I must be Jewish. I know there’s lingering prejudice, but that’s not what makes a whole group oppressed. What brings that about is discrimination and violence.
This is why it might appear that Jews are not on the radar of anti-racism campaigners anymore and why a Labour politician (Dawn Butler) can give a long list of marginalised groups and not mention Jews. The major threat to Jewish safety in Britain remains the Far Right, not the Left and not the police either. How many Jews are subjected to stop-and-search when going to school or work or the shops? How many die in police custody every year? Stereotypes exist, as already discussed, but they are not associated with violence; they do not result in Jews being seen as a threat, such that a Jew raising his or her voice is perceived as a prelude to violence. Groups of Jewish friends are not perceived as gangs. If any Jew falls victim to this type of racism, he or she is probably also Black. This is why we say Jews in general are not merely “white passing” (an Americanism, referring to light-skinned people of partly Black or Latin American ancestry who are able to fit in and evade racial discrimination) but actually white. How whiteness was conceived in the early or mid-20th century is not how it is conceived now.
As a Muslim I don’t regard Jews as responsible for whatever the state of Israel does just because they share a religion or a shared ancestry. I disagree with Miriam Margolyes on that issue. However, the fact remains that mainstream Jewish community organisations and Jewish media (I don’t mean the mainstream media; I mean newspapers with ‘Jewish’ in the name, though the two share a lot of prominent contributors) openly act as lobbying fronts for the state of Israel. These newspapers and prominent columnists campaign against holding Israel to account for the crimes of its soldiers and settlers; they sow false doubts about those crimes and blame victims, they use the antisemitism card to slap down prominent Arabs and Muslims both here and in the USA when they achieve positions of influence. It’s a shame that a Jewish school in the UK has to undergo security drills, but some of these schools are part of the same network of pro-Israel community organisations and Israel destroys Palestinian schools when it wants to seize their land, as seen last week in Masafer Yatta.
Baddiel also appeals to the notion of allyship multiple times in the programme. Allyship is where the more privileged support the less privileged, or oppressed, when they face prejudice, discrimination or violence, such as where men challenge their friends’ misogyny and white people stand with their Black or Asian friends and colleagues against racism (this also includes the Jews who stood with disenfranchised Black Americans and helped to register them to vote). Where ordinary Jews are subjected to physical violence or to abusive chanting at football matches, it is quite appropriate for to support them in this way, by shouting back at the abusers, by physically defending them, by helping them report the attacks, by defending them in words, in public, if they are able. When the ‘racism’ consists of justified condemnation of Israeli oppression, or calls to oppose it through boycotts, or the complaints are plainly spurious, there is no call for allyship from people who are normally opposed to racism or other oppressions; this would in fact be colluding in oppression. In any case, the Jews have no shortage of allies in the mainstream media; their complaints got ample coverage from the broadcast media and newspapers of left and right throughout. The Labour party has expelled people for merely questioning the official story on this.
When facts or at least well-evidenced perceptions are voiced, there is the tendency to link them to antisemitic tropes. To say that Jews are generally prosperous is not the same as saying they have a literal licence to print money or that they control the whole finance industry; to say they are influential or powerful is not the same as saying they are all-powerful or that they control everything from behind the scenes. The nature of racism in a society does not stay the same from time to time and it is certainly not the same from society to society; Jews may have been perceived as a race in Europe for many years, but in many countries today, visible differences such as skin colour trump differences among people of the same colour. I would have no objection to including Jews as an option in diversity forms and the census, much as with the Irish, but I do not believe Jews are an oppressed minority in Britain today. Being told about your forebears’ persecution in other countries at other times under regimes that are no longer in power is not the same as being oppressed or persecuted. When your biggest allies are the mainstream media and major political parties, you do not need to call on anti-racists who are fighting some of those same forces as allies.
