JEWISH REVIEWef BOOKS
Do Jews Count?
By Dara Horn Fall 2021
T would never have said this ten years
ago, or even five years ago, but there [Jews Don't Count
apparently comes a time in the lives of
those who write about Jewish identity
when they have to decide whether to | 1s gooks
write about . .. it.
David Baddie!
144pp, $12.99
“Antisemitism” is too clinical a term
for what I mean. It’s not evocative
enough, as it doesn’t address the
confusion and anxiety that Jews around
the world have experienced in recent
years—which is less about security guards at synagogues than about a much more subtle
baseline reality of dismissing, shaming, and belittling by parts of the non-Jewish world. This
is often cloaked in a performative righteousness that publicly sanctifies the dead Jews of the
past. I found myself in this position three years ago, when I realized that the only thing my
“mainstream” editors and readers wanted me to write about was, essentially, dead Jews—a
topic I had been studiously avoiding as a Jewish novelist for the previous twenty years and
about which I was now expected to wax beatific and inspiring, rather than enraged.
Somewhere between the endless virtual beatdowns and the actual shootings and stabbings
of recent years, I reached the point at which not addressing it felt impossible. I figured that
if was going to write a book I never wanted to write, I might as well go all in and call it
People Love Dead Jews. The A-list British Jewish comedian and television personality David
Baddiel got there first, publishing the book he never wanted to write six months ago, though
it’s only now available in the United States. Like me, he doubled down. His book is called
Jews Don’t Count.
Baddiel’s book expresses the most difficult-to-articulate aspect
of contemporary antisemitism: not the physical or even virtual
attacks but the gaslighting that accompanies them, the
blindingly absurd and absolutely pervasive premise that such
attacks are actually a form of righteous, if perhaps misguided,
“punching up”—and that antisemitism, as a baseless and
horrific dehumanizing hatred, therefore does not exist. The
right-wing version of this absurdity (something something
#WhiteGenocide) makes very little pretense toward logic, but the
left-wing version (something something #PalestinianGenocide)has had more widespread buy-in among educated people. It is
into this particular maw of self-righteous Jew-eating idiocy that
the card-carrying progressive Baddiel, or as his Twitter profile
succinctly describes him, “Jew,” bravely enters.
On its surface, this is a book about what cool people call
“intersectionality” and how it has been weaponized against
Jews, or as his title puts it, how “Jews don’t count” in the
progressive movement's otherwise comprehensive fight against
bigotry. He begins with a series of blunt examples, such as the
lead actor for a 2019 London production of the play The Color
Purple being fired for homophobic comments she'd made in
2014—while no one objected to the production itself, even
though the author of The Color Purple, Alice Walker, had
published an insanely antisemitic poem in 2017 called “It Is
Our (Frightful) Duty to Study the Talmud.” (“Are Goyim (us)
meant to be slaves of the Jews, and not only / That but to enjoy
it?”)
David Baddiel, April 2016,
Oxford, England. (Photo
by David Levenson/Getty
Images.)
Nonprofit campaigns in the UK are devoted to defusing racism
among football fans—but fans who routinely scream antisemitic
insults are of zero concern. Progressives are appalled when
nonminority actors are cast in roles written for minorities—but
non-Jewish performers regularly play Jewish characters, and no
one cares. While many canonical artists are publicly flogged the
minute a racist comment of theirs is unearthed, the children’s writer Roald Dahl, who spoke
proudly and publicly of his own antisemitism, is still celebrated in the UK with “Roald Dahl
Story Day.” About an online trend describing Jesus as a “Black man” or a “person of color,”
Baddiel writes, “The move to reclassify Jesus as non-white is good and historically accurate.
The erasure at the same time of his Jewishness is neither. It accords in fact with centuries of
the Church doing the same.” Baddiel borrows Noah Blum’s phrase, “Schrédinger’s Whites,”
to describe the neat trick by which Jews are considered “white” only in contexts where
“white” is a bad thing to be (inconveniently, white supremacists disagree that Jews are
white). Don’t get him started on Jeremy Corbyn.
Baddiel patiently explains why his progressive friends so often refuse to see antisemitism as
real. Jews being tagged as “white” is one explanation, which Baddiel thoroughly debunks by
explaining that “white” is really used to mean “safe”—something he dismisses with a dismal
series of statistics on antisemitic attacks. Another is that, as his fellow progressives have
openly told him, “Jews are rich.” This is absurd for many reasons, several of which Baddiel
unpacks. Weirdly, he doesn’t explain the most obvious one, which is that “Jews are rich” is
itself the foundational stereotype that allows people to justify their antisemitism. Instead,
Baddiel points out that the wealthiest minority ethnic group in both the UK and the US is
actually Hindus, and this fact does not seem to interfere with them being considered
vulnerable to discrimination. And finally, as he puts it with characteristic bluntness, “Fuck
off about money. Because money doesn’t protect you from racism.” His own grandparentswere rich German Jews; fat lot of good it did them. “It doesn’t matter how rich you are,
because the 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.”
Baddiel’s insistence that Jews belong in the British catchall term “BAME” (Black, Asian, and
minority ethnic), a classification indicating vulnerability to discrimination that is basically
never applied to Jews, might sound overplayed to American Jewish readers. The reality is
that British Jews have been putting up with this crap for a long time and in ways that much
more closely resemble “conventional” racism against other minority groups. The year I
spent at Cambridge University in 1999 was the only year of my life when I routinely
encountered social antisemitism of the sort I associated with my great-grandparents’
experience. One of my many lovely British memories is of a non-Jewish American friend of
mine there who found that all our British peers assumed she was Jewish—despite her non-
Jewish name and the fact that she was six feet tall. After a month, she finally asked someone
why everyone thought so. That person blurted out, “Because you're friends with that girl.”
What’s most chilling about reading this book in 2021 is realizing how much of it now also
applies in the United States. The football fans Baddiel describes chanting “Fuck the fucking
Jews” feel far away, but the Twitter mob saying the same thing is already here.
By design, Baddiel’s arguments only apply in progressive settings. This does lead to a few
blind spots, such as his argument that “one of the things that marks Jewishness out as
different from other ethnicities is that it can be hidden.” I doubt that many haredim, who
have not coincidentally borne the brunt of antisemitic street violence, would agree with that
idea. But to his credit, Baddiel sees that this convenient and false concept of Jewish identity
being concealable, and therefore not subject to bigotry, is itself a demonstration of
bigotry.It is a byproduct of the appalling fact that Jews are routinely regarded as disgusting.
As he puts it, “Jews don’t really suffer from being thought of as different as long as people
don’t know they’re Jews: as long as they, like gays in the closet, hide.” This idea of disgust
and shame is the key to Baddiel’s book and is its greatest insight. The point of contemporary
progressive antisemitism is to make Jews publicly disgusting, chiefly by insisting, as all
types of antisemites always have, that hatred against them is their fault.
Baddiel highlights a social media post from House of Lords @
member Baroness Jenny Tonge just after the Pittsburgh aa
massacre: “Absolutely appalling and a criminal act, but does it @ "=" =
ever occur to Bibi and the present Israeli government that their attire gn et hn
actions may be re-igniting antisemitism?” This post, widely
shared on Twitter, is only remarkable for the high profile of its
writer, its timing, and its all-in absurdity (the Pittsburgh
murderer was a white supremacist goon who obsessed about
the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society). It is otherwise so
commonplace that if you haven’t seen hundreds of tweets like
it, you’ve never been on Twitter. But it demonstrates just how David Baddiel denounces
much progressive antisemitism relies on shaming. Another of House of Lords member
Tonge’s tweets describes Zionism as “Just sickening”:Jenny Tonge’s
We would all like a safe haven to run to when antisemitism on Twitter.
the going gets tough, but we stay on and ask
why it is getting tough. Why have the Jewish people been persecuted
over and over again throughout history? Why? . . . If we discussed
this we would be accused of anti Semitism, so better not, and so it
goes on!
Baddiel parses this perfectly:
Her response is one of disgust: disgust with Jews, for both
manipulating history (high status) and for snivellingly wanting a safe
haven to run away to (low status). Disgust with Jews for failing to be
the tough that gets going when the going gets tough (like, y’know,
when you’re being herded naked at gunpoint with your children into
amass grave you dug yourself).
Would any other minority group, Baddiel asks, be accused by progressives of deserving the
hate they receive?
There's a fair argument to be made against what Baddiel is asking for here. Not because Jews
don’t deserve the kind of official goodwill that other minorities receive from those claiming
to fight the good fight, but because that goodwill is itself based on a flawed and disturbing
premise—namely, that victimhood, or more precisely, powerlessness, is something
inherently honorable. This idea has its roots in a historically Christian concept of suffering
imparting nobility and is hideously linked to an even deeper and unarticulated belief that
Jews deserve respect only when they are powerless—whether that means politically
impotent or dead.
‘This disturbing concept underlies much of Baddiel’s discussion, but he addresses it only
obliquely, through humor. Yet it is precisely here that Baddiel’s jokes don’t land, and that
probably isn’t a coincidence. For someone so plugged into today’s pop culture, he sounds
surprisingly like a Borscht Belt comic who equates being wimpy with being Jewish. And his
jokes about Israelis—“Jews without angst, without guilt. So not really Jews at all”—sound
written by someone who has never met a twenty-first-century Israeli or even watched Israeli
TV. Such jokes are not merely ancient but also dissonant coming from someone who isclearly (and admirably) a bold fighter in the public square, engaged in the brave and
thankless project of rejecting the internalized antisemitic legacy of angst and guilt.
Subjecting oneself to social media mobs, as Baddiel seems to do daily, requires a cast-iron
stomach.
I don’t happen to agree with Baddiel’s opinion, if one can call it that, of Zionism—the sum
total of which seems to be, in his words, “Meh.” But it is refreshing and also revealing to see
just how irrelevant it is to his argument. The truth is that Israel is irrelevant to
contemporary antisemitism because “concern-trolling” about Israel at this point is simply
one more tool for harassing diaspora Jews. Baddiel’s non-Zionism is actually an asset in
seeing this clearly. He shares, for example, an innocuous tweet he posted about watching
golf, to which one of his trolls replied, apropos of nothing, “Lucky you watching golf, no
need to be watching what’s going on in Palestine.” As Baddiel puts it, “For a long time I
used to hand out an award for this sort of tweet, called
#Bringlsrae|PalestinelntoltSomeFuckingHow Award. Then I realised it was happening so
often it was pointless.”
“Discussions” like this “about Israel’—or to be more accurate, vicious personal attacks on
Jews, whether online or in person—are almost never actually about Israel, any more than
blood libels in the Middle Ages were about whatever toddler happened to drown in the river
that week. As fellow British Jewish writer Howard Jacobson put it in one of his columns way
back in 2009, “This is the old stuff.” The reality here couldn’t be more obvious, but
pretending it’s not happening—pretending, for example, that all these yoga instructors
“tatioing” Jews (Twitter-speak for piling on) on social media are doing so because they want
justice for Palestinians, or that artists painting murals of evil bankers straight out of Der
Stiirmer are really just passionate about addressing income inequality—is part of the
gaslighting on which contemporary antisemitism relies. Hearing someone in Baddiel’s
position come out and say all this feels deeply cathartic.
My only real complaint is that Jews Don’t Count isn’t exactly a book, and not only because
it’s remarkably brief. Many passages in this book feel less like well-argued prose or a well-
told story than like a hastily written email, or notes for a stand-up act, or a Twitter thread.
In fact, a remarkable percentage of this book actually is from a Twitter thread. Many pages
of this brief book are filled with screenshots taken from Twitter, written at a level of inanity
that’s startling for anyone used to reading, well, books.
But, of course, the reductive stupidity of having to write about this at all is Baddiel’s point. I
wish nobody had to write these books. But I’m endlessly grateful that somebody did.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dara Horn
Dara Horn is the award-winning author of five novels and the new nonfiction book People Love Dead
Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present (W. W. Norton & Company).