Jews Don’t Count

• Author: David Baddiel
• Genre: Politics
• Publication Date: August 31, 2021
• Publisher: HarperCollins

Jews Don’t Count is a book for people on the right side of history. People fighting the good fight against homophobia, disablism, transphobia and, particularly, racism. People, possibly, like you.

It is the comedian and writer David Baddiel’s contention that one type of racism has been left out of this fight. In his unique combination of reasoning, polemic, personal experience and jokes, Baddiel argues that those who think of themselves as on the right side of history have often ignored the history of anti-Semitism. He outlines why and how, in a time of intensely heightened awareness of minorities, Jews don’t count as a real minority.

I’ve heard good things about this book, in the last few years, but the conditions of the universe haven’t come together in a way that made it possible for me to read it (not available at the library, didn’t have time to read it, wasn’t in the right frame of mind). However, I’ve been slacking on my nonfiction reading, and I had just enough time to squeeze this into one of my days as I was recovering from an upper respiratory infection. 

It’s not a long book—I listened to the audiobook which is just under 3 hours—and it manages to pack a really powerful punch in that amount of time. The author narrates it, and he has such a great speaking voice (and accent) that I really found myself enjoying the narration, even as I found an incredible amount of identification from across the pond. 

Let me start by saying that politics are NOT MY JAM.

While this is a book labeled as politics, it’s more of a book that touches on social justice, or maybe more about social injustice. I keep my political opinions to myself, because I’m a firm believer in the fact that 1-no one wants to hear about my political opinions, because they have their own, and 2-politics has become such a sensitive and touchy subject lately, that it just isn’t worth it to get into a potential argument over something that isn’t going to change. I have so many more interesting things to discuss with people that politics don’t come up. Since I am going to have to at least touch on politics when discussing this book, I can at least promise that I won’t interject anything other than fact.

This book was published in 2021, and it was incredibly relevant then, but I found it even more relevant to the state of antisemitism and how it is being addressed in today’s society around the world. Antisemitism has increased significantly around the world, with estimates showing an increase of between 400-1000% in antisemitic events reported since the events of October 7th. And the response from the world has been … not quite what the Jewish community has expected. We kind of expected solidarity and outrage, not increasing levels of Jew hatred and gaslighting, even as society becomes more aware of prejudices and committed to fighting all of them (except antisemitism).

Antisemitism is known as the world’s oldest hatred, and it has stayed mainstream by shifting and mutating. Initially, Jewish people were painted as Christ-killers, and that belief was enough to justify massacres for centuries (this belief wasn’t officially disavowed by the Catholic Church until 1965). But antisemitism functions by placing Jewish people in opposing categories: Jews are both vilified for being communists and capitalists, too white and not white enough, greedy thieves but good with money, foreigners in their diaspora communities yet foreign colonizers in their ancestral homeland of Israel. Antisemitism projects whatever is disliked most in a society onto Jewish people, keeping them as eternal enemies of the country they live in. Hence viewing Jewish people as “white colonizers” in Israel, when (a) Jewish people are indigenous to Israel and (b) more than 50% of the population of Israeli Jews are Brown and Black Jews, most of whom were ethnically cleansed from the countries they lived in for centuries. And while we are on the topic of Israel, Jewish people don’t owe anyone their opinions on Israel. If they even have them! While many Jewish people feel a tie to Israel (surveys suggest between 80-95% of Jewish people hold Zionist beliefs, aka the belief that Jews deserve to self-determine in their ancestral homeland, or that as a country, Israel has a right to exist), not all Jews do. And asking any Jewish person their position on Israel when it isn’t in the discussion is antisemitic. We don’t walk up to every Chinese or Iranian person and ask them what they believe about their government, and then decide how we’ll treat them based on that. As an American, I’d expect other Americans to understand that regular citizens don’t represent their government; all we have to do is look at the last 8 years to find at least something that our government has done that we don’t agree with.

In this book, Baddiel does a thorough job of exploring the ways in which Jewish people are basically told that we don’t count. When legitimate and observable antisemitism does occur, we are gaslit and told, “it’s not that bad,” “that’s not what happened,” or “you don’t have it bad, what’s the problem?” In the last 10 months, this has happened over and over, leaving us asking, “would this have happened if any other minority group was targeted?” The answer is no. Could you imagine a college campus being okay with an encampment blocking access to Black, LGBTQ, Asian, Muslim, or Hispanic students? I have seen example after example of schools, workplaces, cities, and government officials taking stands, making statements, and implementing action plans after a single case of racism occurs. Except when it happens to Jews. 

We see politicians using Jews as a political football, using our collective trauma for clout, and participating in performative activism … when they bother addressing it at all. And this comes from both sides of the aisle here in America. We see it around the world too—Baddiel limits himself to discussing UK politics, and there’s no shortage of antisemitism there, but have no fear because every single person accused will stand and speak over the Jewish people saying they are acting in an antisemitic way. Other groups get to define their own form of racism, but not Jews. We are constantly told by non-Jews what antisemitism is; as if we haven’t been facing it in all of its insidious forms for more than 2000 years. When Jews are telling you something is antisemitic, believe us. 

And that brings me to the rub—people don’t believe us. There’s not a lot of Jews in the world, and it’s really easy to drown out our voices. It’s really difficult to address antisemitism without triggering more, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. This was seen most recently with the Kyrie Irving and Kanye scandals. Person says or does something ridiculously antisemitic, Jews worldwide speak out in outrage, and when the person has to pay consequences for their actions, it is chalked up to the “all-powerful Jews who control the media and the world.” Of course, most of the time, there aren’t any consequences to be paid. These are just extreme examples. Antisemitism somehow manages to place a teeny tiny minority ethnoreligious group of 15 million people in a position of All-Powerful Oppressor, no matter what is going on, up to and included a terrorist group with a stated goal of genocide attacking Jews in their own homeland without provocation.

I found so much identification in this book. I also finished with an immense level of frustration at how very obvious our diasporic countries have made it that they view Jews as not counting. Jews are being actively threatened and attacked in the streets of major cities around the world, and there is almost nothing being done about it. Our government is planning to release a plan to address Islamophobia in the US, despite the fact that I don’t see mosques requiring private armed security to ensure that synagogue members aren’t going to be held hostage (Colleyville, TX 2022) or shot (Tree of Life, Pittsburgh, PA, 2018). Just today, I saw a video of a Hamas terrorist threatening to repeat the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre of Israeli Olympians, promising that Paris streets will run with blood. And the outrage and reporting? Only Jewish people seem to care. The only issue I had is that there aren’t any concrete ideas for fighting antisemitism or how to deal with it. But aside from that, this is a fantastic read and I highly recommend it, especially if you’re one of those people who aren’t aware of how deeply pervasive antisemitism has become in our society.

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