Tag Archives: david baddiel

Holocaust Memorial Day: Review of “Jews don’t count” by David Baddiel

By Zachary Barker | Fri 27th January 2023 - 12:11 pm

There are few books that I have read which have made me stop, think and completely re-evaluate my world view. “Jews don’t count” by David Baddiel was one of them and without a doubt the most important book I read last year.

The author’s argument is simple. There is a gap in the UK and much of the West for recognising Anti-Semitism and standing up against it. He directs his argument not against would be racists but quite deliberately at those who see themselves as progressives. The author frankly states that his personal belief as a British Jew that progressives treat Anti-Semitism as a lower-class concern compared to other forms of racism. The author believes this is the case for two main reasons, because Jews are seen by progressives as being privileged and not a true ethnic minority and therefore white. One is a shameful and misleading stereotype and the other is factually incorrect.

Much of the book consists of Twitter exchanges between the author and other commenters. These are chosen to illustrate the various ways that such people have sought to trivialise David Baddiel raising the spectre of Anti-Semitism. Many of these examples are really quite worrying. Baddiel seems to have quite a good grip on the characteristics and drawbacks for how such debates are held on social media. One thing has to trump another. It is about “owning” not discussing. In between nuance is lost. This has meant that when David Baddiel has called for Anti-Semitism to be given the same level of recognition as Black Lives Matter, sadly some supporters of the latter have seen this as a competition.

Sometimes it takes a good author to articulate what you have been thinking for a while. I thought that when he talked about those who seek to trivialise or downgrade the tragedy of the Holocaust (labelled as a genocide of “whites”), to allow for recognition of more “black” genocide’s such as King Leopold’s reign of the Belgian Congo. This is something that I have personally witnessed on internet debates and have found quite shocking. Is this world so full of suffering that we have to degrade ourselves further by having some kind of genocide Olympics to see which was the worst? Why can’t we just be united in acknowledging that all such chapters are shameful and should never have been allowed to happen? These are difficult things to talk about and confront, yet it is important that we do.

Book review: “Jews Don’t Count” by David Baddiel

By Ruth Bright | Mon 22nd February 2021 - 2:18 pm

Any reader of a centre left website like LDV will be well acquainted with the world of “whataboutery”. Any article on any injustice can be upended by a “whatabout” list of other injustices; sometimes with the snide implication that the author is a fake for even raising the original injustice.

In his book “Jews don’t count” David Baddiel is well aware of the risks of “whataboutery” but he is surely right to plough on with his argument that the British left does not take anti-semitism as seriously as other racism and prejudice.

Baddiel’s grandparents were robbed of everything and had close family murdered. They were ruined and bereaved and driven from all they knew by the racist state apparatus of their native land. And yet as Baddiel points out the left has a blindspot about his ethnicity as one that somehow doesn’t count and cannot feel vulnerable as all minority ethnicities sometimes do.

He is right to say that in Britain today this blind spot can take preposterous forms. It is ridiculous for example, that what Luciana Berger went through was often ignored by Corbynistas or labelled by them as misogyny rather than anti-semitism. Many women in public life experience serial misogyny but it doesn’t normally entail their tormentors signing themselves “the Nazi”.