How I See It

David Baddiel’s documentary about modern culture’s treatment of Jews was awkward, unexpected – and a great piece of television

David Baddiel: Jews Don’t Count had one of the best beginnings and best endings I’ve ever seen in a documentary. I also liked the middle bit. So now you know where I stand.

The point that David Baddiel has been making for a while now about the way Jewish people are treated in modern progressive culture is insightful, nuanced and absolutely correct. It wasn’t my favourite thing about this documentary, but it’s worth dwelling on because it is – like David Baddiel himself – so smart and so stubborn.

It’s stubborn because it’s so smart. Nuance is tremendously unfashionable these days, and broadly doomed. Baddiel’s book Jews Don’t Count (published in 2021) is brilliant, but anyone can say clever things in a book. Nobody reads books. The rarefied minority who still have sufficient attention span for such an extended medium are ipso facto clever enough to understand almost anything. If you wrote “Help! I need emergency brain surgery!” on page 35 of any recently published novel, chances are 80 per cent of the people who actually saw it would be able to assist you.

You know that, right? After all, you’re in the top 0.1 per cent of the population just by virtue of making it to the fourth paragraph of this article. Everybody else gave up at “ipso facto”.

But David Baddiel is now setting out to make the same point on television, thereby inviting an avalanche of misunderstanding and misplaced offence. Worse still, he tries to make reasoned cultural arguments on Twitter, which is utterly bonkers. It’s like trying to run your considered opinion of Finnegans Wake past a gang of drunks having a knife fight.

The point he’s making is that “progressives” don’t include Jewish people in their rules for marginalised minorities;

Jews are overlooked or wilfully treated differently. I haven’t space here to list all his evidence, nor the evidence offered by his starry guests (including David Schwimmer, Sarah Silverman and Stephen Fry), nor of my own “lived experience”, but trust me: he’s right and they don’t and they are.

Baddiel’s explanation is that Jews are, uniquely, seen as high and low status at once: caricatured like all minority ethnic groups as furtive, stinking and shabby but also as powerful, wealthy and dominant.

This observation is much too clever for the blunt instrument of modern public conversation; thus David Baddiel is perpetually confronted by people shrieking, “So you’re saying [X]!” or “How dare you say [Y]!” as he wearily replies: “No, I’m saying [Q].”

I don’t know how he can bear it. I stopped writing a topical column, or going on shows like Question Time, because I was so sick of the incessant battle with people who wilfully misinterpret one’s words. You spend your life explaining what you’re not saying. It’s amazing and inspiring that David Baddiel has the energy to keep doing it. (Although he shouldn’t be doing it on Twitter.)

It’s also impressive that he keeps identifying so publicly as Jewish, given the boring assumptions it brings on – not just the usual bigotries, but knee-jerk assumptions about his religious practice or his views on Israel. I really hate people making assumptions about me. I realised recently that I play poker in order to punish and tax people’s expectations.

I say “realised”. It’s something I heard myself saying to David Baddiel, over a Chinese meal on Friday night. (It was one of those restaurants where the menus have laminated plastic pages, featuring a choice of about three dishes, all of them obvious. Yet when they brought the food – it was delicious! So that punished our expectations! Or rather, the opposite.)

And what I loved most about David Baddiel: Jews Don’t Count was not the argument, nor the star wattage, nor the arty black-and-white filming, but the way in which it subverted the expectations of the viewer. It did that because it was full of conversations between Jews. Mischievous, contrary, infuriating Jews who absolutely refused to say what was expected of them. It opened – I mean, it bloody opened! – with Miriam Margolyes listing Jews that people find revolting; David Baddiel suggested Jeffrey Epstein and Margolyes immediately replied: “Well no, Jeffrey Epstein is rather handsome. If I was straight, I would go for Jeffrey Epstein.”

Then Sarah Silverman made an astonishingly dodgy accidental joke about gas that they left in the edit, David Baddiel offered his thoughts on Israel and Miriam Margolyes told him he was wrong, Stephen Fry did an impression of Princess Margaret, Andy Nyman called David Baddiel a c--- and it finished.

Sure, in between those bits was a deeply moving revelation about security in a London Jewish school, and a wonderful display of articulate forgiveness from the footballer Jason Lee (whom David Baddiel used to impersonate, in the days before that would be understood as offensive), but what I loved was the glorious messiness, the anarchy, the non-conformism. I watched it at a screening – the usual polite screening in a smart London art-house cinema, with coffee served beforehand to a like-minded audience and a Q&A afterwards chaired by that terrific comedian Phil Wang, who was offering his time and allyship with a fellow ethnic minority – and during the Q&A, where etiquette demands that you congratulate everyone involved, a Jewish journalist put up her hand and said “Why is Phil Wang chairing? Couldn’t you find a Jew to do it?”

And it was so awkward and unexpected and contrarian! I wish every screening, and every documentary, could be so un-boring.

But of course, if they were, then this wouldn’t be contrarian at all.

He’s inviting an avalanche of misunderstanding and misplaced offence