The book is ridiculous from its ludicrous title thru its methodology of preferring inference over research, description over definition and assertion over evidence, to its inconclusive conclusion. It's hard to see why this book has been written except maybe for Baddiel to settle some scores with people who, unlike on Twitter, can't have a right of reply or maybe it's just to make money. It is not to fight antisemitism and in some cases it's to invent it. It provides no insights and there is nothing new in any of Baddiel's suggestions/demands.
In fact come to think of it, it's hard to see who he's addressing. He claims he's talking about progressives and the left and sometimes the progressive left. But his own worldview like his framing is profoundly conservative
Something he is saying, you might say, clearly, is that Jews are a race/ethnicity (these are not interchangeable terms except in BaddielWorld). But anyway he claims Jews are a race and therefore that Jews are susceptible to racism like any other race of people. Actually he seems to think antisemitism, which he renders anti-Semitism. There's much literature on why you shouldn't do that but Baddiel hasn't read it.
So hard up is Baddiel for genuine antisemitism, he goes on extended whinges about when non-Jews have played Jews in movies and plays. He might not have noticed this if it wasn't for certain other communities protesting when one of their members is portrayed by a non-member like hetros playing gays or the fact that trans roles can only be played by trans actors. This is a logic fail and a lack of understanding. Trans and gays are still very much in struggle for emancipation. In both cases legal equality has only just been achieved and we are still in a culture around acceptance of the ever lengthening LGBTQ. Jews are not struggling for emancipation and there's no issue around the proportional representation of Jews in show business.
Baddiel calls non-Jews playing Jews #Jewface though he's never seen it "trend on Twitter". (p60). Honestly, what is a Jewface? Of course, there's an element of self-justification there. Baddiel famously blacked up and used a pineapple to represent a still current hairstyle among Blacks. (pp 69-72)
His mea culpa re Black footballer Jason Lee was all culpa and no mea that I could see. In fact there's not a whole lot of culpa especially since he somehow thinks it's equivalent to an Italian-American playing the role of a Jew in a film or play. Really, he goes off on an extended one about how white non-Jews playing Jewish roles somehow equates with the mockery of our (yes our, whites including white Jews) ownership of and trading in Blacks people. That's where blacking up comes from. Oh and I checked #Jewface and it appears on Twitter often enough going back to 2012 (maybe earlier) usually from supporters of the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians including a rabbi in 2019 to slag Corbyn probably over his attending a Seder night. But to equate serious non-Jewish actors playing Jews with whites (Jewish or not) blacking up calls into question Baddiel's understanding of antisemitism and racism more generally.
So quite early in the book, Baddiel has equated Jews to a gender type and a sexual orientation neither of which are races. They are however disadvantaged and the disadvantage of Jews is one of the things he wants to establish even though it's mostly absurd. But where does he get the Jews are a race idea from? Well, he is Jewish mostly because the Nazis say he is. He also likes Jewish food and a couple of Jewish authors. He doesn't like the religion. He so doesn't like the religion he manages to place the Talmud in the wrong millennium (p7) before saying that antisemites invent quotes from it to disparage Jews. Now given that he doesn't know the Talmud, how would he know if quotes are misquotes? Every so often an Israeli chief rabbi will make some statement about G-d's plan to make gentiles subservient to Jews according to the Talmud. Baddiel really should have done some research.
In spite of antisemitism allegations having been used every day for 6 years now to destroy the prospect of the Labour Party ever being a party of conscience and reform, Baddiel claims that racism against Jews is being given a free pass by the "progressive left". Ah, now here's where we rely on Baddiel's descriptions to know or guess what or who he means when he says progressive and left. At one point he even seems to include David Cameron. (pp 24/5) who Baddiel actually had access to.
Which brings us to the Y-word, ie, the word "Yid" versus the N-word which is, by progressives and leftists considered so taboo it can never be said in its proper form except by Black people themselves. Baddiel says the Y-word should be similarly taboo. What surprises me, I don't know if it's his laddish persona that prevents him from drawing on anything he learned from his double first in English at Oxbridge but he does nothing to analyse these words to establish their etymology and history. N-words were owned and traded by Whites including white Jews. The word Yid is actually Yiddish for Jew. Yes it's offensive but it doesn't denote ownership. Offence does happen in degrees. Not all slurs have equal weight. Having said that, Baddiel would be enormously hard pressed to find examples of leftists using Yid as terminology in any circumstances except in discussing his stupid book and the only people he quotes are David Cameron and notoriously racist football fans.
Baddiel's equating of N-words and Y-words is because he thinks racism against Jews is treated as not being as serious as racism against say, blacks. So often his examples tell us more about Baddiel than about what he claims to be writing about though sometimes he stumbles on something he has to shy away from. For example, BBC Radio 4 had a reading of TS Eliot's poetry including his antisemitic poems. Those latter were introduced by the famous Jewish lawyer, Anthony Julius. Baddiel said that the Beeb would never dream of reciting Agatha Christie's Ten Little N*****s. That may or may not be true (remember I said inference) but what is definitely true is that the Beeb would have had enormous difficulty finding a Black Anthony Julius to introduce the recital. That, of course, doesn't occur to Baddiel. By the way, Baddiel met up with Anthony Julius for 3 hours to discuss the Eliot recital.
Baddiel has been quite a key player in the smear campaign against Jeremy Corbyn and of course Corbyn isn't spared in this stupid book except Baddiel at one point comes across as almost charitable when discussing Corbyn's take on the not necessarily antisemitic mural. Remember MuralGate? Well for Baddiel it is unambiguously antisemitic in spite of him knowing that the portrayal is of six founding fathers of the modern banking system only two of whom were Jews,. Now where he gets that from is that he accurately describes the artist's response to the complaints about the mural as being wildly antisemitic even hashtagging #Warburg and #Rothschild. What he doesn't describe accurately is the mural itself. It does not depict "hook-nosed bankers". They are literally stoney faced and fairly representational except they are monochromatic. Suspiciously, in spite of pictures of some of the tweets he mentions he doesn't include a picture of the mural either freestanding or with a tweet. He claims "Jews seemed to think" the mural was antisemitic but David Toube of the rabidly pro-Israel hate-site Harry's Place didn't think so. He's Jewish. So am I and whilst I hate the stupid mural for its conspiracism and garishness there is nothing essentially Jewish in the symbols or the faces.
But anyway, on Corbyn, Baddiel charitably though patronisingly, says that he might not have known about the depictions of Rothschild and Warburg. Actually if Baddiel was completely honest he would say what is the case and that is, no-one knows if Corbyn even saw the mural. He simply asked why it was being taken down. But Baddiel plows on and how. Corbyn would have seen the anti-capitalism but not the antisemitism. Well if he saw the mural at all he might have seen just what David Toube and I saw. But the idea that Corbyn would place his anti-capitalism above his anti-racism across the board is just plain wrong.
Corbyn has condemned antisemitism specifically many times. An aside here. When Baddiel was on Frankie Boyle's programme in 2018 he complained that Corbyn always says he is against all forms of racism including antisemitism but that Baddiel wanted him to commit to fighting antisemitism as a stand alone thing. That is just a little bit of a contradiction of his position in this book that Jews are an ethnic minority or a race just like Blacks are a race. Anyway, I remember Corbyn condemning Tam Dalyell for accusing a "cabal of Jews" of unduly influencing Tony Blair over Iraq. So his opposition to antisemitism was not obscured by his opposition to the war. He condemned Paul Flynn for saying that Matthew Gould shouldn't be ambassador to Israel because he is Jewish. That was in spite of Gould self-describing as a "proud Zionist". So again Corbyn's opposition to antisemitism was placed before his anti-Zionism. Baddiel's inference was plain wrong and unfair. There is no reason to assume that Corbyn would allow his anti-capitalism to allow antisemitism to fly below his radar.
But what right has Baddiel to infer rather than research or simply ask people stuff anyway. With Julius he met him for lunch. He met Cameron too. Why doesn't he connect with the more ordinary people so he won't have to infer?
A similar thing happens when Baddiel manages an inference about someone else's inference. See this on page 10:
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"At one point, he [John Zogby] began talking about fissures in the Democratic Party specifically around the 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 anti-Semitism is a bit like the way some of our people might regard anti-white racism, that it's actually a different order of racism. It's not as important - it's still bad -...."
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From that Baddiel leaps to this:
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"It felt less like a question, more like a helpful suggestion. *Maybe this would be a way forward for the Democrats*? was the tone."
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So, as far as Baddiel's readers can see, the idea of antisemitism wasn't mentioned by Zogby. Nothing antisemitic was quoted from Omar. The very notion was introduced by Webb and inferred beyond recognition by Baddiel. What tosh, honestly.
Yet another over-inference is in the case of Ash Sarkar. He even quotes her accurately and still manages to misrepresent the words he quotes. "Antisemitism...is primarily experienced as prejudice and hostility towards Jews as Jews largely without aspects of material dispossession (such as structural unemployment) that manifest in other forms of racism". And here's Baddiel to infer, "The suggestion here is that, because Jews are better off....than other ethnic minorities, it is a lesser form of racism". Pay attention, she didn't say either of those things. She merely said that racism against Jews does not have a socio-economic impact. So wherever Jews are on the socioeconomic scales, high or low, is not down to their being Jews. Idiot!
Sorry about the disjointedness but it is such a silly book. Let's take a look at Baddiel's claim of being non-Zionist. It is true that most false allegations of antisemitism are made by Zionists to cover up their own racism and Baddiel being Jewish and happily repeating many false claims of antisemitism on Twitter and even inventing one of his own on telly make people suspect he's a Zionist. I remember in the 1990s Baddiel saying that leftists who criticise Ariel Sharon were antisemitic at the same time as saying he's not actually an Israel supporter. I think Zionism, like racism more generally and even antisemitism, is something he just doesn't get.
For example he correctly calls Jenny Tonge antisemitic whilst cheekily linking her to Corbyn. She's actually almost literally a centrist having been a LibDem. But one of the examples he gives of her "antisemitism" is that she reports that she is sickened by the entitled attitude of a New Zealand woman presenting a YouTube vid titled Why I'm a Zionist". Baddiel watched it. He wasn't sickened by it. Actually I was as sickened by the racist video which accuses the Palestinians of colonialism and Israel as their victim, as I was by Jenny Tonge trying to explain away the killing of 8 worshippers in a Pittsburgh shul by reference to Israel's atrocities. Baddiel watched the vid and wasn't sickened by it. But then he's not sickened by racism.
So one accurate example of antisemitism on the left and it turns out to be closer to his own professed position of centrism.
Anymore naming and shaming? The stuff about (pp67-69) Ken Loach is bizarre because Baddiel shows that allegations that he supports Holocaust denial are lies. The thing takes a bit of unpacking but Baddiel can even see that the Zionist he quotes was lying about what Loach actually said. And this is where I think Baddiel uses the book to settle scores. He posts a tweet from Ken Loach's son protesting the defaming of his father and linking the most famous but not the only example of Baddiel's racism, the Blackface Jason Lee thing.
This gives Baddiel an opportunity to show he doesn't understand whataboutery. Whataboutery is when you justify wrongdoing on your own side by reference to similar wrongdoing by your enemy or opponent. Jim Loach wasn't doing that. He was saying that his dad is being smeared (defamed) and so Baddiel is a liar and he finished by pointing to one example of Baddiel's own racism.
Failing to mention the smear campaign against the left is a serious omission. At one point he has Dawn Butler rattling off a list of identity groups she said Labour was pitching to. He laments, you can guess, she didn't mention Jews. OMG, what if she had? Is not just faintly possible that she was terrified to mention Jews. It appalled me at the same conference that Corbyn didn't mention the Palestinians in his last speech ever to Labour.
A couple of times Baddiel's mask slips and it's clear he believes that Jews are more important than everyone else eg Jews are "one of the most persecuted minorities in history" (p3) and for all his claim of non-Zionism, he describes orthodox Jewish anti-Zionists as "stupid f*cking frummers" and secular ones like me as "ashamed Jews" which is downright silly given how we self-identify and actually how we live.
Given his book revolves mostly round Twitter you don't need to read it. It is just a bunch of tweets or tweetable nonsenses. His right to infer is there to see.
Away from the book there are several instances of Baddiel's racism available to see on line. In one interview he describes himself as looking "like a pikey". I remember him on a panel programme once being asked why a certain view of Jesus's mum was pulled from the schedules and whilst other panellists tried to point to the offensive nature of the portrayal, Baddiel simply said "the BBC heard the words "Muslim" and "offended" and crapped themselves".
This is a putdown for Gypsies, Roma and Travellers. The Jason Lee thing is legendary. Back in the nineties he penned for the Guardian "Black men can jump" where he pigeonholed the various ethnicities of the UK by occupation, Blacks jump, Asians shopkeep and of course Jews don't lay bricks, they do accountancy. Oh! See that? Jews do count after all.
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