Last October, the Guardian’s Hadley Freeman tweeted: “Question: would addressing bigotry against any other minority be seen as an unfortunate distraction from the bigger picture, or is it just antisemitism?” Novara Media’s Ash Sarkar tweeted a response that concluded “…spare me the ‘any other minority shite,’” following up with: “it is just a complete fiction to suggest that trans people, Muslims, black people, the GRT community, exist in some kind of privileged bubble in which harm against them is widely recognised and their pain taken seriously.” Freeman’s response to Sarkar was that the “any other minority” referred to the failure of the anti-racist left to treat Jews like any other minority.
This isn’t the only Twitter spat that David Baddiel mentions in his brisk book-length essay Jews Don’t Count: How Identity Politics Failed One Particular Identity. While he acknowledges that “Twitter is not the real world,” it’s certainly the main platform where tensions between Jews and the left are played out. One of the paradoxes of Twitter conflict is that it often results in people feeling ostracised, even though no one actually goes anywhere (save the few who are banned or suspended).
An appreciation of that paradox is key to understanding Jews Don’t Count, whose blunt title refers to the sense of exclusion that Jews such as Baddiel and Freeman feel from the left and progressives in general: “Progressive Jews, Jews who would never want in any way to minimise 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.”
The book is likely to be received with some eye-rolling on sections of the left. After all, they might counter, wasn’t antisemitism on the left taken seriously enough that it contributed to the failure of the Corbyn project and resulted in the damning EHRC report? And, some might scoff, is David Baddiel an oppressed individual? He is a successful public figure who attended a prominent public school and the University of Cambridge. (Full disclosure: I am also a Jew who attended the same school and university as Baddiel.) He comes across as supremely self-confident, even when he is admitting to errors of judgment, like “blacking up” to satirise the footballer Jason Lee in the 1990s. On Twitter he is effortlessly contemptuous of those who attack him.
Throughout his career, Baddiel has switched back and forth between savage, blunt humour and nuanced, thoughtful writing. The title Jews Don’t Count prepares you for a brutal polemic, but the content leavens that directness with self-deprecation, caveats and reflection.
It is that licence to be bewildering that Baddiel’s detractors find infuriating and that enrages antisemites. For some on the left, that insouciant swagger seems to scream “privilege.” But when Jews like Baddiel talk about the antisemitism they both see and have experienced, it complicates any simple understanding of what privilege is. He takes Sarkar to task for a tweet in which she claims most Jews no longer experience “material dispossession.” As Baddiel points out, his German ancestors were materially privileged, until they were forced to flee with their assets confiscated. As he says, “My mother was born in Nazi Germany. I only exist by the skin of my teeth.” Moreover: “The dispossession and trauma experienced by my grandparents didn’t end with them. My grandfather was in and out of a mental hospital for the rest of his life with clinical depression. My mother was an amazing woman, but deeply damaged. And as for me … well, that’s another book. The point is, history is not past. Its effects live in the present.”
Privilege is neither irrevocable, nor a zero-sum game. Material disadvantage is not the only way through which minorities can be subject to hate and prejudice. The narrow “privileging” of the material over the experiential can, in less sophisticated forms of anti-racism, mean that those who are materially okay are assumed to be immune to hate. Moreover, while Jews who can “pass” as white might escape the targeting that results from visibility, not only are many Jews non-white or visibly Jewish in other ways (such as orthodox Jews), antisemitism has often seen Jewish invisibility as a sign of deviousness.
For all these reasons, Jews often feel they need the solidarity of anti-racists on the left and feel deeply hurt they don’t feel they receive it. That’s why, while Baddiel acknowledges that antisemitism on the right is serious and rising, he wrote a book about antisemitism on the left. While many on the left are bewildered that Jews are so fixated with the left at a time of rising far-right antisemitism, it is the sense of abandonment that seems to grate; after all, Jews have rarely had illusions about the far-right.
At the same time as Jews like Baddiel might feel abandoned, the ability to assert oneself publicly without the help of the left may also convey the message “we don’t actually need you.” All of which deepens the mess.
The Jewish willingness to speak tests some of the more naive forms of progressive anti-racist politics to destruction. It’s easy to defend the voiceless wretched of the earth—they won’t talk back. In contrast, Jews of all stripes can be known through the clamour of their discordant voices. Even those Jews who might seem more recognisably oppressed make their awkwardness known; Mizrachi Jews from Arab lands often embrace right-wing politics in Israel, rather than conveniently joining hands with their non-white Muslim cousins.
It is precisely the treatment of awkward Jews as arguments to be refuted rather than people to listen to that Baddiel skewers in Jews Don’t Count. If the “any other minority” argument has value, it is here.
Facing up to the ways in which the other isn’t always what you want them to be is an essential task in developing an effective anti-racist politics. I can understand why other minorities may feel that the Jewish ability to speak crowds out their own voices (and this is certainly one area where Baddiel might ask himself some awkward questions). But the difficulty of including Jews in progressive coalitions might engulf other minorities that are perceived as successful. We are starting to see similar tensions between the left and the more affluent with sections of the British Hindu community, which is becoming more vocal.
What message does it send if anti-racism is conditional on minorities not being able to speak for themselves? Grappling with the challenge presented by “mouthy Jews” like David Baddiel is therefore an urgent task even for those on the left who cannot relate to his arguments.
