Jews Don’t Count
I’m going to give you some examples of a recurring phenomenon. My publisher here is the Times Literary Supplement, so let’s begin with a literary one. In August 2020, the British newspaper the Observer, which, along with its sister paper the Guardian, is politically the most progressive mainstream news outlet in the country, published a review of the screenwriter Charlie Kaufman’s first novel Antkind. It wasn’t a very positive review, criticising the book mainly because the narrator operates from what the critic calls a ‘white-male-cis-het perspective’. In other words self-evidently white, male and, less self-evidently, possessed of a gender that is neither trans nor non-binary, and a sexuality that is straight. Anyone occupying this square of characteristics is considered, by those who assume that all social structures are underpinned by power, privileged. White-male-cis-hets have four head starts in life. A book written from a white-male-cis-het perspective would routinely be marked down by a platform like the Observer, keen always to re-centre the cultural conversation away from that square.
However, the narrator in Antkind is called B. Rosenberger Rosenberg. He describes himself early on as having a ‘rabbinical’ beard, as ‘Jewish-looking’; perhaps even more of a giveaway, at one point he wears a tie with the slogan ‘100% Kosher’. There are numerous occasions when other characters behave antisemitically towards him, assuming his behaviours tally with Jewish stereotypes, whispering ‘Jew’ under their breath as he leaves rooms, or shouting ‘Fuck you, Hebrew!’ directly at him. But in the Observer review, there’s no mention of his Jewishness, or the issue of Jewishness in the book in general, despite it including – thank you, Kindle – sixty mentions of the word ‘Jew’, and ninety of the word ‘Jewish’. And, of course, Charlie Kaufman himself is Jewish.
But I guess none of this, for the Observer critic, has any bearing on B. Rosenberger Rosenberg’s white-male-cis-het perspective: no bearing, that is, on his privilege.
Here is another example, this time from the Danish comedian Sofie Hagen. In a – very good – 2019 short film she made about body positivity, Hagen recites a list of ‘the most oppressed people in society’, a list that includes: ‘Black people and people of colour, queer people, trans people, Muslims and people with disabilities’. Which indeed is a pretty good stab at covering the waterfront of what many progressives would consider to be the most oppressed groups, the most persecuted minorities, in society.
But it misses out one persecuted minority, one of the most persecuted minorities in history. Now. Imagine that the main character in Antkind belonged to any of these minorities that Hagen mentions. The central premise of the Observer review – that the problematic issue with Antkind is that it is written from a white-male-cis-het perspective – would dissolve, and with it, most of the review’s negativity. Which means that despite the history of persecution, there is only one minority that, for the privilege-checkers, stays firmly in the square of privilege.
Time for a high literary example: on New Year’s Day 2017, BBC Radio 4 broadcast Jeremy Irons reading from the complete collection of T. S. Eliot’s poems, almost in their entirety. Anyone who knows Eliot’s poetry will know that reading all of his poems means the inevitable inclusion of these lines from ‘Gerontion’:
My house is a decayed house,
And the Jew squats on the window sill, the owner,
Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp,
Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London.
And from ‘Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar’:
The rats are underneath the piles.
The Jew is underneath the lot.
I remember listening, and wondering how the BBC would get round this. When it came to these particular poems, they enlisted the help of Anthony Julius, a Jewish lawyer, and the author of T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form (1995), who prefaced the readings with his theory of how the highly prevalent, fashionable antisemitism of the time informed and possibly even enhanced Eliot’s work. To simplify considerably, Julius believes that Eliot was such a great poet that he could – almost uniquely, although there is of course The Merchant of Venice – make antisemitism into art.
I wrote to Anthony Julius after this because I think his position is wrong. I’m an Eliot fan, but I think the poetry does not redeem the hatred. We ended up some time later having lunch and talking about it for three hours (a very, if I might say so, Jewish reaction to the whole thing).
But none of this shook off the feeling I had, on New Year’s Day 2017, that, however great the writer, however great the writing, no other minority group would be compared to rats, or envisaged as any similar negative racist stereotype, on Radio 4. It is not inconceivable that the BBC might read a whole Agatha Christie book on New Year’s Day. It is, however, inconceivable that anyone will hear Jeremy Irons’ voice saying, ‘And now, Ten Little N****rs’.
Meanwhile, in mid-2020, following the spate of statues being toppled as part of the Black Lives Matter protests, a protester a long way from Minneapolis – in Broadstairs, Kent – sprayed the words ‘Dickens Was A Racist’ on the Dickens Museum. The protester was called Ian Driver and his inspiration was a letter that Dickens had written in 1857 decrying the Indian Mutiny, the uprising against the colonial rule of the British East India Company. Unquestionably, the letter is racist. However, it is strange that Ian Driver had to go all the way to a relatively obscure piece of writing by Dickens to become inflamed by his racism, when, in Oliver Twist, in plain sight, for years and years and years, has been Fagin.
But maybe he doesn’t count.
The modern cultural conversation about reassessing great writers from the past in the light of current political understanding is not always, however, negative. In the case, for example, of the early twentieth-century novelist Edith Wharton, that reassessment has recently been about upping her status in the canon, with a sense that, as a woman, she had been overlooked. In the latter part of 2020, the Guardian’s online reading group chose Wharton’s The Age of Innocence as its book for September. Meanwhile, in The Times, Anna Murphy wrote of her love for The House of Mirth, and specifically about how pleased she was that Wharton was finally being recognised as ‘a match’ for Henry James.
It’s certainly the case that with some notable exceptions, women authors have not been given their due by the culture, so this re-evaluation of Wharton made me decide to pick up The House of Mirth. I was very much enjoying the heroine Lily Bart’s adventures in the first few pages, until a character called Mr Rosedale – ‘a little Jew who had been served up and rejected on the social board a dozen times within her reminiscence’ – is introduced. The issue is not, of course, that Wharton, in her time and context, wrote things that we would now consider to be antisemitic. The issue is that this is not a problem for her present feminist reclamation. Meanwhile, other types of racism that her writing might express continue, for some, to be. In an essay for the feminist website Jezebel, the Victorian literary scholar Rachel Vorona Cote writes: ‘Excluding what Wharton’s characters – or, for that matter, Wharton herself – might have to say about my Jewish family, my whiteness supplies me with a pair of cozy blinkers that occlude the tarnishing details. Once I turn my attention to the novel’s treatment of persons of color – peripheral, dismissive – I cannot regain my uncomplicated enjoyment of it.’
It’s good that Vorona Cote is interrogating Wharton’s assumptions. If I was to interrogate her own, the question I would ask is: why exclude what Wharton’s characters or Wharton herself would say about Jews?
Here’s another example.
In 2019, a production of The Color Purple, based on Alice Walker’s novel, was due to be staged as a musical in London. About four weeks before it opened, the actress who was going to be playing the starring role of Celie, Seyi Omooba, was found to have posted – in 2014 – homophobic messages on Facebook. Omooba is from an evangelical Christian background, and her posts were fairly standard evangelical Christian messages about the sinfulness of same-sex activity. She refused to apologise for them and was fired.
I’m not interested, for the purposes of this book, in the overall rights and wrongs of cancel culture. But what is important, for the purposes of this book, is that Omooba was cancelled, at least as far as the show was concerned, for homophobia.
Alice Walker published in 2017 a poem called ‘To Study The Talmud’. The Talmud is a book of exegesis of the Old Testament, codified in the fourteenth century and containing the basis of all the archaic rules and laws of Judaism: it was written mainly by rabbis. It has been misquoted extensively by antisemites wishing to suggest that Jews drink Christian blood and promote paedophilia. Here’s what Walker wrote:
Are Goyim (us) meant to be slaves of Jews, and not only
That, but to enjoy it?
Are three year old (and a day) girls eligible for marriage and intercourse?
Are young boys fair game for rape?
Must even the best of the Goyim (us, again) be killed?
Pause a moment and think what this could mean
Or already has meant
In our own lifetime.
Walker, like Omooba, has used ancient religion to uphold and promote stereotypes and discrimination against a minority group. Omooba says: ‘It is clearly evident in I Corinthians vi, 9–11 what the Bible says on this matter. I do not believe you can be born gay, and I do not believe homosexual practice is right.’ This is an anti-gay position. Walker says: Jews believe that paedophilia, slavery and the murder of non-Jews are sanctioned by their religion. This is an anti-Jewish position. It is also, I would suggest, the more powerfully expressed of the two positions (‘I do not believe’ is a statement of opinion; ‘Jews believe’ is a statement of – incorrect – fact). Omooba got cancelled. Alice Walker – no one ever even suggested she should be. And, of course, The Color Purple musical went ahead.
We live in heightened times, politically. When I was growing up, in the 1970s and 1980s, it was a mantra that the personal was political, but even so, now, the politicisation of all things, on the back of identity politics driven by social media, puts that time in the shade. This was evident in a recent documentary on BBC TV, about the drama strand Play for Today. Play for Today, which ran from 1970 to 1984, was a showcase for single plays on television, and was a breeding ground for many significant British dramatists. My memory of those plays was that they were very varied in tone and subject matter, but this documentary, which was called ‘Drama Out of a Crisis’, highlighted only those that expressed radical politics and social issues. It made a point, therefore, of focusing on the few plays in the Play for Today strand that dealt with minorities, notably the work of Black writer and director Horace Ové, but also the one play that, ahead of its time – although in tune with ours – dealt with transgender issues.
In 1977, on Play for Today, the BBC screened Jack Rosenthal’s play Bar Mitzvah Boy. It won that year’s BAFTA for best single play. Two years earlier, Play for Today had screened Rosenthal’s The Evacuees, a drama about two Jewish children forced to live with non-Jewish foster parents during the Second World War. It also won a BAFTA, and an international Emmy. But more importantly for me, as a young teenager in London, both of these plays were the first real example of representation of my life, on TV. They were the first time I had seen the British-Jewish experience accurately portrayed anywhere in the culture.
In ‘Drama Out of a Crisis’, neither of these plays were mentioned.
Sometimes, you hear what I’m talking about out loud. The major BBC current affairs show, the one that sets the news agenda every morning, is the Today programme on Radio 4. It’s a must-listen for those interested in politics. And a must-react to: if something controversial is said on Today, Twitter is set alight, and the conversation explodes.
On 13 March 2019, the American pollster John Zogby was on. At one point, he began talking about fissures in the Democratic Party, specifically around the then new Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s views about Israel and its supporters in the US. The interviewer, Justin Webb, who is a regular on Today, said, in response:
If the party decided to say to its supporters, ‘Look, we think that antisemitism is a bit like the way some of our people might regard anti-white racism, that actually it’s a different order of racism. It’s not as important – it’s still bad – but it’s not as important as some other forms of racism’, what impact do you think that might have?
It was a strange moment. It felt less like a question and more like a helpful suggestion. Maybe this would be a way forward for the Democrats? was the tone. Webb did not qualify or contextualise it. He did not preface or add ‘Obviously this is offensive to say, but perhaps it’s what some people in the party actually think’. His tone was neutral.
Zogby moved on without really answering. But even if he had, it was the question itself I was struck by. I remember listening and thinking, Blimey, it’s rare that someone just comes out with it: Antisemitism is a second-class racism. I thought it would create controversy. I thought that there would be an intense reaction.
There wasn’t. Well, that’s not true. There was a bit, after I managed, following much fiddling about with BBC Sounds and recording devices on my computer, to record the question and post it on Twitter, along with a sense of my amazement. Even then, there wasn’t that much online noise, and what noise there was came mainly from Jews.
So actually, when I say ‘Sometimes you hear it out loud’, what I really heard was the silence.
An example from my sporting life. In 2008, I was sitting, as usual on a Saturday afternoon, with my brother Ivor watching Chelsea at Stamford Bridge. We’d been going for many years, and by this point sat in the Upper East Stand. Chelsea were playing Aston Villa. The game was dull. On the big screen, a score came up of another match. Tottenham Hotspur were being beaten by Hull.
The bored crowd picked up on this and started chanting ‘We hate Tottenham, and we hate Tottenham’. Then, with wearying predictability, this mutated into the crowd chanting the word ‘Yiddo’. For those who don’t know about this phenomenon, the Tottenham Hotspur football club (known as Spurs) is located in an area of London that is fairly well populated by Jews. For this reason, Spurs fans both self-identify and are identified by others as a ‘Jewish’ club – even though the vast majority o...
