Jews Don’t Count, by the British comedian David Baddiel, is a book about anti-Semitism, but perhaps even more than that, it is about something else, which Dara Horn, in her review, describes as “the subtle baseline reality of dismissing, shaming, and belittling by parts of the non-Jewish world.” Baddiels find particularly galling the way that people who pride themselves on being enlightened, tolerant, and “antiracist,” and make a show of standing up for every oppressed religious, ethnic, and sexual minority, are entirely unwilling to acknowledge anti-Semitism, and sometimes willing to indulge in it themselves. Horn writes:
Baddiel’s insistence that Jews belong in the British catchall term “BAME” (Black, Asian, and minority ethnic), a classification indicating vulnerability to discrimination that is basically never applied to Jews, might sound overplayed to American Jewish readers. The reality is that British Jews have been putting up with this crap for a long time and in ways that much more closely resemble “conventional” racism against other minority groups.
The year I spent at Cambridge University in 1999 was the only year of my life when I routinely encountered social anti-Semitism of the sort I associated with my great-grandparents’ experience. One of my many lovely British memories is of a non-Jewish American friend of mine there who found that all our British peers assumed she was Jewish—despite her non-Jewish name and the fact that she was six feet tall. After a month, she finally asked someone why everyone thought so. That person blurted out, “Because you’re friends with that girl.”
There’s a fair argument to be made against what Baddiel is asking for here. Not because Jews don’t deserve the kind of official goodwill that other minorities receive from those claiming to fight the good fight, but because that goodwill is itself based on a flawed and disturbing premise—namely, that victimhood, or more precisely, powerlessness, is something inherently honorable. This idea has its roots in a historically Christian concept of suffering imparting nobility and is hideously linked to an even deeper and unarticulated belief that Jews deserve respect only when they are powerless—whether that means politically impotent or dead.
Read more on Jewish Review of Books: https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/holocaust/11626/do-jews-count/