‘Antisemitism, not religion, makes me Jewish’

British comedian and author David Baddiel told a South African audience, “Antisemitism is the primary thing that makes me Jewish.

“How could it not?” he said. “My whole family was murdered on my mother’s side. My whole family was murdered, apart from her and her parents,” Baddiel said in conversation with local writer and performer Matthew Krouse at Love Books in Melville on 23 April. “There’s a huge family picture of them and their family in the 20s, dead, all of them. I don’t know who most of them are.”

Baddiel was in South Africa as a special guest of the Jewish Literary Festival in Cape Town on Monday, 28 April.

He explained that most non-Jews – and even some Jews – connect Judaism with the religion, but for most Jews around the world, being Jewish isn’t about observing religion. “It’s about culture, it’s about tradition, it’s about family, it’s about comedy, food. But I’ll tell you what it’s primarily about, and a lot of people think it’s negative, but it’s true. It’s about antisemitism.

“A lot of people think that racism against Jews isn’t racism,” he said. “They think it’s religious intolerance, and so they can mark it down because religious intolerance isn’t as big a crime in our modern society. But that’s wrong, because I’m an atheist, and that would get me no free passes out of Auschwitz.”

Baddiel said that being an atheist didn’t save his great-uncle, Arno, from dying in the Warsaw Ghetto. “The Nazis didn’t give a f*ck about whether you kept kosher,” he said, “And neither, by the way, did the white supremacists chanting that the Jews ‘will not replace us’ in Charlottesville. They don’t care about religion. They basically care only about whether you’re born a Jew or not, which is what makes it racism.”

Baddiel described antisemitism as “the racism that slips past you”. He said Jews were considered what he calls “Schrodinger’s whites”, meaning that for the far right, Jews are non-white. “Jews have always been non-white to the far right. Hitler absolutely wouldn’t accept the idea that Jews were white.”

However, at the same time, the left sometimes sees Jews as sort of super white because we’re rich and privileged and all the things we’re mythically supposed to be.

This, he said, was why he wanted his 2021 bestselling book, Jews Don’t Count, to be thought of as a primer for people to think about and understand the way that antisemitism works. “It’s complicated, but the simple reason why Jews don’t count is because the world is now seen in a binary way. And the binary is power versus powerless. The oppressed and the oppressor.

“The thing about Jews is that Jews are a glitch in that binary. Because, of course, some Jews are powerful, some Jews are rich, and Israel is the most powerful state in the Middle East. But also, Jews have been incredibly vulnerable throughout their history. Jews have been exiled, genocided, and destroyed. And, incredibly, they survive it all. And that has to be taken into account in this binary because the binary shouldn’t be as simple as that, right. One of the things I do say is that people who imagine that Jews don’t need to count, don’t need to be thought of this way because they are rich – firstly lots of Jews aren’t rich – money doesn’t protect you in the end.”

Baddiel said his mother was born in Königsberg in Nazi Germany. She grew up in a wealthy family and had a glamorous life in Germany in 1933. However, by 1939, she and her parents had to flee to Britain, essentially penniless. “So, money isn’t a reason to say that racism doesn’t happen to these people,” he said.

Ever since publishing Jews Don’t Count, one of the issues he brought up in his book has gained greater profile since 7 October 2023, when Hamas invaded Israel and murdered more than 1 200 people and took 250 hostages. This is that many “progressives” define and connect Jews to what’s happening in the Middle East, and Jews are condemned for it as such. Baddiel said he disagreed with this idea because no other minority in the world is condemned by the actions of a land that they don’t live in.

“If progressives are to treat Jews as a proper minority and indeed, if we are to think of ourselves as a proper minority, we have to stop constantly accepting a definition of us as entirely, umbilically connected to a country, [which is] for most of us, a long way away. Because that doesn’t happen to other minorities.”

Baddiel said he would never ask Phil Wang, a British comedian of Chinese-Malay heritage, to tell him what he thought of the Chinese government and how it had mistreated the Uighurs, and that he is racist and offensive because of it. “But I can promise you, every f*cker will say to me or any Jew, ‘Can I ask you what you think about what’s happening in Israel and Palestine?’”

Baddiel said his position in regard to Israel had always been the same, namely that he believes it’s a foreign country, and that as a British Jew, he’s not responsible for it. “Anyone who tells me I am is a racist in the same way that if they said to Phil Wang, ‘You are somehow responsible’, or ‘I need to hear what you think about the Chinese government’ is a racist.”

While many Jews may feel a connection to Israel, “The assumption that all Jews do is a racist one,” Baddiel said.