David Baddiel finds the darkly funny in the fight to take antisemitism seriously
Since my schooldays, I’ve had a thing for TS Eliot – despite overtly antisemitic lines in his poetry. “Rachel née Rabinovitch tears at the grapes with murderous paws” (Sweeney Among the Nightingales, 1920) gave me pause for thought all right. Our English teacher called him out, though contextualising by referring to the antisemitism endemic in the English establishment at the time, which made this Jewish teenager – one of a tiny minority at school – feel distinctly uncomfortable.
So I’m with David Baddiel, as early on in his witty polemic he calls out the BBC for celebrating New Year 2017 with Jeremy Irons reading almost all Eliot’s poetry, including lines from two other poems that are even more offensive. For Baddiel, broadcasting an apologia from Jewish lawyer Anthony Julius, author of a critique of Eliot and antisemitism, only opens up the debate. I do love though that Baddiel (self-confessed Eliot fan, though he thinks “the poetry does not redeem the hatred”) went to meet Julius for lunch and talked about it for three hours: as he admits “a very Jewish reaction to the whole thing”.
I recount this in detail because it demonstrates what draws me into Baddiel’s forensic dissection of the sidelining of antisemitism as racism lite; how he manages to make me feel uncomfortable, even as he proves his comic mettle by evoking a wry laugh with almost every page.
He writes of the double bind that “if you suggest that progressives might operate a hierarchy of racisms on which anti-Jewish racism is placed lower as a concern than others, you will be quickly accused, by progressives, of racism”.
With more than 730k followers on Twitter, what places Baddiel at the eye of the Twitterstorm on antisemitism is his bold and unashamed one-word Twitter biography: ‘Jew’. He makes it clear he is a Jew by birth and identity, not religion (he is an atheist) or as an apologist for Israel. In a characteristically witty list disowning this last role, he writes “my Jewish identity is about Groucho Marx, and Larry David, and Sarah Silverman, and Philip Roth, and Seinfeld, and Saul Bellow, and pickled herring, and Passovers in Cricklewood in 1973, and my mother being a refugee from the Nazis, and wearing a yarmulke at my Jewish primary school…”. The corollary of the list is to emphasise that Baddiel, who is constantly called out on Twitter to have a position on Israel – as colonial oppressor of the Palestinians of course – does not “care about it more than any other country”.
The storm rages on. Professor David Miller at Bristol, for example, has called for the “end” of Zionism as a “functioning ideology of the world” after launching an extraordinary attack on the Jewish student groups who complained about his behaviour.
Never mind ‘Oh Jeremy Corbyn’ (who of course figures in this timely tract). Oh David Baddiel, I’m glad (to quote Wordsworth) you are “living at this hour” to help me see the funny side of being proud, amused – and uncomfortable – to stand up and be counted as a Jew.
By Judi Herman
Jews Don’t Count is out now, published by HarperCollins, £9.99. harpercollins.co.uk