Blindspot

David Baddiel's Jews Don't Count is a slight book, in both senses of the word. It's not very long, it's padded-out with screenshots of tweets, and it's made up mostly of anecdotes lacking historical or sociological context. It's also a book about Baddiel's feelings in the face of both real and imagined slights. What it most put me in mind of was Woody Allen's film, Annie Hall. Two scenes in particular. In the first, Allen's character Alvy Singer is insisting to his friend Rob, played by Tony Roberts, that other people routinely refer to his Jewishness in an underhand and slighting manner, for example saying "Jew" instead of "D'you". Rob not unreasonably suggests Alvy is paranoid. In the second scene, Alvy morphs, in his own imagination, into a Hasidic Jew while having a meal with the WASP family of his girlfriend, Annie Hall, played by Diane Keaton. What's notable in both scenes is that while they are played for laughs at Singer's stereotypical Jewish anxiety, they also acknowledge that antisemitism is real. Some people do make disparaging remarks about Jews under their breath; many New England WASP families in the America of the 1970s would have looked down their noses at New York Jews. But while Baddiel shares a background as a comedian with Allen, he lacks the latter's balance, not to mention self-doubt.

The book is a polemical essay about political language (the shadow of Orwell looms large), ranging over topics as diverse as literature, dramatic casting and cuisine. Its subject is what he defines as a progressive blindspot: the deeming of antisemitism as a lesser prejudice, and how that makes him, as a Jew, feel. One obvious problem is that his feelings aren't necessarily representative of Jews as a whole, just as the supposed lacuna isn't necessarily representative of all progressives. The idea of a blindspot entails a logical leap: the assumption that subscribing to a hierarchy of racism - or, more accurately, an equivalence of all prejudices with the exception of Jew-hatred - is characteristic of progressives. The book's emotive title also suggests that a lesser valuation of antisemitism is really outright disregard or even denial: not that Jews count less but that they don't count at all. The first assumption is tendentious, the second absurd (the EHCR investigation of the Labour Party is proof enough of that). As the polemic depends on Baddiel's own feelings, it's inevitably solipsistic. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it does mean that it biases towards a metropolitan, middle-class milieu: the BBC's Today programme, the broadsheet arts pages, and the Upper East Stand at Stamford Bridge. There is nothing here about assaults on Haredi Jews in Stamford Hill or Gateshead.

In Baddiel's definition, progressives are "those who would define themselves as being on the right side of history" [his italics]. This condescension is typical of his susceptibility to rightwing tropes. As the book progresses his focus narrows to the political left, and specifically those who have taken on a symbolic role in the eyes of the media, such as Diane Abbott, Jeremy Corbyn and Ash Sarkar. But to begin with his targets are the lesser known, and this perhaps in part explains his patronising vocabulary. For example, on the first page he draws a distinction between "the screenwriter Charlie Kaufman" and "a critic called Holly Williams" while discussing an Observer review by the latter of the former's novel, Antkind. Baddiel's issue is that Williams refers to the book's "white-male-cis-het perspective" but ignores that the protagonist is Jewish. The variation between definite and indefinite article might be attributed to the relative fame of each, but it looks like a concern with status: what right does Williams have to criticise Kaufman? In insisting that there is a hierarchy of progressive regard, he suggests there is also a hierarchy of judgmental authority. In a later example of this, he notes that "a poet called Omar Sakr tweeted this image created by the photographer Bas Uterwijk". The image was an AI "reconstruction" of Jesus. The Arab poet's jocular comment was to suggest that he looked like family, which Baddiel interpreted as erasing Jesus's Jewishness. This is obviously silly (not least the AI bit), but his choice of "a" and "the" is again revealing.

In reviewing problematic art and how our assessments change over time, Baddiel makes some good points about moral compromises. For example, that we delicately bracket TS Eliot's antisemitism because of his poetic excellence, or that we allow Edith Wharton's to pass unchallenged in order to recover her from the disregard of misogynistic critics. But he undermines his case when he criticises the 2020 BBC documentary Drama out of a Crisis, about the history of Play for Today, for not mentioning Bar Mitzvah Boy or The Evacuees. The clue for this editorial choice is in the title: the role of Play for Today in reflecting the political and social crises of the 1970-84 period, which largely centred on class, trade unionism, feminism, racism and latterly the impact of Thatcherism. The point about Jack Rosenthal's plays, excellent though they both were, is that they didn't. To suggest that they were excluded simply because they reflected Jewish themes is illogical. After all, if the BBC were so institutionally antisemtic it wouldn't have made the plays in the first place. You could counter that the BBC has become more antisemitic over time, and now chooses to disown such works, but then you'd have to provide some evidence for that and there isn't any.

A central topic, and arguably the reason why the book was envisaged, commissioned and published, is the failure of the Labour Party to effectively deal with charges of antisemitism between 2015 and 2019. This is not simply an attack on Jeremy Corbyn, whom Baddiel is careful not to label an antisemite in the manner of Margaret Hodge, but a critique of its commitment to a progressive anti-racism that excludes Jews. This implies that the issue hasn't necessarily been resolved by Corbyn's exclusion from the PLP, at least not to Baddiel's satisfaction, so further work (i.e. purges of the left) may be required. Baddiel is selective in his treatment of the issue. There is no qualitative or quantitative analysis of the party's policies or the speeches of leading figures, nor is the voting record of its MPs examined. Instead he highlights a single speech by Dawn Butler that describes some of those whom the party will fight for. In its multi-dimensionality, this is closer to Borges's Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge than a systematic list (i.e. a rhetorical enumeratio): LGBT+, people who didn't go to Oxbridge, carers etc. The only mention of ethnicity is "black, white, Asian". Baddiel notes there is no mention of Jews. Is this really evidence of a blindspot? The list mentions those who "struggle to pay the rent" but not those who "struggle to put food on the table". Would you conclude from this that the Labour Party has a blindspot about food poverty?  

There is the familiar disingenuousness over the "Epshteen" incident, the Mear One mural and Corbyn's reluctance to dance to Andrew Neil's tune during the 2019 general election campaign. Baddiel's conclusion is that "Corbyn is not someone who hates Jews but someone ... who places anti-Jewish racism lower on the hierarchy of things that truly matter". In other words, that Corbyn is the embodiment of the progressive blindspot. Despite the careful phrasing (lower than what?), that is a charge that doesn't really stick given Corbyn's long record of opposing anti-Jewish racism (again I note that Baddiel hasn't analysed early day motion votes to determine which MPs actually do care enough about antisemitism to bestir themselves). Baddiel has an answer to that, namely that Corbyn's "we oppose all racisms" is the equivalent of "all lives matter" and therefore suspiciously evasive. This shows the way that his interpretation of a person's motives allows him to invalidate their language (obviously the influence of Orwell only goes so far). In another example he suggests that Diane Abbott showing solidarity with Luciana Berger over misogynistic attacks is deliberately erasing antisemitism.

At times, Baddiel's method lapses into self-parody. Noting that charges of cultural appropriation in the realm of food have become a thing in recent years, he searches Google for "cultural appropriation" in reference to Jewish food, finds little beyond a few denunciations of Jews appropriating Palestinian cuisine, and so concludes that Jews don't count: that their cultural integrity is not valued as highly as that of other minorities. This ignores that there are many other cuisines that aren't "culture-war battlegrounds", as he puts it. Nobody's insisting that only the Irish can make Irish stew, after all. He also seems oblivious to the implication that Jews themselves don't care enough about their food being appropropriated, in the way that American blacks might care about white chefs appropriating soul food or Spaniards care about the abuse of paella, to actually make an issue of it. Baddiel here comes close to interpreting the uncontested cultural assimilation of Jewish cuisine in America (bagels, chicken soup, salt beef etc) as evidence of antisemitism, which is nuts. In a British context, are Jews irritated that gentiles blithely eat fish and chips without regard for the meal's ethnic origins? Are Belgians, for that matter?

Another bee in his bonnet is the issue of casting across racial, gender and other lines in theatre, cinema and TV. His argument is that non-Jews routinely play Jews but there's usually a row when other boundaries are crossed. In his attempt to prove that there is a hierarchy of regard, he does identify another, more persuasive point. If a character is recognisably Jewish, that's usually because it's a stereotype. He acknowledges this point in his criticism of the US sitcom Seinfeld for presenting obviously Jewish characters like George and Elaine as ostensibly a Greek and a WASP respectively. His mistake is to imagine that this was intended to make the New York-based sitcom less obviously Jewish, when it couldn't be more, and that the lack of pushback would have been unthinkable for any other ethnicity. The irony here is that Baddiel admits to perpetuating the same stereotypes in his own writing, e.g. describing Israelis as "Jews without angst, without guilt. So not really Jews at all". Another target is the North London-based sitcom Friday Night Dinner, the cast of which weren't Jewish, but this seems to serve solely as an excuse for a footnoted anecdote suggesting that Jim Rosenthal (the TV sports presenter father of the actor Tom) is a self-hating Jew, which seems ungenerous, to say the least.

In the field of literature, Baddiel first notes that a novel of his appeared in his local Waterstones in the "Jewish interest section". I don't know where he lives, but if it has a dedicated section that probably reflects the local market, much as a black section in a Brixton bookshop would, rather than a policy of segregation. But his beef here is less the idea of a bookshop ghetto than that works by the likes of Zadie Smith and Bernardine Evaristo are presented as "state of the nation" novels. In contrast, Jewish writers, such as Howard Jacobson, are always thought to produce simply Jewish books. This is a weak argument if you recall that Benjamin Disraeli pretty much invented the state of the nation novel. To ask where is the British Bellow or Roth is to ignore that the conditions that gave rise to them are similar to the ones that produced Smith and Evaristo. In contrast, the conditions that produced Jacobson are similar to those that produced Kingsley Amis or David Lodge: chroniclers of the postwar middle class rather than panoptic surveyors of wider society (so not unlike Jack Rosenthal either). As Jacobson has become more reactionary with the passing years (see his remarks here on the "monotonous chorus of young people"), it is optimistic to expect him to rise above his prejudices to produce a state of the nation novel that captures the contemporary mood.

Despite the brevity of the book, Baddiel cannot escape mentioning that he once appeared in blackface, and with a pineapple on his head, as a lampoon of the Nottingham Forest footballer Jason Lee in the 1990s TV show Fantasy Football League, which he co-hosted with Frank Skinner. He freely admits that this was a "mistake" and that he has "apologised for it publicly on various occasions since". What he doesn't say is that he hasn't apologised personally to Lee, despite being frequently urged to do so. Perhaps he would be uncomfortable hearing from Lee how it made him feel. The reason why this infamous incident keeps appearing in Baddiel's Twitter timeline is not, as he imagines, that people want him to shut up about antisemitism, but that they don't think he is genuinely contrite. In other words, the charge isn't one of hypocrisy (or "whataboutery"), and therefore meant to nullify his concerns about Jew-hatred, but of insincerity. He is, ironically, being accused of operating a hierarchy of racism.

Perhaps the key sentence of the book is this: "For a long time, only Jews really cared about Jews, only Jews really cared about anti-Semitism". That double use of "really" is doing a lot of work. It implies that the solidarity of non-Jews with Jews may be at best suspect and at worst wholly insincere (more irony). This is tantamount to dismissing the Nuremburg trials and subsequent cases against Holocaust perpetrators and deniers as somehow of no account. For all his indifference to Israel, it also echoes the claim that the Jewish state has few real friends in the world, despite its widespread indulgence. There is also a wry irony here in respect of his central claim that progressives have a blindspot when it comes to Jews, namely that in many ways Israel was the epitome of a progressive state up to 1967 (and for some, beyond) with a blindspot for the Palestinians. In a further layer of irony, some Jewish critics have accused Baddiel of having a blindspot about Israel, of forgetting that it is intrinsic to the identity of many British Jews and thus explains their suspicion that anti-Zionism is really a cloak for antisemitism.

The subtext of the sentence is that Jews were historically treated as an exception from Christian society and that has now led to the exception of antisemitism from progressive regard. Even if we accept that the progressive blindspot is real, I find the idea of cause and effect - that it's the legacy of "classic" antisemitism - unconvincing. It is far more likely to reflect the changing socio-economic status of Jews. Baddiel attempts to dismiss this argument by characterising it as the claim that Jews are "white", so cannot in the minds of progressives be victims of racism, but this simply ignores the multiple dimensions of prejudice. As Stephen Bush says, anyone with power is capable of using it unfairly, so no one can be wholly free of prejudice in their dealings with others or of being discriminated against (despite the offsetting benefits of "white privilege"). I'd simply note at this point that one of the funniest (if now straight up offensive) cinematic jokes on exceptionalism was made by another New York Jewish writer and director, Mel Brooks, in Blazing Saddles.

Ultimately, Baddiel's case isn't persuasive, largely because it is often illogical and makes claims that it can't justify. For all the real instances of antisemitism he cites, too many of the examples he offers in support of a specific progressive blindspot are simply ridiculous, while his focus on the supposed sins of the left is transparently partisan and gives the impression of a blindspot about rightwing antisemitism. If I was looking for a common theme in the antisemitic remarks of TS Eliot, Roald Dahl and Dave Whelan (Conservative Party donor and former owner of Wigan Athletic FC), I wouldn't imagine it had anything to do with progressive shibboleths, let alone the Socialist Campaign Group. The book was published this year, which means it would have been timed perfectly for the general election due in early 2022. In the event, the Conservative government short-circuited the last parliament and secured a majority in which "Get Brexit done" counted for more than the claims of Labour antisemitism. I suspect the book will read as more hyperbolic, even hysterical, in years to come. I doubt Baddiel will mind, particularly if the progressive England football squad ensure "It's coming home", though that may require another refereeing blindspot.