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David Baddiel: Jews Don’t Count, review: well-argued, but not entirely well-balanced

David Baddiel with comedian Sarah Silverman in Jews Don’t Count
David Baddiel with comedian Sarah Silverman in Jews Don’t Count

In 2019, Dawn Butler gave a speech to the Labour Party conference in which she promised that a Labour government would value you “if you wear a hijab, turban, a cross, if you are black, white, Asian…” The list went on. But there was one minority that did not get a mention from the Shadow Minister for Women and Equalities. This speech featured as a prime example in David Baddiel: Jews Don’t Count (Channel 4).

Anti-Semitic crimes hit a record high in the UK last year. But Baddiel’s programme was not about racism as blatant as the Muslim men who drove through London last year in a pro-Palestinian convoy, making rape threats against Jewish girls, or the more recent attack on a bus full of Jewish teenagers on Oxford Street.

Instead, in this slick, well-argued film, Baddiel went after Left-wing liberals, who are forever speaking up for other minorities but remain curiously silent on anti-Semitism. “There is a sacred circle of minorities that the progressive Left are prepared to go into battle for,” he argued, “but Jews are not in it. Why?”

He deftly explored the reasons. There is the belief that Jews cannot be counted among the oppressed because they are rich and powerful and secretly running the world. But there is also the question of Israel. Baddiel filled the programme with famous Jewish people who mostly agreed with his arguments, but on Israel he came up against Miriam Margolyes. Baddiel said Israel had nothing to do with him. Margolyes told him it was wilful of him to deny a connection.

Baddiel pointed out double standards in the arts world: no outcry when Radio 4 broadcast a reading of TS Eliot’s lines from Burbank with a Baedeker: “The rats are underneath the piles/The Jew is underneath the lot.” Some other double standards were not mentioned, such as Sarah Silverman appearing here as a contributor with no mention that her own comedy has offended the black and Asian communities.

Things went awry when Baddiel attempted to head off critics who bring up his mockery of the former Nottingham Forest player Jason Lee on Fantasy Football League – a recurring “gag” which involved Baddiel in blackface and on every occasion involved playground-level bullying. The comic huffed that he had apologised countless times but it was only here, 25 years late and in service of his own documentary, that he bothered to apologise to Lee himself. The air is thin up there on the moral high ground.