The Jewish Chronicle

An arts bailout for everyone except Jews?

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before they can pass the first threshold for subsidy. The questions are so brutally personal that anywhere but the public sector they’d get the interrogat­or charged with privacy violation. But this is Whitehall and we’re talking money, so here’s what arts managers are required to disclose.

“Please select your gender identity”. There are four options: “Female (including trans women), Male (including trans men), Non-binary (e.g. androgyne)” and “prefer not to say”. Some applicants cross out the last line and write “I’ve never looked”. Seriously, though, does Whitehall need to know?

Next question: “Is your gender identity different to the sex you were assigned at birth?” Well, who can remember that? If it weren’t for the circumcisi­on, I’d be stumped for an answer.

“Please select your sexual orientatio­n,” the form continues, with a whole ice-cream menu of options that I won’t splash across your Friday-night dinner-table for fear of mixing one dubious streak with another. I’m advising colleagues to write in mango with raspberry ripple, which seems vaguely neutral and even a little creative.

But this is where it gets distinctly sticky and a touch sinister for Jews. “Please select your ethnicity,” demands the Arts Council. Eighteen different options are available, starting with

White British, White Irish, Gypsy or Irish Traveller and Any Other White Background. Indian, Pakistani and Bangladesh­i are three separate ethnicitie­s, on grounds I cannot understand. Are Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherland­s different on ethnic grounds, or just historical­ly so?

Black Caribbean, I see, is not the same as “Black and White Caribbean” and the word “Arab” covers up a multitude of hostilitie­s, religious and territoria­l. I wouldn’t say it aloud in my Iranian grocer’s store. Most shocking to my eye, however, is that, among 18 dominant ethnicitie­s in the arts of England, there is no designatio­n on the form for a person of Jewish ancestry.

If Jews are not ethnic, what are we? We come from all over the world with a religion that divides us rather than unites and a civilisati­on that is more distinct and diverse than any other on the list. Yet, when it comes to dishing out Rishi’s dosh, Jews are the ethnicity that dare not speak its name.

A gentile friend who knows the official mind better than I do says “well, Jews come under Any Other White Background”, but we don’t, do we? There are Jews whose skin is darker than Wiley’s and whose music is way out of harmony with European tonality. There are Jews of every tongue and nation, every shade of Jewish opinion. The refusal to recognise Jews as an ethnic group is an act of blatant prejudice, and it may run deeper than we think.

You’d have to go back to Nazi Germany to find official forms calculatin­g bits of identity — quarter-Jewish, halfGypsy, Mischling. I am not imputing that civil servants in SW1 are cut from the same cloth, but their ethnic curiosity in what ought to be a simple transactio­n — I am an arts organisati­on, give me the money — expose a deep-seated crisis in British identity, a cry for help from bureaucrat­s wanting to know who or what anyone really is beyond the top end of the Northern Line.

Would it hurt them to add Jewish to the list? Perhaps. To put Jew on a form is subliminal­ly Nazi. But there’s a more troubling prejudice at play right now, one that the rapper Wiley was allowed to vent this week on Sky news — the notion that Jews are all lawyers and bosses. They shouldn’t be queuing with artists for a dollop of Rishi’s porridge. I’ve heard similar things said in unguarded moments by certain well-known actors. Jews are well off, they help each other, they give to Israel. Ergo, they are not a British ethnic group. We have a right to exclude them.

Just as the Arts Council has done.

 ?? PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES ?? Royal Albert Hall
PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES Royal Albert Hall

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