David Baddiel’s Twitter bio is one word long: ‘Jew.’ There are many ways he could describe himself, being a successful comedian, father and an author of many novels and a play. Now, he is the writer of his first non-fiction work, Jews Don’t Count. But, as he explains in the book, he likes keeping ‘Jew’ as a statement against Jewish shame and to reclaim a word that many people think is derogatory. Plus, he finds it kind of funny.
Baddiel’s experience of growing up Jewish in Britain is at the heart of Jews Don’t Count, a timely and uncompromising look at modern anti-Semitism. Mainstream progressive identity politics, he argues, has a blind spot for Jewish people. They’re silenced in conversations about racism because they are “Schrödinger’s Whites,” sometimes considered white and privileged and sometimes not, depending on the politics of the observer.
Opening the book with examples of often-ignored anti-Semitism from many aspects of life, sport, literature, film, radio, theatre, politics, Baddiel challenges the way many non-Jewish people think of anti-Semitism:
“When people talk about anti-Semitism, what they tend to mean is an active process. They mean a specific targeted attack […] But what I’ve begun with here is a series of examples of the opposite: of absences. Of something – a concern, a protectiveness, a championing, a cry for increased visibility, whatever it might be – not being applied to Jews.”
He’s not talking about violent anti-Semitism, although that is also a serious problem. In 2018, 60% of religiously motivated hate crimes in the USA targeted Jewish people. The second most targeted group were Muslims at 18.6%.
Instead, Baddiel focuses on subtle anti-Semitism that flies under the radars of generally ‘progressive’ people. They are the people who marched for Black Lives Matter last summer, but dismissed reports of anti-Semitism within the Labour party as a right-wing smear campaign. They’re the people who criticised the show, Bojack Horseman, for casting an American actress in an Asian-American role but didn’t care that the stereotypically Jewish character Lenny Turtletaub wasn’t played by a Jewish actor. They assume that every Jewish person has an opinion about Israel. They also assume that it’s okay to ask about it.
Using examples from politics and pop culture, Baddiel’s argument is brilliant in the first half of the book and only slightly less elegant in the second, which relies on many screenshots of tweets to illustrate his points. In a footnote, he apologises for the book’s reliance on Twitter but justifies including the screenshots, because social media is where ‘most of the cultural conversation about identity politics’ takes place. The screenshots disrupt the flow of his argument a little, but it’s a valid point.
Jews Don’t Count feels relevant and necessary. Its biggest achievement is highlighting the hypocrisy of identity politics that exclude Jewish people. There’s an obvious problem when otherwise progressive people will speak out against racism, homophobia, sexism and every other -ism, but are silent about anti-Semitism. At only 144 pages, or as an audiobook under three hours long, Jews Don’t Count is concise and accessible. There’s no excuse for not reading it.
Jews Don’t Count is published by Times Literary Supplement Books.
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