![E98: [TEASER] Radical Reads – ‘Jews Don’t Count’ by David Baddiel - podcast episode cover](https://assets.metacast.app/images/episode/artwork/Ag3ZLC1a)
Hi everyone. As you might know, we don't get any sort of funding from any wealthy benefactors, academic institutions, governments, or political parties. Our work is funded by you, our listeners and readers on Patreon. In return, our supporters on Patreon get access to exclusive content and benefits like ad free episodes, bonus podcast episodes, and two exclusive Patreon only podcast series, Fireside Chats and Radical Reads. So here's a
little preview of our latest Patreon only episode. You can join us, help support our work, and listen to the full episode today at patreon dot com slash working class history link in the show notes.
As we come margin Martin and the Beauty of the Day a million dark in kegeens one thousand mil last grade are bridden by the Beauty is Sun Sun Disclosers and the Ableses Roses.
All right, Hi everyone, I'm here with Michael Richmond, author of the book Fractured, and we're here to discuss David Badile's Jews Don't Count. And yeah, I don't know if Michael, if you wanted to introduce yourself at all, anything beyond beyond that, I.
Guess it's probably useful to say that we're both Jewish, and that's partly why we're interested in this book. And I've kind of done some writing around sort of anti Semitism and philo Semitism in recent years. And yeah, I think we were both just kind of sufficiently, you know, we recognized that the book came out a few years ago now, but we're kind of sufficiently annoyed by it that we we've finally managed to get together to talk about it.
It is quite an annoying book.
I mean, he just annoyingness as a man just jumps off the page.
Yeah. I did say in the lead up to this that I wanted to try and be even handed, but we've jumped straight into just how annoying he is. But before we get onto how annoying is, can we maybe I don't know if you want to say something maybe anything that you think about the book that might be positive, or anything good that you can say about the book.
Yeah, it's tough because I think, like I think what's most damaging about the book is that it's kind of become this this kind of go to book for a particular kind of reaction to like recent debates around phanti
Semitism and Jewishness. And in that sense, I think probably quite a lot of people have read it and thought, right, this is the right opinion to have, And in that sense it's really damaging because a lot of the people that have read it aren't people who have engaged in any way in any of these debates and are just thinking, all right, here, this is a kind of stupid man's intellectual who kind of comes out with this kind of take that's quite high profile, and people can just kind
of swallow it whole and kind of take it on as their kind of answer to what's been what's been
happening with recent debates. And so, you know, having said that, like if you actually read it, you know, from our point of view, in terms of like knowing a bit more like having lived some of these kind of debates in these kind of really kind of annoying, trying kind of times, we might be able to experience some of the book as being like, okay, yeah, like anti Semitism is a problem, and like Jewish culture and Jewish history
aren't that well known in Britain. You know, there's those kind of small aspects of the points that he's making are valid, and therefore it just seems like even more of a kind of missed opportunit. You need to like speak about them in a more like historicized and kind of contextualized way rather than this kind of like really quite reactionary kind of polemic that he that he kind of used it for. I don't know how even handed that was. I know that I'm supposed to be even handed.
Yeah, just what I did want to say that was so from that was the good bit that you can say about about the book. And from here it's all downhill. So it's a really damaging book. That's the positive. That's the positive statement.
About what do you think do you think my being unre well.
No, you're I mean, I think you're right basically. But the topic, the topic that he's he's brought up is a really interesting one. You know, the issue of, you know, there's an issue of jewishness in its relationship to whiteness, the issue of you know, anti semitism and its relationship to to other forms of racism. You know, these are kind of interesting topics for discussion.
They are really importanttant question, but.
He does he does approach them in perhaps the stupidest way imaginable. I was I was talking to someone about it yesterday and uh, and we were saying, like it's the equivalent of someone, you know, someone who wants to write, you know, about what the weather's been like this week and what the weather's going to be like next week and just looking out their window and that being the extent of what they talk about, you know what I mean. It's just so kind of like so, oh right, yeah,
that's it. That's so what I can immediately see here. That's that. I don't think I need to go any deeper into that. So basically the short version is that there's there's not much good about this book. I mean, I think, you know, the style of it, it's this kind of like this long form s say essentially, which I think, what is it?
What is it? It's not it's not clear what it is. It's almost like a kind of like what's it called? In in like shape, it's like a soliloquy. It's like a just like there's one long soliloquy. But it's like the kind of feeling of it is just that it's like wow, like that's the kind of tone like everyone should think the same things as me, and everyone should stop being mean to me. On Twitter, like this is the kind of.
I mean, I think, I think, I think that's it. I think because that's you know, because it's got the sort of the the sort of the long form essay style of you know, you can imagine like Camu, like you know when he writes The Rebel, you know what I mean, or like you know, one of all Well's long form essays or James Baldwin or something like that. But then the thing is is that it's just so daft. It's like there's no there's no intellectual heft to it
at all. There's no I can't I think there's hardly any reference to any other book on the topic or I.
I would like to talk to you about referencing. Yeah, I've done some very important research. Right while I was reading the book, I counted that he references thirty tweets in the book, right, And he doesn't just reference tweets, he reproduces them with the image from Twitter of the
tweets right. Out of the thirty tweets, nine of them are his own tweets, right, So basically the whole book is just him doing a self retweet of his own kind of really bad opinions and bad tweets, and I kind of thought about I thought about this kind of like phenomenon of like referencing yourself, and it reminded me of when I did a Capital reading group, like and I just and I realized that basically, this man, I've never seen a Jew reference himself so much since I
read Capital Volume one like this, this, this is Carl Mark's levels of like I'm I'm right, read my previous work. I mean, he even like, yeah, quotes one of his novels at length as if that's like that.
Was actually one bit where I was like, oh, well, you know what that's this is an interesting this is potentially interesting point. What's what's this book that he's And then I went back and read read the paragraph again. It was like, I know, he's just talking about one of his own novels. This is not it's not research. It's not researching like there's he's just constantly been like oh yeah, this is all you see this all on
social media. I see many posts these days. It's like that's not, that's not research, that's not it's just like I've seen tweets. It's not you know, that's not that's not.
That's kind of like I think indicative of like his overall focus of the book, which is he doesn't go into great detail about why he's focusing on what is basically this kind of very indeterminate blob that he calls progressives, which is just like everything from like liberals, like centrist conservatives, to like all different types of British institutions to well.
As well as we'll get on as we'll get onto this later. But you know, one of the examples he gives is actually not of a liberal or he is actually of a Nazi collaborator. But somehow this has pinned somehow, this has pinned on the on the left in some way. But yeah, I mean I think this is that's really kind of key. And I think part of part of this issue is that there is no intellectual or methodological.
Rigor to it.
And it's and and yeah, like you say, like you know, he's quoting his own tweets, he's quoting his own novels, and like there's.
This from his own life. Yeah for the guy, because a lot of the time he's quoting things that have happened where his friends have been racist. It's like, all right, mate, if your friends are being racist, to you, that's not like some representative of like the left or like progressive. That means that you should have choose better friends.
You've got racist friends. And but there's this I mean like as I was reading it, like there were I got that. There's that line from Uh, there's a British sitcom called Garth Marengi's Dark Place where the main character is this author, Garth Marengi, and he says he says the line, I'm actually one of the few authors who's written more books than they've read. And as I was reading this book, I was like, this is this is Garth Morengi. You know what I mean?
This is it.
It's like there's no no desire to look into anything beyond Yeah, like you say, his own tweets, his own books, and like, yeah, his his interactions with you know.
We probably know how many books he's written because he probably references all of them.
Yeah, yeah, I still cut you off there, but I think you know, you talk about this this kind of indeterminate blob that he's kind of aiming his his ayre towards.
This comes to basically the central claim of his of his of his book, which is basically that that anti Semitism is not taken as seriously as other as other forms of racism, So for me, you know, I mean, I think immediately on the face of it, anyone who's faced any other form of racism apart from anti semitism would probably raise their eyebrow at that idea, that suggestion.
But actually, like you say, he's limiting or he's claiming to limit his discussion to just those on the left, which he you know, he describes in this really really vague, indeterminate way. I don't know if you want to say a bit more about that.
Yeah, I mean, it's it's really quite facile, like the way that he does it, Like when he describes like the left, it's almost like, you know, what was that There was like a TV show in the eighties that became this kind of like reference point for like kind of fish left wing where the guy wears the beret and.
He's called like wof Citizens Smith. Yeah, something like that.
It's that kind of like it's a kind of liberal way of talking about leftist politics. It's like not understanding any part of any of the ideas or history of the left, but it's kind of like he describes the left as being fighty. You know that it's like the left like it's supposed to care about injustice, but it
doesn't when it comes to Jews. And there's this thing that he calls like the sacred circle, which is like these are the kind of like prioritized or oppressed groups that are included in the people that the left fights for. So then you know, the left is like not anyone who's from those groups. It's just like I guess, you know, white indeterminate white people on the left who care about
certain minorities but don't care about Jews. And his kind of analysis of like left anti semitism, which you know, we'll probably discuss it more, but like you know, throughout these years, last few years, there's been a lot of discussion about anti semitism on the left, you know, and it's kind of an exhausted topic. It's like you'd have to like wade through this whole kind of like morass of like bad faith to have any kind of like useful conversation on it. But it's like it's something that
has a history that exists. There are like histories of exclusion and of conspiracy type racism on the left towards Jews, but like his kind of presentation of it, it's just completely like puerile. It's just like the left doesn't care about Jews because they think that Jews are all powerful and are all kind of capitalists and bloody, bloody blah.
And it's like there's no engagement whatsoever with like any kind of history, any kind of like the thought of like Jewish left, this Jewish Marxist, Jewish anarchists, struggles over the centuries of like working class Jewish culture. There's none of that. It's just it's just this kind of like one line thing of like this is why, this is why, this is why Jews don't count for the left, and it's.
Just like, yeah, well this is this is actually what's funny. Towards towards the end of the book, he goes the response to Corbyn's labor mobilized British Jews for the first time in history or something like that, and you're just like, are you out of your mind? Like you know what I mean, Like, you know, Jews in Britain, but not just in Britain, you know, Jews in general, you know, the diaspora are some of the most mobilized politically mobilized people,
you know. Ever, like you know, it's just it's crazy, like you know, you're talking, you know, in Britain. You just need to go to like you know to talk about I don't know, you know, the old like you know, communists in East London. You know, they used to describe like East London as a little Moscow, you know, because it was so mobilized with the old kind of Jewish trade unions.
And like, you know, there's a reason there's a reason why the British ruling class talked about kind of anarchism and terrorism. Like the reason why they racialized it is Jews. It's not just because of their racism. It's because there was loads of Jewish anarchists.
Yeah, yeah, Jewish Bolshevism and like yeah, you know, it's like it was just crazy to like it was what do you mean like that you know in twenty whatever, twenty seventeen or that that was the first time that Jews had ever mobile is like Cable Street, you know, like the forty three group. There's so many things that like so many times that Jews have organized politically and he just doesn't mention it. It just has And again it's its first.
Jewish trade union was founded in London in like the eighteen seventies or something like, You've got massive history of like Taylor strikes and solidarity and within those workers struggles in the in the East. Then like it's I mean, do you know what it reminds me of, Like when he says, like for the first time, it's just like
this kind of classic ahistorical void of liberalism. It just it reminds me of like, you know, when there were there were kind of the kind of pro eu marches that would happen around around kind of the Brexit time have you'd have like like painfully middle class people kind of holding up signs along the lines of like why did you make me come out here and leave my house? Like or like not usually the type to do this
kind of person. It's like this doesn't speak to like the actual history of like Jewish struggle or Jews involved in struggle in Britain. This speaks to like the deal and lots of other Jews in the current period being demobilized or being kind of like you know, suddenly deciding oh we're going to be we're going to have to
like do protest things. So you had like you had that absolutely bizarre kind of protest in like whenever it was twenty eighteen or twenty nineteen, when you had like you know, the Board of Deputies and various other like kind of Jewish leadership organizations having like a kind of sort of supposedly a protest. But it was like, how do you have a protest if the entire kind of
state is on your side? Like everyone's all these Tory politicians, all the government ministers are all there like with their like plat like kind of perfectly kind of like laminated signs. Yeah, like this, and it's just like that's that's what it reminded me of. It's like, this is a kind of this is the first time that we're doing this because I have no idea what history is.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, and yeah, and I think like, you know, so as part of as part of his kind of his this claim that he's making about an anti Semitism not being taken as seriously as other forms of racism and specifically on the left, you know, he says in this one part of the book at the beginning, he says that what he's trying to do is and so this is just to quote him that he's trying to pinpoint something key about modern anti Semitism, which is the
left confusion over it. And so, you know, I read that and I was like, Okay, you know, does that does that make it because he's making it more precise, He's he's maybe being a bit more precise about what he's talking about. So does that does that make it
kind of better or sharper this now insight? And I was like, no, actually, that makes it even stupider because it's just like, you know, I was like, there, it's like, you know, so wait, so you're telling me that the key, the key to modern anti semitism, you know, the crucial thing to anti semitism today is the left confusion over it.
And you're just like, well, you know, at the moment, we have like you know, political discourses around kind of cultural Marxism and great replacement theory and saw us you know, saw us money, and like, you know, have the far right kind of spreading this, uh, these kind of anti semitic these anti Semitic conspiracy theories, all the while kind of still supporting Israel obviously, and and then so there's that and that that sort of seems quite signific dificant
in terms of modern anti Semitism. But then also, you know, so this book is published in twenty twenty one, and you know, at that point, you know, the Tories had been in government for over a decade, the far right were on the right art well, and still are on the rise everywhere, you know what I mean. It's and and so I'm kind of, you know, I'm just there. I was thinking, like, I'm not sure that in that context the left is key to anything, you know what I mean?
As we come margin Martin and the Beauty of the Day, Amelion.
That brings us to the end of this episode. Preview To listen to the full thing and help support our work with searching and promoting people's history, join us on Patreon at patreon dot com slash working class History link in the show notes