Jews Don't Count by David Baddiel, a Times Book of the Year

(TLS Books/Harper Collins Publishers, 2021)

Any lingering regard I had for David Baddiel disappeared back in 2014. That was the year his first children’s book was published. Writing books for children is the last – but one – refuge of the washed-up “alternative” comedian. I have a particular loathing for children’s books written by alternative comedians, washed-up or otherwise. With titles like The Parent Agency, The Boy Who Could Do What He Liked and Head Kid, it was painfully obvious that in rehashing his “alternative” comedy schtick for schoolchildren, this pin-up boy of the 1990’s “comedy is the new rock n’ roll” generation thought it would be a good idea to impose on the children of England the jaded revolutionary politics with which the grown-ups of England are becoming increasingly fed up. With this deeply held prejudice I decided to read Jews Don’t Count, at which point I discovered that David Baddiel had reinvented himself again – this time as cultural commissar, the last refuge of the washed-up alternative comedian.

His re-emergence as cultural commissar appears all the more inevitable given that David Baddiel is a Jew. Lest there be any doubt about it, in his latest book he tells us that “My Twitter biography has always been one word: Jew.” He goes on to give three reasons for this choice: it’s “funny,” it’s a “statement against Jewish shame,” and it’s a “reclamation.” Well, David Baddiel might think it’s funny, but if Jews Don’t Count is anything to go by, I’m not sure if the rest of us are allowed to laugh. As readers of this magazine will know, the Jewish rejection of Logos manifests itself in rejection of recognized limits, alternative comedy doing for laughter what political correctness did for speech, establishing new rules about what was funny and when to laugh. This re-setting of the limits of laughter provides one of the keys to the book.

Jews Don’t Count finds Commissar Baddiel casting his censorious gaze across the media landscape, calling out all things anti-Semitic, looking not so much for evidence of anti-Semitism – that’s taken as read – but for failures to speak out against anti-Semitism whenever and wherever it rears its ugly head. Why these failures? Because, as the title claims, Jews don’t count, an assertion that provides the second key to the book, namely Jewish victimhood.

Jews Don’t Count is published by TLS Books, the offspring of the Times Literary Supplement (est. 1902), a brief history of which appears at the start of the book and in which we learn that: “Our guiding principle for the selection of pieces remains the same as it ever has been: is it interesting; and is it beautifully written?”1

Well, Jews Don’t Count is interesting, but not for the reasons that the author or his publishers think. The chief interest arises from the author’s exploration of his own identity. The “What is a Jew?” question provides, as it were, the animating spirit of the book. The body of the book is also interesting but once again not in the way the author imagines. David Baddiel wants to know why Jews are not accorded the same sympathy – and the corresponding protection – that other minorities enjoy. Why, he wants to know, are Jews in England excluded from the “sacred circle”2 of disadvantaged groups, the dignity of which the world, now more than ever before, seems determined to uphold? Why does nobody seem to care about the Jews, or less egregiously though none the less alarmingly, why does no one even notice the Jews? Why this “blind spot”3 these “absences”4 – terms which Baddiel uses repeatedly to explore the perceived problem? Though we can hardly blame the author, the acclaim with which his book has been received provides a crushing refutation of the book’s thesis: if Jews don’t count, why has the TLS published Jews Don’t Count? If Jews don’t count why is this rather dreary diary of a keyboard warrior a Book of the Year? If Jews don’t count, why is this monotonous but mercifully short monologue of Jewish misery being proclaimed as a masterpiece? The answer is known as Jewish privilege, and this provides the third key to the book.

Is it beautifully written? An aesthetic assessment is not the first thing that comes to mind with a book like Jews Don’t Count. I suppose to an accountant, a balance sheet is a thing of beauty. Jews Don’t Count, ironically enough, reads very much like the work of a man who has been counting. For all the author’s comedic pretensions, it reads for all the world like a tax return: David Baddiel, cultural auditor, presents the accounts for the Jewish People (UK unLtd) for the period 2000 – 2021; with some retrospective income and expenditure going as far back as the 1970s; some inheritance tax issues going back to the Holocaust; and assets and liabilities arising from a punitive Christian inland revenue regime established some 2000 years ago. So if it fails or falls short in aesthetic terms, it’s hard to blame the author, a Cambridge University English graduate, who does a pretty good job of keeping his tax return clear and succinct, managing to explicate very tidily the inevitable jargon – disablism, minority casting, white-male-cis-het privilege – by which the uninitiated might be put off. Then again, if proportion and symmetry and luminosity are the essential attributes of beauty, David Baddiel tries very hard to sound both balanced and measured, his apparent composure betrayed only by occasional barrages of the f-word, which Baddiel no doubt imagines comes across as good old-fashioned plain speaking. In reality, the use of the f-word reveals the author’s frustration when other people fail to comply with his rewritten rules about laughter, as when a restaurant critic jokes that the upper-crust Ivy Restaurant – a favorite among local Jews – in upper-crust St John’s Wood should be called the “Oy vey.” David Baddiel is not amused. He Tweeted: “name and shame the racist fuckwit. The time of Jews laughing along with this shit and thinking offence against us doesn’t matter like it does to other minorities is over.”5

Under the sardonic surface, the reader encounters an angrier more troubled David Baddiel who sends out highly contradictory signals about how laughter fits into his overall project, a confusion that adds an entirely unintended undercurrent of humour.

As for luminosity, his entries do shed light on and give real plausibility to his chosen examples, and there are times when I felt real sympathy for the author as he grapples with the vagaries of cancel culture, and how the perception of Jews as both oppressed and oppressor can make a Jew feel thoroughly unloved, especially by the very progressives who share the Jewish rejection of limits and, like ungrateful children, forget that they are the indirect beneficiaries of Jewish privilege. Having said all that, the greatest failing of the book is that even if his conclusion about Jewish exclusion from the “sacred circle” is wholly right, he is at best only half right about why this is the case. However right he is about questions of absence and/or animus, his answers are always and only about the behavior of the offenders and never – with one bizarrely expressed exception – about the behaviour of the Jews, ever the scapegoats, ever the victims of irrational, atavistic gentile hatred.

The author’s effort to reclaim the word Jew is motivated by his assertion of its “deep burial of it in a bad place in the Christian unconscious.”6 Though the Christian unconscious may be the source of all the trouble, Baddiel is not concerned here with the Christians. No, David Baddiel is worried about the atheists. He can’t help noticing that “progressives” like himself – the “left” – those who consider themselves to be “on the right side of history”7 (he excludes himself from this particular positioning) are so indifferent to or even guilty of slights against the Jews. He makes it quite clear that the “anti-Semitism” of the irredeemable “right” is not the concern of the book, thus quite conveniently and quite arbitrarily ignoring the Jew taboo rigorously observed by English conservatives – the progressive party which happen to be in power – and their utter failure to ever mention the word Jew except in the most obsequious way. What Baddiel can’t fathom is why the left, the self-appointed custodians of the moral high ground, seem so determined either to place Jews at the bottom of the “hierarchy of racisms,”8 or, what’s worse, why the left – so busy railing about the injustices faced by blacks, browns, disableds, homosexuals, transgenders, and all the other occupants of the sacred circle – is all the while unconsciously or even deliberately leaving Jews out in the cold, or placing Jews “in the damned circle of the oppressors.”9 You have to admire the man for using such explicitly Dantean language, given that he himself identifies as an avowed atheist, filling the God-shaped hole with rather too occasional comic asides, deployed, no doubt, to obviate the charge of this erstwhile alternative comedian becoming a rather too serious old Jew: “Although I never use the phrase ‘on the right side of history’, as I believe the only person who really knows how things will turn out in years to come is Doctor Who.”10 He registers his alarm at the progressives’ exclusion of Jews from the sacred circle but his unwillingness to provide any analysis of this beyond his catch-all “majority cultures always in need of a minority to fear and loathe”11 leaves the reader none the wiser.

WHAT IS A JEW?

Baddiel’s effort to answer the question, “What is a Jew?’ put me in mind of 6-year-old Thomas Aquinas asking repeatedly, “What is God?” The Angelic Doctor came to realize that the only way to approach the “What is God” question, is to say what God is not. David Baddiel tries a similar approach. He is a Jew though he does not believe in God. He is a Jew though he is not a Zionist. He is a Jew though Jews do not necessarily look like Jews. In other words, it’s not a matter of biology. We can all agree on that. He is a Jew but neither by conversion nor by choice: “One’s Jewishness, just like one’s skin colour, is an accident of birth.”12 The closest Baddiel gets to a definition is to make it sound like being a Jew means being a member of a localized culinary club while at the same time being part of an international culture club, bound together by a Nazi-refugee Holocaust narrative:

Because I am a British person – a Jew, yes, but my Jewish identity is about Groucho Marx, and Larry David, and Sarah Silverman, and Philip Roth, and Seinfeld, and Saul Bellow, and pickled herring, and north London seders, and my mother being a refugee from the Nazis, and wearing a yarmulke at my Jewish primary school – and none of that has anything to do with a Middle Eastern country three thousand miles away.13

It’s instructive to note that all the international culture club Jews with whom David Baddiel identifies are comedians or novelists. David Baddiel is both comedian and novelist. He rose to fame as a comedian in the late 1980s/early ’90s TV comedy sketch show, The Mary Whitehouse Experience. A helpful shorthand might be to describe it as Monty Python-lite. The invocation of Mary Whitehouse was not so much about challenging sexual mores – the heavy lifting on that score had already been done – as affronting this archetypal intolerant English mother, goading the Bible-thumping old hag with no-end of scatological skulduggery and infantile sexual innuendo. Throw in a bit of homosexual humbug and you get the picture: “Kiss me Hardy” implores the dying Lord Nelson; David “Hardy” Baddiel does the honours. In purely Python terms this was a regression – the innuendo-laden masters of the absurd gave way to the innuendo-laden purveyors of the puerile. The MWE sketches were shorter – little more than set-ups for increasingly predictable one-liners – and the content had much less intellectual heft, for which Baddiel and friends strove to compensate with much more lavatorial levity and homosexual virtue signalling. Like three of the Pythons, all four of the MWE team are Cambridge men, cutting their comedy teeth in that veritable incubator of revolutionary comedy, the Cambridge Footlights.

If anyone is entitled to claim the Python crown, it’s Stephen Fry. This titan of British media, arts and culture, another Cambridge (Footlights) graduate who self-identifies as a half-Jewish homosexual, rates Jews Don’t Count as a “masterpiece in its own way.” Well, as book promoters are wont to do, one two-word fragment of Stephen Fry’s review now adorns each and every piece of promotional material for Jews Don’t Count – yes, David Baddiel’s latest book is, quite simply, “a masterpiece.” Fry goes on:

Perhaps too rueful and wise to be called straight hostile polemic, there is as much sorrow here as anger. The main conclusion drawn – that anti-Jewish sentiment, language and behavior somehow aren’t in the mainstream considered as much of a scandal, affront or abuse as all other kinds of racism and minority prejudice – seems to me impossible to refute.14

I wonder what UK rapper Wiley would have to say about that? This is the man who in 2019, following a series of anti-Jewish Tweets, only just avoided arrest and was on the receiving end of a thermo-nuclear cancelling. Baddiel brushes off online claims that Wiley’s treatment reflected Jewish privilege, interpreting Wiley’s banishment to the cultural outer darkness, not as particular sensitivity to anti-Semitism on the part of online platforms like Twitter, but as a general “upping of its game against hate speech,”15 the Jewish origin of which Baddiel conveniently fails to acknowledge.

The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) seems very confident that its work is having an impact and “has helped guide countless governments, organizations, and individuals in their efforts to identify antisemitism.”16 Does this list of organizations include British universities? David Baddiel is worried. And he’s not the only one. The fact that only 29 out of 105 universities in the UK had yet signed up to the IHRA definition was described in October 202017 as “frankly disturbing” by the then Education Secretary, Gavin Williamson, who threatened regulatory action against the malingerers – including the suspension of “funding streams” – if they didn’t get a move on. Invoking his Jewish victimhood, Baddiel manages to interpret this sense of urgency about anti-Semitism, not as special concern for Jews but as indifference to anti-Semitism. Consistent with the focus of the book, Baddiel considers the response of the “progressive” media, which he again interprets as indifference to Jewish fear. Why, he wants to know, is the Guardian, the progressives’ daily scripture, so determined to regard anti-Semitism as “this trifling issue”?18 According to the Guardian:

Williamson’s intervention comes at a difficult time for many universities struggling to cope with hundreds of students and staff infected with Covid-19, as well as preparing for the UK’s exit from the EU and its impact on recruitment and funding.19

It seems that momentous national and international events must not distract anyone from adopting the IHRA definition. Readers may be interested to learn that as of November 2021, ninety-five UK universities had signed up.20 Once again, the author chooses to ignore the contradiction that his book points up: If anti-Semitism is the poor relation in terms of minority protection, how does one account for the special status accorded to Jews by the existence and the imposition of the IHRA definition?…

[…] This is just an excerpt from the September 2022 Issue of Culture Wars magazine. To read the full article, please purchase a digital download of the magazine, or become a subscriber!

(Endnotes Available by Request)