"Comedian" comes up with funny idea: "holocaust fatigue" (Imagine that!)

[yankeedoodle]

David Baddiel fears 'Holocaust fatigue' as interest in the Nazi genocide wanes
The comedian said he worried that over time the genocide had become 'deprioritised'
https://www.thejc.com/news/news/david-baddiel-fears-'holocaust-fatigue'-as-interest-in-the-nazi-genocide-wanes-6woSnaOE9YMloBaQyUuPbi?reloadTime=1658840485031

David Baddiel has warned of the danger of "Holocaust fatigue" growing as the public lose interest in remembering the Nazi genocide.

Addressing Holocaust Educational Trust (HET) ambassadors in London, the comedian said: "It needs to be constantly there and understood as part and parcel of why Jews face racism."

Over time, however, the genocide has become "deprioritised", he claimed.

The Jews Don't Count author emphasised that 70 years after the Shoah, antisemitism is continuing around the world.

"Nazis were marching in Charlottesville in 2019," he said. "Antisemitism always reappears. I don't get the sense that it's gone away."

When a deadly mass shooting took place in Illinois' heavily Jewish Highland Park suburb this month, "Nobody talked about it as an attack against Jews," he said.

His advice to young people confronted by a lack of interest in the Holocaust, he continued, was "don't be ashamed to discuss antisemitism in the conversation about other racism".

Visiting Auschwitz-Birkenau with the HET was an "incredible experience", Mr Baddiel added.

"I was kind of frightened of going... it was at once enormously depressing and wonderful to go."

As a rabbi read Kaddish for the dead, he said, snowflakes began to fall and, despite being an atheist, it was hard for him not to think that the souls of his dead relatives were present somewhere.

[yankeedoodle]

This "comedian" - David Baddiel - comes up with another funny idea: jews don't count.   

And, to everybody's surprise, they let him make a television documentary about it in Britain, so the Brits will never again fail to count the jews.

David Baddiel: Jews Don't Count TV review: Five stars for this primer on antisemitism
Josh Howie applauds David Baddiel's documentary on the left's blind spot
https://www.thejc.com/life-and-culture/all/david-baddiel-jews-dont-count-tv-review-five-stars-for-this-primer-on-antisemitism-5rhhh16QxuEQNqbgaBgwPh?reloadTime=1669139479063

To be honest I'm getting just a wee bit sick of antisemitism. My latest analogy is it's like being in a hypobaric chamber, the pressure infinitesimally increasing day to week to year, the body adjusting as best it can to the bends, until everything explodes. At which point the chamber resets and starts again.

David Baddiel's documentary Jews Don't Count on Channel 4 isn't really about getting those on the controls to alleviate the most recent crush of these last few years, it's more about trying to get those on the controls, to first recognise that they're even on the controls. Which is a particularly difficult undertaking when they see themselves as the type of people who'd never ever touch the controls, they're anti-controls, if fact they're against all forms of controls, they don't have a control bone...alright, enough of this analogy!

I don't need to tell you how insidious a racism antisemitism is, but we're not who this was made for. It's always good to be given a reminder, to have some of the most modern forms of this ancient prejudice clearly articulated, but like the book this is based on, this is a primer, a beginner's guide, and under that remit it does its job very well.

Part lecture and part interviews and clips to back up the point, the hypocrisy of identity politics is laid bare when it comes to Jews. Even being familiar with the various examples, anger and disbelief still swell up at the blatancy, the ignorance, the unfairness. Whoopi Goldberg's words are particularly jaw dropping, but Baddiel's calm self-deprecating presence isn't interested in allocating blame, he's more interested in analytically laying out the ever more precarious position our people somehow find ourselves in yet again.

Yes there's the usual cop out about Israel, yes I don't think Miriam Margolyes should be anywhere near a documentary about antisemitism, but this is like coming in with a degree in astrophysics to point out what's missing in a primary school maths book, which has been written by someone with a degree in astrophysics. Anyone who did any homeschooling knows how difficult it is to teach basic foundations, and Baddiel as one of the most recognisable Jews in this country, his work and presence straddling many aspects of British culture, is perfectly placed and skilled to highlight the increasing bigotry afflicting Jews.

This is an enlightening and even entertaining programme, helped by enlightening and entertaining guests including David Schwimmer and Sarah Silverman, that will hopefully shift the conversation. Particular praise should go out to Jason Lee, in an awkward but necessary scene where Baddiel apologises for his own past failings. Lee's obviously still hurt and angry, justifiably so, but his mature generous response shows him to be a real mensch.

As evidenced by the tide of online antisemitism I've seen merely in anticipation of this documentary, I'm not sure how many of those who most need to watch this will. But that it does exist, and that there are people who'll watch this and understand and hopefully change, for that we should be very grateful.




The target audience for Jews Don't Count is anyone but Jews
That's one reason why my Channel 4 film was packed with famous names — if you're trying to persuade people to start to care about something, it helps to have Ross from Friends
https://www.thejc.com/lets-talk/all/the-target-audience-for-jews-don't-count-is-anyone-but-jews-3Om6RJd5AM7ncAUjQkZwmZ?reloadTime=1669141037828

My book, Jews Don't Count, is a personal polemic. It includes a lot of what is now called my "lived experience" — in simpler terms, stories from my life, examples of how this one minority doesn't seem to be considered, by the people who care most about minorities, quite a proper one.

When it came to making a documentary on the same subject, which went out on Channel 4 on Monday, that meant an opportunity presented itself to bring on board other voices, and other stories. Which is why if you watched it, you will have heard David Schwimmer, Sarah Silverman, Stephen Fry, Miriam Margoyles, Rachel Riley, Neil Gaiman and others talk, in ways you might not usually hear, about Jews being, to quote the director Patrick Marber "an unprotected species", and how vulnerable that makes them feel.

One criticism that I've heard is that the film spends a lot of time arguing that Jews are not the privileged, rich stereotype which seems to disqualify them from vulnerable minority status, and yet here I am on screen with a lot of privileged, rich Jews.

Well. First, it's not just big TV and film stars. I also interview various Jewish writers and thinkers; the rabbi of New York Central synagogue; my bi-racial niece; plus I visit my old primary school to see how Jewish schoolchildren have to do security drills to protect themselves from terrorist attacks, and none of them are rich or privileged.

Second, as I have said before, yes, some Jews — like some people — are rich and privileged. That doesn't mean they should have to suffer racism. My grandparents in Germany before the war were rich. They owned a brick factory in Konisgberg. That didn't stop the racists stealing that from them, and then murdering most of their family.

But more generally, there has been in the whole process of drawing attention to this phenomenon, a duality. Which is that I'm writing something about Jews, that speaks to Jews, but is at some level not for Jews. For most Jews who have spoken to me about the book, the ones who like it — I'm fully aware there are some that don't — it has provided a release, a formulation of something that many of them had felt but that no-one had quite articulated before. In the documentary, Sarah Silverman says that the idea of Jews not counting was like something in the air, that all Jews knew was there, but no-one had, as it were, bottled it.

And I'm glad for some that the book has provided that liberating sense of "At last someone has bloody said this!" But of course the people who I want to be changed by the book is not Jews. I'm trying to speak to non-Jews, particularly ones who see themselves, in the core of their beings, as anti-racist, but who nonetheless incorporate certain racist ideas about Jews within their — to use a phrase normally applied only to other minorities — unconscious bias.

Those are the people I want to make realise that — as, indeed, a non-Jewish progressive reader who wrote to me on Twitter put it — "antisemitism is the racism that sneaks past you."

The problem can be — and this itself is a Jews don't count issue — stuff about Jews in our culture is generally seen as niche: as just, really, something that will only be consumed by Jews. I like to hope that the book and its message has broken out of the — can I say the word ghetto? OK I just have — and shifted the dial a bit on the conversation in the world beyond, but the chance for that to happen on TV is better still. Which is why I went for big stars. It was a pragmatic decision. There are no doubt lots of not-very-well-known Jews out there I could have spoken to who would have said insightful and amazing things, but I'm not sure they would have brought in the ratings that Stephen Fry and Miriam Margolyes will. Or to put it another way: if you've made a documentary about what might seem to many people a subject that doesn't concern them — when it actually does — it helps a bit in terms of getting that wider audience that Ross from Friends is in it. Then, hopefully, they will stay to hear he and I discuss how instructive it is that Friends is criticised — correctly — for its lack of diversity but how people don't even notice, don't even register, that that series did have a minority character in it: a Jew.

So. I know this being the Jewish Chronicle, I am now mainly talking to Jews, but — if you haven't seen it go and check it out on All4. And more importantly, tell your non-Jewish friends to do the same.