January 1, 2025 • 20 mins
This is a teaser preview of one of our Radical Reads episodes, made exclusively for our supporters on patreon. You can listen to the full 85-minute episode without ads and support our work at https://www.patreon.com/posts/e97-radical-10-116392240
In this episode, we talk to Michael Richmond, a Jewish communist author and anti-racist activist, about David Baddiel's ridiculous book, Jews Don't Count. In this book, Baddiel claims that the key thing about contemporary antisemitism is the left's confusion over it, and how this confusion means that Jews are uniquely excluded from left-wing political discourse and activism.
We discuss (and make fun of) Baddiel's book for about an hour and a half covering every aspect of his shallow understanding of racism, whiteness, Jewishness and antisemitism, and why Baddiel should probably get new friends.
Listen to the full episode here:
More information:
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/working-class-history--5711490/support.
In this episode, we talk to Michael Richmond, a Jewish communist author and anti-racist activist, about David Baddiel's ridiculous book, Jews Don't Count. In this book, Baddiel claims that the key thing about contemporary antisemitism is the left's confusion over it, and how this confusion means that Jews are uniquely excluded from left-wing political discourse and activism.
We discuss (and make fun of) Baddiel's book for about an hour and a half covering every aspect of his shallow understanding of racism, whiteness, Jewishness and antisemitism, and why Baddiel should probably get new friends.
Listen to the full episode here:
More information:
- Read Michael's excellent book (co-authored with Alex Charnley), Fractured: Race, Class, Gender and the Hatred of Identity Politics
- A number of Michael's articles can be found here and here. Some which are particularly relevant to this discussion are:
- Timeline of people's history stories about radical Jewish history
- The webpage for this episode is available here: https://workingclasshistory.com/podcast/e98-radical-reads-jews-dont-count-by-david-baddiel/
- Thanks to our patreon supporters for making this podcast possible. Special thanks to Jazz Hands, Jamison D. Saltsman, Fernando López Ojeda, Jeremy Cusimano, and Nick Williams.
- The episode image of David Baddiel at Soho Theatre, 2020. Credit: Raph PH (with additional design by WCH). CC 2.0.
- Edited by Jesse French
- Our theme tune is Montaigne’s version of the classic labour movement anthem, ‘Bread and Roses’, performed by Montaigne and Nick Harriott, and mixed by Wave Racer. Download the song here, with all proceeds going to Medical Aid for Palestinians. More from Montaigne: website, Instagram, YouTube.
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/working-class-history--5711490/support.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
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
(00:23):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
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.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
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.
Speaker 3 (01:26):
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
(01:48):
ago now, but we're kind of sufficiently annoyed by it
that we we've finally managed to get together to talk
about it.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
It is quite an annoying book.
Speaker 3 (01:58):
I mean, he just annoyingness as a man just jumps
off the page.
Speaker 1 (02:02):
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.
Speaker 3 (02:23):
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
(02:48):
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
(03:11):
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
(03:33):
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
(03:56):
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.
Speaker 1 (04:15):
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.
Speaker 3 (04:31):
About what do you think do you think my being
unre well.
Speaker 1 (04:37):
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
(04:59):
kind of interesting topics for discussion.
Speaker 3 (05:04):
They are really importanttant question, but.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
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
(05:30):
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
(05:51):
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?
Speaker 3 (06:02):
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
(06:28):
should think the same things as me, and everyone should
stop being mean to me. On Twitter, like this is
the kind of.
Speaker 1 (06:35):
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.
(06:57):
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.
Speaker 3 (07:08):
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
(07:28):
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
(07:51):
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.
(08:12):
I mean, he even like, yeah, quotes one of his
novels at length as if that's like that.
Speaker 1 (08:18):
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
(08:39):
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.
Speaker 3 (08:49):
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,
(09:16):
to like all different types of British institutions to well.
Speaker 1 (09:20):
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
(09:41):
this issue is that there is no intellectual or methodological.
Speaker 3 (09:47):
Rigor to it.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
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.
Speaker 3 (09:55):
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.
Speaker 1 (10:15):
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
(10:38):
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?
Speaker 3 (10:48):
This is it.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
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.
Speaker 3 (11:00):
We probably know how many books he's written because he
probably references all of them.
Speaker 1 (11:04):
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
(11:27):
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,
(11:50):
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.
Speaker 3 (12:01):
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.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
He's called like wof Citizens Smith. Yeah, something like that.
Speaker 3 (12:29):
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
(12:51):
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
(13:15):
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
(13:35):
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,
(13:56):
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
(14:18):
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,
(14:39):
this is why Jews don't count for the left, and it's.
Speaker 1 (14:42):
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
(15:05):
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
(15:27):
like East London as a little Moscow, you know, because
it was so mobilized with the old kind of Jewish
trade unions.
Speaker 3 (15:33):
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.
Speaker 1 (15:49):
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
(16:15):
he just doesn't mention it. It just has And again
it's its first.
Speaker 3 (16:19):
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
(16:45):
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
(17:08):
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
(17:29):
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
(17:53):
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
(18:14):
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.
Speaker 1 (18:23):
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
(18:45):
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
(19:08):
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,
(19:30):
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
(19:51):
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
(20:12):
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?
Speaker 2 (20:33):
As we come margin Martin and the Beauty of the Day, Amelion.
Speaker 1 (20:39):
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
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
(00:23):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
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.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
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.
Speaker 3 (01:26):
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
(01:48):
ago now, but we're kind of sufficiently annoyed by it
that we we've finally managed to get together to talk
about it.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
It is quite an annoying book.
Speaker 3 (01:58):
I mean, he just annoyingness as a man just jumps
off the page.
Speaker 1 (02:02):
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.
Speaker 3 (02:23):
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
(02:48):
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
(03:11):
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
(03:33):
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
(03:56):
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.
Speaker 1 (04:15):
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.
Speaker 3 (04:31):
About what do you think do you think my being
unre well.
Speaker 1 (04:37):
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
(04:59):
kind of interesting topics for discussion.
Speaker 3 (05:04):
They are really importanttant question, but.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
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
(05:30):
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
(05:51):
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?
Speaker 3 (06:02):
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
(06:28):
should think the same things as me, and everyone should
stop being mean to me. On Twitter, like this is
the kind of.
Speaker 1 (06:35):
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.
(06:57):
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.
Speaker 3 (07:08):
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
(07:28):
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
(07:51):
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.
(08:12):
I mean, he even like, yeah, quotes one of his
novels at length as if that's like that.
Speaker 1 (08:18):
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
(08:39):
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.
Speaker 3 (08:49):
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,
(09:16):
to like all different types of British institutions to well.
Speaker 1 (09:20):
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
(09:41):
this issue is that there is no intellectual or methodological.
Speaker 3 (09:47):
Rigor to it.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
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.
Speaker 3 (09:55):
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.
Speaker 1 (10:15):
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
(10:38):
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?
Speaker 3 (10:48):
This is it.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
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.
Speaker 3 (11:00):
We probably know how many books he's written because he
probably references all of them.
Speaker 1 (11:04):
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
(11:27):
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,
(11:50):
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.
Speaker 3 (12:01):
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.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
He's called like wof Citizens Smith. Yeah, something like that.
Speaker 3 (12:29):
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
(12:51):
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
(13:15):
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
(13:35):
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,
(13:56):
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
(14:18):
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,
(14:39):
this is why Jews don't count for the left, and it's.
Speaker 1 (14:42):
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
(15:05):
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
(15:27):
like East London as a little Moscow, you know, because
it was so mobilized with the old kind of Jewish
trade unions.
Speaker 3 (15:33):
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.
Speaker 1 (15:49):
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
(16:15):
he just doesn't mention it. It just has And again
it's its first.
Speaker 3 (16:19):
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
(16:45):
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
(17:08):
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
(17:29):
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
(17:53):
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
(18:14):
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.
Speaker 1 (18:23):
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
(18:45):
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
(19:08):
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,
(19:30):
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
(19:51):
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
(20:12):
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?
Speaker 2 (20:33):
As we come margin Martin and the Beauty of the Day, Amelion.
Speaker 1 (20:39):
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
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