The ugly rise of dinner party anti-Semitism
She told him: ‘I always want to defend Hitler. He’s a person, too. Who are we to judge?’
Shortly after I graduated from university, I sat with a glamorous friend in the kitchen of the Putney mansion she had been invited to live in by an ageing pop star’s son. I mentioned in passing that I was Jewish, and her reaction was memorable. “You’re Jewish? But you don’t have the…” and she mimed a big hook nose.
Growing up in the Eighties and Nineties, mostly in the US, I had rarely encountered that sort of thing. So I laughed. It was almost quaint – my first brush with brazen Jewish caricaturing. This friend later went on to marry Richard Wagner’s great-greatgrandson, so maybe it wasn’t such a passing moment of naivety after all.
Years passed with very few instances like this. But then, about four years ago, roughly from the dawn of Corbyn’s
Labour leadership in 2015, things began to change. Dinner-party antiSemitism passed from being something one heard about from indignationprone relatives to something real and frequent – on both sides of the Atlantic. It belongs to a rise in antiJewish thuggery across the board: last summer I gulped to see a swastika on a bench in the train station of the quaint New England town where I grew up. I tweeted the transport authority and got no reply.
The problem isn’t just the new breed of swastika-daubers. It’s the chattering classes, whom I know far better. And what no dinner party-attending Jewish person can now avoid noticing is that at elite social gatherings in Britain and the US, dressing up brazen anti-Semitism as a form of political morality has become cool, acceptable and easy.
The sinister vogue for venting “honestly” about Jews, as we sit there looking sickened at our plates, has no doubt been freshly legitimised by the resurgence in high politics of far-Left arguments about the evils of Israel. Wildly popular senators such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar in America, and the top brass of the Labour Party, take any opportunity to poke at Israel – or worse. Ocasio-Cortez caused a stir last week by borrowing Holocaust terminology to describe US border internment camps. Disgraceful though they are, they are not Auschwitz on
any level, and yet she had the backing of the great and the good, including
The New York Review of Books and the LA Times.
In Britain, Emily Thornberry, shadow foreign secretary and Labour leadership hopeful, revealed last week how Labour tried to remove any mention of attacks against Israel from its election manifesto. “Disgustingly, attacks on Israeli civilians were being deliberately dismissed in a way that would never have been tolerated of attacks on any civilians in any other country around the world,” she noted. Indeed. Meanwhile, the Metropolitan Police announced last week it was considering bringing criminal charges against five Labour members as part of a probe into anti-Semitism in the party.
But the astonishing rise of dinnerparty anti-Semitism is not simply caused by Leftism run amok. There seems to be a general feeling across the political spectrum that people are tired of Jews – our “money”, our “power”, our “lobby”, our “complaining”, our “warmongering”, and our even “victimhood”. Perhaps people always felt this. The difference now is that they say it, unapologetically.
Thus, I recently found myself at lunch in south London with a gaggle of fairly dull Tory types and an Australian woman, very brash, who suddenly made a clean breast of her conviction that “Jews control the media, because they are naturally so good at propaganda. They just are”. Then there was dinner last month in Oxford with two male friends. A few glasses of wine in, one, a solicitor at a top American firm, began to orate his view that Jewish insistence on the unique horrors of the Holocaust was egregious and minimised Indian suffering under empire.
Particularly disheartening, in part because it’s no longer shocking, was an interchange involving my father. On a work trip to California recently, he found himself at dinner with a party that included the sixtysomething wife of a wealthy British tech executive. She came clean to him – knowing he is Jewish – about how she really feels about Hitler. “I always want to defend him,” she said coquettishly. “He’s a person, too. He had a tough childhood. And who are we to judge?”
My father was flummoxed and checked that he had heard right. He had: and not only that, the next day in the airport, she resumed, further defending her view, and elaborating it with a garbled application of a philosophical theory. There was neither shame nor apology, and no tying herself in knots over possible offence caused. This from someone enjoying the tip-top of society and wealth.
It’s as fatiguing as it is depressing, this business. One can muster the outrage for the odd incident, but when one finds oneself repeatedly on the receiving end of offensive rubbish that no other minority would be expected to endure in 2020, battling it alone, one begins to feel like retreating. Nothing is more jolly than a stimulating dinner with interesting people. But as situation after situation turns nasty, revealing gruesome true colours where Jews are concerned, one begins to feel it may just be better to stay home.