Gerald Jacobs: Jews Don't Count
Some years ago, when reviewing Frederic Raphael’s collection of writings, The Necessity of Antisemitism, and reading it on the Northern Line, I tried all manner of awkward ways to hide the cover-title from my fellow passengers. I haven’t yet ventured on to the Tube brandishing David Baddiel’s new offering, Jews
Don’t Count, but the possibility has awakened memories of my uncomfortable rides with Raphael.
Of course, neither of these well-known Jewish authors advocates the idea broadcast upon his particular book-jacket. Raphael’s title was a sophisticated conceit borrowed from Shelley’s essay, The Necessity of Atheism, while the sentiment on Baddiel’s cover is one he is emphatically ascribing to others.
And he doesn’t mess about. Following an introductory clutch of celebrity encomia, Baddiel launches straight into a joyless-sounding review in the Observer, by a writer called Holly Williams, of Jewish film-maker Charlie Kaufman’s rambling novel, Antkind. It is narrated by a character called Rosenberger Rosenberg, whose wild parody of a Jewish name is in keeping with Kaufman’s ironic laying on of Jewish stereotyping throughout a story that demands a lot of unscrambling.
Understandably, Williams is not too keen on the book but, for her, it seems the problem is that it is written from a “white-male-cis-het” perspective. It’s as though Jewishness doesn’t exist. Charlie Kaufman is subsumed, along with Rosenberger Rosenberg, beneath a four-fold woke anathema.
And, from there, Baddiel breezily, but with serious purpose and accuracy of aim, assembles examples across contemporary culture and politics where, as he puts it, “despite the history of persecution, there is only one minority that, for the privilege checkers, stays firmly in the square of privilege”. And that, he argues, is the Jew. He even cites actual lists of ethnic minorities and other groups deserving of protection against negative discrimination, upon which Jews would be expected to appear but do not.
It seems that 2019 was a vintage year for such listings. That was when a Danish comedian called Sofie Hagen enumerated “the most oppressed people in society” including those who are black, Muslim, disabled, “queer” and “trans”. But not Jews.
In that same year, in a speech to the Labour Party Conference, Dawn Butler, shadow minister for women and equalities, gave a rousing but slightly confusing promise of Labour support if, inter alia, “you are LGBT+” (but also if you are “straight”); wear a turban,