‘Growing up, being Jewish was incidental. Now it’s controversial’
Ahead of Holocaust Memorial Day, criminal barrister ‘Judge’ Robert Rinder tells Guy Kelly why the testimonies he’s heard are needed now, more than ever
Robert Rinder doesn’t go on Twitter very much, but occasionally – if he’s been on television, say – he likes to dip a toe in, just to see what people are making of him.
“I’m always fascinated by the slew of hate, and the community who seem to galvanise around their hatred of me,” the barrister, television personality and former Strictly Come Dancing contestant says, almost giddily, when we meet for a coffee in north London. “It’s hilarious.”
The mob’s comments are often fairly nasty – Judge Rinder, as he is known to viewers of his courtroom reality show, is a rare, Twitter-bating combination of famous, outspoken, professionally judgmental, openly gay, fiercely sarcastic and, perhaps above all, Jewish – but there was one day last year when the hate was curiously absent from his timeline.
It was the morning after Rinder’s episode of Who Do You Think You Are?, the BBC’S long-running genealogy show. The previous night, millions had tuned in to see what was possibly the most affecting film in the series’ 15-year history, as Rinder explored the lives and fates of his Polish family. In particular, he followed the journey taken by his late grandfather, Morris, a Jew who grew up under Nazi occupation and spent the war at Schlieben concentration camp in Germany, before arriving in the Lake District in 1945 as part of a group of child Holocaust survivors given asylum in Britain. Morris’s parents, four sisters and brother, we learnt, weren’t as lucky – all seven had been killed at Treblinka extermination camp in Poland.
“After that aired, there was nothing horrible on Twitter. Absolutely nothing. And doesn’t that tell you something?”
Before the programme, Rinder knew some aspects of Morris’s story: a proud Anglophile, he died when Rinder was 21, and rarely spoke about his early life. To be able to fill in the blanks – including travelling to the ruins of Schlieben and meeting a survivor who had known his grandfather – was “lifechanging”, so much so that the 40-yearold is now planning to make two more Holocaust documentaries for the BBC.
Rinder is also clear that the wholly positive reaction from the public had in it a lesson: that while the numbers (approximately six million Jewish men, women and children murdered by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during the Second World War) involved in the Holocaust are shocking alone, hearing and seeing first-hand testimonies “can change people”. To that end, ahead of Holocaust Memorial Day on Sunday, today he will interview another survivor, Harry Spiro, for a webcast that will be beamed to tens of thousands of schoolchildren around the country.
“Harry comes from Piotrków, the same town as my grandfather, and he came to the Lake District with him,” he says. “He’s one of an increasingly dwindling number of survivors, so this is an opportunity to hear from somebody with firsthand experience of the horror. I know for sure that having the opportunity to see and hear that changes people. It’s almost impossible to articulate how important it is, because if there’s nobody left who can say, ‘I was there, I saw it’, then the creeping shadow of anti-semitism and especially Holocaust denial can re-emerge. The lessons are more important than ever.”
The question of other genocides crops up often in discussion of the Holocaust, and it is addressed by the survivors Rinder has met. To him, it is further proof of the day’s worth, while anecdotal reports of some parents taking their children out of memorial events, on account of unfairly focusing on the Holocaust (incidentally, Labour shadow chancellor John Mcdonnell, supported by Jeremy Corbyn, presented a motion in the Commons in 2011 to suggest it should be renamed “Genocide Memorial Day – Never Again For Anyone”) are a warning sign.
“When you hear the survivors speak, they talk about Rwanda, they talk about Yugoslavia, and now they talk about the Rohingya in Myanmar. These things aren’t mutually exclusive; it means the lessons weren’t learned,” he says. As for the parents, “You’d have to question why they would do that. What’s really at the root of it? I would find it deeply suspicious, and my suspicion would be that that parent believes in Holocaust denial.”
As a child growing up in Southgate, London, where he attended the same school as Amy Winehouse, he has never been a target of anti-semitism – at least not knowingly, though wonders if that’s because his family bore no outward signs of Judaism. But he has seen his fair share of unpleasantness: one client met him and said: “Thank God it’s you. All that other solicitor does is send me Yids and queers.”
In such cases, Rinder either ignores, or empathises. “Darling, I’m Jewish and I once represented the National Front [in court]. Ignoring it isn’t some Zen state I’m in, it’s just my lived experience. I know that Margaret and John Loony from Reading are never happy humans. The detritus around their lives is likely to be significant, so I just think, ‘Poor darling, if you’ve got time to write that you hope Judge Rinder dies, you’re probably there in bed in a muumuu, sitting up and chainsmoking Parliaments at night’.”
One aspect is increasingly troubling him, though: instances of the word “Nazi” being used appear to be on the rise. Just this month, it appears to have become the slur du jour for extreme protesters on either side of the Brexit debate.
“I’m increasingly disturbed by it, as we all should be. We did a piece for my review of the year show [on Channel 4 at the end of December] looking at all the things called Nazi in 2018. KFC running out of chicken: Nazi. Sainsbury’s: Nazi. Et cetera. It is a stone that’s become increasingly light and glib to throw, without any understanding of what it means. How dare they. What are they talking about? To make that ahistorical is a real problem.”
In conversation, Rinder has two primary modes: outrageously gossipy and incredibly serious. The latter is hallmarked by his rich oratory skills, which slow to fully articulate an idea. On the question of modern anti-semitism, he nearly grinds to a halt.
“Am I more worried now? As a child, my Jewishness was an incidental feature to my identity, it was kind of fun, and gave me a kind of shared history with my friends. But now, it feels odd that there are places in London where there are political meetings that don’t seem in any way threatening, where it would be controversial to say you are Jewish.
“It’s quite clear that anti-semitism is incurable, and inextricably wound up in nefarious ideas that have never gone away and have now been picked up, especially by the political Left. All the same stuff that was the fuel that eventually enabled extremist governments to succeed in the 20th century.”
Rinder never reveals his political persuasion, but he counts among his best friends Luciana Berger, the Jewish Labour MP who has publicly criticised Corbyn for failing to tackle anti-semitism. “It is truly shocking, what she’s been through. And it’s coming from the Left and the Right, let’s be clear,” he says, stabbing at the table.
Just as soon as he has delineated the serious, he switches to his playful side, mentioning other well-known friends including George Osborne (“he has a heart of gold”), the journalist Katie Glass – who moved into his home for a while last year after his amicable divorce from barrister Seth Cumming, and with whom he travelled along the Trans-siberian Railway, to viral social media success, over Christmas – and university pal Benedict Cumberbatch. He was best man to the Sherlock actor, is godfather to one of his children, and had him officiate his own wedding.
“I was in Chengdu in southern China once, in a vehicle, and inside was a picture of a religious icon on one side and Benedict on the other. That’s when life gets weird. He was sleeping in my basement 20 years ago…”
He prepares to head off to the National Television Awards, where silly mode will abound. It’s a delicate balance. Let’s hope Twitter is kind to him afterwards.
Robert Rinder’s Holocaust Memorial Day commemorative webcast with concentration camp survivor Harry Spiro will be streamed live today at 10am. Details: het.org.uk
‘You’d have to question why parents would take their children out of memorial events… My suspicion would be that they believe in Holocaust denial’