REVIEW: Jews Don't Count by David Baddiel
3/5 stars
In general, trying to get people to change their mind is overrated. Once we form a solid opinion about something, that opinion tends to become part of our identity – especially if “person who has correct opinions” is an important identity of ours. It follows, then, that if you want to make spreading good ideas your vocation, it’s worth your while to prioritize issues that most people are either apathetic or ignorant about. All of this to say that “Jews Don’t Count” is exactly the kind of book we need in the world right now.
The first non-fiction book of author and comedian David Baddiel is a call to arms for liberal intellectuals who have failed to take anti-Semitism seriously as a social problem. Core to the persuasiveness of Baddiel’s argument is his attention to the detail of the opposing perspective, ie, the perspective I used to have. That perspective is as follows: Anti-Semitism obviously used to be a big problem. The Jews had a rough go of it in the Book of Exodus, then later there were pogroms in Russia, and there was also that Holocaust thing. But things have changed! Most Jews today live in either America, where they are generally better off than average, or in Israel, an independent state just for Jews which has itself blossomed into a thriving, tech savvy, settler-colonial ethnocracy. Sure, there are still a lot of neo-Nazis kicking around online, and some of the jokes on Family Guy are in poor taste, but these examples are all either pretty fringe or pretty innocuous – of a kind with what Irish Americans might still experience today. To use Carol Brodkin’s phrasing, Jews have become white folks.
This question of whiteness is pivotal to Baddiel’s argument, so it’s worth outlining here in a bit more detail. Discussions of racism often involve a distinction between “racial prejudice” – explicitly thinking ill of someone because of their race – and “structural racism” – general differences in the social positions of different races which initially emerged because of racial prejudice but which may persist even after such prejudices have left society*. This distinction is relevant to Baddiel’s book for two reasons. First, structural racism is what we generally place at the centre of discussions of race today. The primary concerns of Black American anti-racist activists, for example, tend to be things like segregation, mass-incarceration, and access to voting – material issues that would require a lot of work to fix even if anti-black prejudice disappeared tomorrow. If we say that this is the kind of racism that counts (to use Baddiel’s language), then it does indeed look like most Jews are indeed white, since Jews are not generally materially worse off than non-Jews. The other side of this coin is that the whole reason for inventing the “racial prejudice”/”structural racism” distinction is that it allows us to acknowledge that white people - including, it would seem, Jews - can experience racial prejudice (for example, from black nationalists who think that racism is evidence of the inherent inferiority of white people) without drawing a false equivalence to the much worse experiences of non-white people. It follows naturally from these premises that Jews don’t count as non-white people because Jews don’t experience structural racism.
Baddiel’s argument rests on a complication that anti-Semitism presents for this distinction – namely that it is always predicated on the idea that Jewish people occupy a position of unfair social advantage. Whereas black people are stereotyped as lazy, brutish, and lascivious, Jewish people are depicted as greedy, devious, and callous. Often, white supremacists will combine these stereotypes into one unified theory, concocting morbid fantasies of crook-nosed “globalist elites” marshalling their apish black goons to the cause of world domination. But notice how compatible these stereotypes are with the “racial prejudice”/”structural racism” dichotomy. If meaningful racism is all about structure, then Jews are incapable of experiencing meaningful racism – you can’t be systematically oppressed if you are the system. Thus, my previous dismissal of anti-Semitism on the grounds that Jews do not experience structural disadvantage was itself anti-Semitic, playing as it does into stereotypes about powerful Jewish elites.
But some of you are likely scratching your heads at this point. Baddiel’s argument, as I’ve presented it, is as follows:
1) Anti-racists fail to take anti-Semitism seriously because Jews are not structurally disadvantaged
2) The belief that Jews are not structurally disadvantaged is an important facet of anti-Semitism
3) Therefore, dismissing anti-Semitism on the grounds that Jews are not structurally disadvantaged is itself anti-Semitic
It’s been too long since I’ve taken a philosophy class for me to say exactly what’s wrong with this argument, but I know that it doesn’t get us to where Baddiel wants us. Specifically, it raises two further questions: 1) Why is an emphasis on Jewish structural advantage such an important part of anti-Semitism? 2) What are the grounds for taking anti-Semitism seriously? Unfortunately, Baddiel doesn’t really give satisfying answers to either of these questions. Instead, he spends most of the books detailing instances of racial prejudice against Jewish people and pointing out liberals’ failure to take them seriously. But if the conventional emphasis on structural disadvantage is appropriate, then it makes no more sense to take these instances of anti-Semitism seriously than it does to fret over jokes about how white people are bland, humourless snobs.
But there is one powerful paragraph, early in the book, where Baddiel gives a sense of how anti-Semitism can generate catastrophic outcomes in the absence of pre-existing structural disadvantages:
“But either way – and this is very un-Marxist of me – fuck off about money. Because money doesn’t protect you from racism. As I say, some Jews are rich. My grandparents were: they were industrialists in East Prussia. They owned a brick factory. They had servants. By the time they were fleeing to England with my mother as a baby in 1939, however, that had all been robbed from them. And by the end of the war, most of their family – and therefore a large section of mine – had been murdered. It doesn’t matter how rich you are, because the racists will smash in the door of your big house that they know you don’t deserve anyway and only own because you’re Jews.”
In other words, prejudice doesn’t generate structural disadvantage for Jews until, very suddenly, it does. That makes it “meaningful” under the “racial prejudice”/”structural racism” dichotomy, but still very different from forms of racism we’re more familiar with. Structural racism of the kind that typifies, say, the Irish Direct Provision system, is notable for its consistency. In Direct Provision, asylum seekers of all backgrounds are kept in the same institution for years and deprived of the opportunity to fully participate in society, but there is never any attempt to fully eliminate them from society either. For most minorities, oppression means consistent subordination over the course of your entire life, but the experience of Jews in modern history is characterized by long periods of relative freedom punctuated by intense violence.
The question of why anti-Semitism persists thus raises the question of why extreme anti-Semitism doesn’t persist.
To find our way to an answer to that question, we first have to take one last detour into my one fundamental disagreement with Baddiel – namely with his belief that Jews should not be considered white. It’s not an absurd contention. In post-colonial England, where Baddiel grew up, “black” was considered by many to be a political category which should include all oppressed peoples, regardless of skin colour. And, of course, the KKK and BNP have never been too scrupulous about parsing who exactly is to be first against the wall when the revolution comes. But, as many mixed race people could tell you, the brute fact of skin colour is not a reducible element of racial politics. A fundamental premise of white supremacy is that friend and foe are immediately distinguishable on sight, and Jews with white skin complicate that premise. For the purposes of everyday white conservatism, only the most prominent, permanent and unambiguous markers of difference will do. You can hide an accent, you can abandon a faith, but you cannot get rid of your melanin.
Which brings us to the other side of the coin: If the Jews of Nazi Germany could not be distinguished from other citizens, why were they given armbands so that they could be? The answer, I contend, is that extreme anti-Semitism is a unique product of fascism. It follows a genocidal logic which only makes sense in the context of a society which has abandoned its commitment to human rights in favour of its commitment to elevating increasingly narrow subsets of the racial elite to a position of ultimate authority. Given that Jews are almost always a tiny minority of any nation they live in, they are the easiest minority to frame as traitors to the white race. In the absence of Communists, it is Jews who they come for first, and you will not speak out, because you are not a Jew.
But anti-Semitism isn’t conjured from thin air any more than fascism is. Like fascism, it lies dormant in the background of everyday conservative discourse, waiting for its moment to re-emerge. You can see it, if you know where to look – in the pseudo-leftism of Soros-phobia, in the crooked noses of the goblins of Gringotts, even in the published fiction of the current British Prime Minister. Also like fascism, its metastasis is always a product of both conservative malice and liberal complacency. For that reason, Baddiel’s work in Jews Don’t Count remains valuable.
In his Irish Journal, published in 1957, the German writer Heinrich Böll describes the tiring experience of having to correct rural Irish punters’ declarations that Hitler “wasn’t such a bad man, really, only… he went too far.” Böll described himself as feeling like a dentist, spending his life extracting and disposing of bad ideas, each one a rotten tooth that threatens to infect the entire body politic. If Baddiel fails to diagnose the source of the infection, his prescription is still correct. We need to learn not just to recognize anti-Semitism, but to be repulsed by it, to feel compelled to stamp it out like the virulent contagion it is. We all know now what it looks like to let a dangerous pathology spread throughout the population. We must not let it happen again.
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*I use the word “race” here in its sociological sense, referring to groups of people who are racialised in one way or another. I don’t mean to imply that race is an essential or unambiguous property. For more, see this Stuart Hall lecture that they show to race studies students on their first day.
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REFERENCES:
On the challenges of persuasion
For a discussion of the difference between structural racism and prejudice, and also for references to the old British political use of the word “black”, check out Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge
For a discussion of why some people are anti-Semitic, see Philosophy Tube’s video on the subject
On the cyclical nature of anti-Semitism
My last paragraph is a little bit ripped off from this Fintan O’Toole essay about Böll