Call it “The Devil Wears Galliano.” Wintour reckons that the British designer’s work “combines erudition and creativity, darkness and light, the past, the present, the future all smashing together in a brilliant way.” Less brilliant was Galliano’s tirade in a Paris cafe in 2011, when cameras captured him screaming at a woman, “I love Hitler. People like you would be dead. Your mother, your forefathers, would all be fucking gassed.” Witnesses reported that he also called the woman a “fucking ugly Jewish bitch.” He claims to have no memory of the incident due to substance abuse.

Wintour insists that Galliano “isn’t defined by a moment” and says that “John Galliano: Horizons” won’t “shy away from any of the darkness in John’s past. It’s part of what has shaped him. The show will take in the full arc of his career and grapple with all of it.”           

Wintour is garlanding Galliano with a rare honor. Only two other living designers have been feted by the Met with solo shows: Yves Saint Laurent in 1983 and Rei Kawakubo in 2017. 

Wintour has met with Jewish machers such as Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt and Rabbi Rick Jacobs about the choice of Galliano, who gave it their blessing, citing Galliano’s apologies and contrition. In the wake of the dark incident in the City of Light, he was fired as director of Dior and criminally convicted in a French court. However, he was quickly tapped by esoteric French label Maison Martin Margiela, where he completed a highly successful decade-long run in 2024. He has now taken the reins at mass-market retailer Zara, where he will “re-author” designs from the brand’s archives. 

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Galliano’s genius glowed early. A school collection inspired by post-revolutionary France, “Les Incroyables,” was snapped up by London’s legendary Browns boutique. A 1994 collection inspired by the murdered Romanovs, “Princess Lucretia,” was hailed by Diane von Furstenberg as a “watershed moment in modern fashion history.” Galliano’s bias-cut gowns ruled red carpets in the 1990s and his runways reached for historical phantasmagoria. No Brit had ever led a French couture house until he took over Givenchy in 1995. A year later, he was at Dior, giving the haute a surrealist flair. 

Take the Dior Saddle Bag, introduced in 1999 by Dior under Galliano’s direction. The asymmetrical item was popularized by Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie Bradshaw on Sex and the City. It simultaneously conjures posh stables; a low-slung, hip-hop aesthetic; and the melting drip of one of Salvador Dalí’s clocks. Knockoffs became a Canal Street staple, and Wintour’s Vogue christened it a “pop culture phenomenon.”

Galliano’s sins, however, are hardly limited to that one outburst in Paris. His biographer, Dana Thomas, contends that honoring him is a “terrible idea” and that “his infamous antisemitic rants were not an aberration.” And beyond the judgment of Galliano’s character — by all accounts, it’s troubled —  lies a more difficult reckoning with fashion’s fascination with cruelty and fanaticism, which all too often has lain behind the glittering surfaces. 

Eighty years before Galliano’s outburst, also in Paris, fashion and fascism were sewn together in Coco Chanel’s atelier. Chanel was just one of many auteurs and geniuses to collaborate with the Nazis and freeze out Jews — Martin Heidegger was a member of the Nazi Party until the end, and failed to protect his mentor Edmund Husserl from being fired under anti-Jewish laws. During the war, the French designer — inventor of the little black dress and Chanel No. 5, the best-selling perfume of all time — had a Nazi lover and was in the formal employ of German military intelligence. Chanel also appealed to Aryanization laws to attempt to wrest control of her perfume company from two Jewish partners, proving that allegiance to beauty provides no inoculation against brutality. She received her own Met show in 2005. 

Even worse was Hugo Boss, a German citizen and clothing manufacturer who joined the Nazi Party in 1931 and whose company mass-produced the black uniforms of the SS, the brown uniforms of the SA, and the mixed brown and black ones for the Hitler Youth — made in part by forced labor. The company apologized in 2011 for using the labor of 140 French and 40 Polish prisoners. Boss’s imprisoned workers would have sewn the Totenkopf or “Death’s Head” symbol onto the garments intended for concentration camp guards, though Boss was not responsible for the design. After the war he was found to have been an “activist, supporter and beneficiary” of the Third Reich. On appeal, though, he was ruled to have been merely a “fellow traveler” of the regime.  

In a 1975 essay, “Fascinating Fascism,” Susan Sontag coined the phrase “beauty freak” to describe Hitler’s favorite director, Leni Riefenstahl. Sontag means it as something of a compliment — that in movies like Triumph of the Will and Olympia, Riefenstahl was acting not as a “horrid propagandist” but instead as an almost autistic auteur in search of the perfect shot. Fascist art, Sontag writes, “glorifies surrender; it exalts mindlessness: it glamorizes death.”

Sontag reasoned that “most people who are turned on by SS uniforms are not signifying approval of what the Nazis did,” as if the fashion could be detached from the fascism. In truth, Riefenstahl was hardly ambiguous. In 1937, she gushed that “Hitler is the greatest man who ever lived. He truly is without fault, so simple and at the same time possessed of masculine strength.” One of her films used extras sourced from a concentration camp. They were sent to Auschwitz when the movie wrapped. 

A half-century ago, Sontag predicted that a “revival of Nazi art, following the revivals of Art Nouveau, Pre-Raphaelite painting, and Art Deco, is most unlikely. The painting and sculpture are not just sententious; they are astonishingly meager as art. But precisely these qualities invite people to look at Nazi art with knowing and sniggering detachment, as a form of pop art.” A harder question is presented when the art is rich but the artist is rancid.  

Galliano, then, appears to belong to the tribe of beauty freaks and antisemitic art monsters that includes Riefenstahl, Chanel, and Kanye West, not to mention composer Richard Wagner, poet Ezra Pound, and Voltaire  — and, some might say, Sontag herself, who in an infamous piece appeared to justify the 9/11 attacks as “an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions.”

The raising up of Galliano comes three years after Karl Lagerfeld, who once declared that “no one wants to see curvy women,” was honored at the 2023 Gala. Fashion, it seems, has few untainted heroes to choose from. That honor, though, was posthumous. It also came before the Costume Institute took over prime real estate at the Met. In May, it ascended from the basement to the Condé M. Nast Galleries, adjacent to the Great Hall — the former location of the museum gift shop. 

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In honoring Galliano, Wintour is taking something of a gamble with an event that has become a gilded goose. The Costume Institute has become crucial to the Met’s bottom line. Last year’s Gala brought in $31 million. The museum’s most popular show in history was the Costume Institute’s “Heavenly Bodies,” in 2018, which was seen by 1.7 million people. That edged out 1978’s “Treasures of Tutankhamun,” which was viewed by 1.4 million visitors.

The Met contends that “rather than presenting a conventional narrative of disgrace and redemption, the gallery will examine how memory, experience, cultural values, and historical circumstances continually reshape the reception of a designer’s work.” It could be, though, that the old parabola of grace and redemption, as hoary as it is, remains the best shape to map the choice to honor Galliano, who was raised in a devout Catholic family and whose work often bears the imprint of the Church’s couture. 

The Met originally intended to honor Galliano in 2024, but postponed the plan in the wake of the Hamas massacre on Oct. 7, 2023. Those sensitivities appear to have dulled in the years since, even as antisemitism against Jews in New York continues to rise. The New York Police Department reports that antisemitic incidents increased by more than 8% this year, and that more than half of all hate crimes are perpetrated against Jews, who constitute just 10% of the population. Antisemitism is a fashion that is very much back in style. 

In a 2023 documentary, John Galliano: High & Low, Wintour explains that “it isn’t often that you meet a great designer. But when you saw what John was doing, you realized that he was one of them.” Perhaps it is as simple as that — the rules are different for the great and glittering, even if their sins and prejudices are no less ugly than ours. Or perhaps a line ought to be drawn when it comes to the world’s oldest hatred.

Sontag concluded that “Riefenstahl’s current de-Nazification and vindication as indomitable priestess of the beautiful — as a filmmaker and, now, as a photographer — do not augur well for the keenness of current abilities to detect the fascist longings in our midst.” Wintour, a lioness in winter, is set to test again if the beautiful ought to bleach the baleful. 

Few other observers have kept their counsel in the run-up to Aston Villa’s home tie with Maccabi Tel Aviv. Pundits have drawn attention to the Maccabi fans’ previous misbehavior, others have raised concerns that the same fans will be unsafe in what is seen as a partisan city. Most have agreed that the match would not be untroubled if Maccabi fans turned up. Seeing political opportunity, in September, a local MP, the pro-Gaza independent Ayoub Khan, called for the match to be canceled. Then, amid rising concern, local policing bureaucrats banned Maccabi fans from attending the game — citing safety reasons. Amid commentariat fury at perceived antisemitism, Keir Starmer called the ban “the wrong decision”, and his government said it would find resources with which to get fans to the match safely. Birmingham was suddenly the focus of a furious row about ethnic strongholds and ancient hatreds.

Small wonder, then, that Villa Park has also become a magnet to provocateurs, with the pro-Gaza former mayoral candidate Akhmed Yakoob, a self-promoting lawyer who faces a trial over money laundering, holding court in a Villa shirt. Inevitably, Tommy Robinson, too, has hinted he might pitch up for the game. But while the political class has been trying to play this game to its own advantage, the residents are touchy. It wasn’t just the security guards. “Mate, I’m not speaking about that,” said one man on a smoke break near the stadium.

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Birmingham Perry Barr, Khan’s constituency, is particularly economically vulnerable, with people struggling to put food on the table; the city’s financial woes, meanwhile, have left rats picking over the piled-up bin bags. But such quotidian issues have been drowned out by Khan and his ilk allowing the match to become the platform for their Gaza-sympathetic stance. They’ll feel supported institutionally, since UEFA has recently considered banning Israeli teams from competition, and the UN concluded that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza. This does play locally, too. Aston has a large Muslim population: over 73% in 2021. And, according to a recent poll, one in four British Muslims rates Israel-Palestine as their most important election issue. Venture down the main Aston High Street and this would seem to be reflected in the sea of anti-Zionist signs and thickets of pro-Palestine heraldry. But Kefentse Dennis, a former local councilor with a pro-Gaza stance, worries that this increased flagging isn’t entirely local or organic. Activists are imposing their politics on the locals, he suggests. “Food on the table is more important here,” he tells me. And the match has become about more than football because Khan, as he sees it, is part of “a political class”.

All told, then, the area is more complex, than some far-off commentators, might assert. Shopkeepers of South Asian heritage run the off-licenses, takeaways and shops that service fans. “I love the football guys,” beams one in a Villa-branded takeaway. And though Palestinian flags fluttered by the Witton Arms, the old-school Villa boozer, broadly the fans think politics and football should be separate.

In any case, it’s not just Palestine flags you notice when walking around Aston. There are Union flags and St George’s crosses too — something that national reporting has overlooked. The whole flagging trend started in the poorer, whiter suburbs of South Birmingham and while it could be a sign of rising sectarianism here, it is also true that flags of any stripe, Palestine or St George, are becoming symbols of disillusionment. “People are sick and tired,” Dennis told me. “They don’t get to feel pride at being British,” he adds. “Flags have given them something to do.”

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Dennis also contends that the reputation of the Maccabi fan base complicates the allegations of antisemitism. In fact, many in the local Jewish community supported the ban along with the police. While it is true that, since October 7, Jew hatred has soared across the West Midlands, it is unavoidable that the Maccabi fans have previous. Notwithstanding the clashes in Amsterdam, in Israel, police have recently had to intervene in their matches. Not long after the fans were banned from attending the game in Aston, the police called off a Maccabi match in Tel Aviv after violent rioting. You might forgive the police for being cautious — just two years ago, almost 50 officers were injured in clashes with visiting Polish soccer fans. They’re aware of the potential on-the-ground danger for both locals, themselves and potential visiting Jewish fans.

In the end, though, it was Maccabi themselves who chose not to bring fans. Late last month, the club said it would not accept its allocation of away tickets. In a statement, it said that “a toxic atmosphere has been created which makes the safety of our fans wishing to attend very much in doubt”. Closer to home, Ruth Jacobs, a representative for the Jewish Representative Council for Birmingham and the West Midlands, confirmed that the Jewish community were kept in the loop regarding police thinking on the match but the incident has been “frustrating, irritating and sad”. “It should have never come to this,” she says.

With or without Maccabi fans there, the police will have work to do —  over 700 officers, will be drafted in. Hours before the match, a pro-Palestine protest is set to take place, with demands for Israeli teams to be banned from international soccer competitions altogether. And local pro-Palestine activists have voiced concern that “bored, masked youths” might decide to cause trouble. “There are worries that this then confirms the pre-emptive media narrative,” Dennis added.

Perhaps for that reason, this is now a city on the defensive. Ayoub Khan, chatty last month, refused to speak to me. Days before the match, his predecessor, Khalid Mahmood was at first happy to speak, and then simply ghosted me. The police didn’t want to get caught up in politics again.

I understand why locals might have a distaste for probing journalists. Muslims, Jews, and Aston as a whole have all been used to justify grand narratives of some sort. Nuanced safety concerns, the truth of community and grinding economic realism are secondary in angry national debates.

Indeed, poorer North Birmingham suburbs have all proved useful for the type of media criticism we’ve seen building around the Villa match. Robert Jenrick turned up nearby, claiming no white faces could be seen. In nearby Erdington, a majority-white area, a Telegraph reporter found a community that didn’t feel like a community because, as she told it, of rising migrant numbers. Damned be the facts of the matter.

But this national weaponizing of local issues has already dealt a powerful blow to a place which will be left reeling long after the final whistle is blown and Westminster loses interest. Politicos in London won’t have to deal with the reverberating tensions, but locals will.

In the days after Hamas’s grisly assaults of October 7, 2023, which left almost 1,200 dead, including over 800 civilians, Americans backed Israel’s muscular counterattack by 50% to 45%. But Israel’s ceaseless bombardment of Gaza has left at least 50,000 dead — most of them civilians, including 12,000 children under 12. Precise numbers are hard to come by, and Israel does not permit reporters to enter the war zone. A late-July Gallup poll found that Americans now oppose Israel’s military operation by almost two-to-one.

What is most interesting about this is the partisan skew. Whereas Republican support for the Israeli war effort has remained steady at 71%, Democratic support has collapsed, from 36% to just 8%. This matters: the Democratic Party wins about 70% of the votes of American Jews, and has been their political home since they began arriving as immigrants in the 19th century. It is under pressure to become an anti-Israel party. Under the influence of Donald Trump, the party is moving Left. And opposition to Israel has been a winner for Left parties in the West. La France Insoumise, the continent’s most anti-Israel major party, won the most seats in France’s legislative elections last year. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the party’s leader, is France’s most uncompromising critic of Israel. Jeremy Corbyn, who occupies a similar spot on the British political landscape, came within a handful of seats of becoming prime minister in 2017, and now appears to be enjoying a revival.

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In July, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders forced a vote to block shipments of offensive weapons to Israel. Though it failed, it did win a solid majority (27-17) of Democrats. The situation may remind veteran Democrats of the crisis they faced after October 2002, when the party’s presidential hopefuls swallowed their misgivings and made the safe-looking vote to follow George W. Bush into the Iraq War. By the 2004 presidential election, that war had gone badly wrong, and Vermont governor Howard Dean briefly appeared likely to win the Democratic nomination on the strength of his anti-war position alone.

In 2008, Democrats reached for a candidate whom obscurity had protected from the need to vote on Iraq — Barack Obama, who at the time had been a state legislator in Illinois. In this light, the stunning emergence in New York City of Zohran Mamdani, now the odds-on favorite to become mayor of the largest Jewish city on the planet, could be a historic development. Like Obama, Mamdani is a state legislator; unlike him, he has backed the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, which in the United States represents the outermost edge of anti-Israel activism.

In some ways, the grounds for the American shift on Israel resemble those elsewhere in the West. Time has passed. Israelis rightly insist that Zionism dates from the 19th century, and Jewish ties to the Holy Land are ancient. But the world’s willingness to countenance Israel’s extreme measures of self-defense has everything to do with the murder of Europe’s Jews during the Second World War. It remains a lesson and a landmark. But it has passed from living memory. The media, for its part, has changed. Today public opinion is built out of on-the-spot clips from Gaza, and when Israel bars foreign correspondents, public opinion smells a rat.

In other ways, the American disillusionment with Israel is different from the rest of the West’s. No article on the Israel-Hamas conflict has done more to influence American opinion in recent months than Brown University historian Omer Bartov’s judgment in the pages of the New York Times that Israel was committing genocide. Bartov’s influence comes from his background as an Israeli war veteran, as the son of a major Israeli writer, and as a man whose distinguished scholarly career has focused on genocide in general and, in particular, on how soldiers and statesmen are led astray in the heat of battle. In a more recent interview, with the journalist Dan Wakin, Bartov tried to describe the sadness he felt in contemplating how Israel had squandered its moral capital. “It took a long time,” he said, “to build up the kind of support — in many ways, love — for Israel that exists in the United States.”

He is right. Americans may not think this is Israel’s finest hour. But they are far from thinking ill of it on a fundamental level. These fond feelings are, quite naturally, reciprocated. The main determinant of Israel’s ability to survive is its relationship with the United States: military, commercial, diplomatic and even legal. Imagine, for instance, the effect on Israel if the US were to reassert the presumption against dual citizenship that is still in its lawbooks, but has been allowed to lapse since the end of the Cold War.

Trump’s second presidential term has lent a note of paradox to the recent American turn against Israel. He is a straightforward champion of the country, his support for Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu subject to only two qualifications: first, a lingering resentment (reportedly) at Netanyahu’s having recognized Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory with undue haste; second, an unwillingness to be associated with bad TV — hence his pushback against Netanyahu for pooh-poohing allegations of famine in the Gaza Strip. Trump insisted that it was “real starvation stuff”.

Even leaving aside his willingness to risk war to join Israel’s war against Iran, Trump is as loyal a friend as Israel has. But his program benefits Israel only in a confused and contradictory way. At the center of Trumpism is the President’s project to liberate people from civil-rights law in its late, decadent “woke” stage. Twenty-first-century America turned tyrannical when progressive regulators and litigators came to realize that local governments, large corporations and private citizens could be threatened with lawsuits for almost anything they said about minorities or women, and anything that left the impression of a “hostile environment”. Trump has eliminated large parts of this system, especially as regards corporate America. He has ordered experienced civil-rights litigators in the Justice Department to stand down.

And he has paid a lot of attention to Jews. This makes electoral sense. As long as the Democratic Party was built “intersectionally” out of an ever-growing list of underprivileged beneficiaries of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Jews — for all their historic attachment to the party — have been a poor fit within it. That is because they are a rich and successful group, and the main diagnostic tool of civil-rights law is essentially a race-based conspiracy theory: if Group X has more wealth, income or academic honors than Group Y, some hidden plot, somewhere, must be to blame.

But when it comes to universities, Trump has not dismantled the powerful disciplinary apparatus of woke. He has harnessed it to his own ends, and he has done so by focusing on antisemitism — which has not been a problem in American universities since the middle of the last century. What has happened on campus is an increasing number of anti-Israel demonstrations. Trump has forced on universities an irresponsibly vague definition of antisemitism, created by the International Holocaust Remembrance Association, which assimilates many kinds of statements against Israel to run-of-the-mill antisemitism.

Trump has prompted universities to police certain genuinely disruptive campus protests — for instance, the takeover of Butler Library at Columbia University last May by 70 students who set up a “Basel al-Araj Popular University” while students were studying for finals. In a democracy with total freedom of speech, “activism” can be a way of introducing an element of intimidation into public life. The non-academic public often views American universities as places that mainly undermine the political system and only secondarily offer an education.

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On the other hand, the mildness of anti-Israel feeling among the non-academic public may in retrospect have been tied up with the de facto censorship of woke. When people speak of an Israel “lobby”, they most often mean powerful campaign-finance organizations such as AIPAC, to which many congressmen are beholden. But the debate has probably been more shaped by such groups as the Anti-Defamation League, which greet anti-Israel sentiment with organized pressure campaigns — and by a plethora of litigators, advocacy groups and unaffiliated pro-Israel campaigners.

The political scientist John Mearsheimer has credibly alleged that The Atlantic was too frightened to publish an article he co-wrote two decades ago about the Israel lobby. In the end, the story wound up being published in the London Review of Books, and a book followed in its wake. But during the high tide of woke civil-rights law, even a feebly substantiated allegation that a writer or broadcaster was a racist or antisemite placed the outlets that employed them in fear of lawsuits, boycotts and other harassment. In the early days of Trump’s second term, such fears have waned, and with them the power of pro-Israel pressure groups.

Public skepticism about Israel, meanwhile, has waxed. Certain comfortable arguments (“Israel’s fight is the fight of Western civilization”) and certain familiar solutions (the “two-state solution”) have grown contentious when we weren’t looking. The tendency of Netanyahu’s government and its defenders not to rebut criticism but simply to calumniate critics is bringing diminishing returns. As a young diplomat in the mid-Eighties, Netanyahu himself worked magic on ABC’s Nightline with bravura attacks on Israel’s foes. But he is stuck in that time. Calling starvation in Gaza a “bold-faced lie”, accusing Emmanuel Macron of “siding with Hamas” for urging an end to Israel’s blockade of aid — the tactics that once helped Netanyahu inhibit criticism may now inflame it.

Regarding American public opinion, Israel is in a delicate position. Trump’s return has made speech more free in most respects — but by no means all. For a decade now, Trumpism’s core belief has been that the Washington establishment’s priorities are a giant elite hustle. Israel has been one such priority, and it is due for a cynical reassessment. But Trump’s role as Israel’s most stalwart defender changes its symbolism and its stature — enhancing it in some contexts, detracting in others. Israel is a main target of populists. It is also populism itself.

Israel’s position in the affections of Americans is for the most part unchanged and secure. On the other hand, there is that matter of the anti-Israel activist who is set to become mayor of New York. Should Mamdani govern successfully, he could become a model for a new generation of Democratic politicians. No less important, Democrats always stand a chance in presidential elections. Taken together, that leaves Israel only one or two bad breaks away from a downgraded relationship with its indispensable backer.

In Silver Linings Playbook, two very attractive and very mentally ill people (Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper) find redemption and love through the power of taking part in a dance competition. (Good news, people with bipolar disorder! No need to take your lithium anymore, you can just embrace the power of the tango.) And finally, most of all, in Girl, Interrupted, there’s Angelina Jolie, barely capable of feeding herself but still able to style her sexily disheveled hair and whack on her smudged eyeliner perfectly. These characters are, the movies all suggest, not crazy like the homeless man who shouts in front of the supermarket. They are simply too sensitive for the cold, tin-eared world.

Some images of poor mental health from my own experience, when I lived in various psychiatric facilities in the Nineties, where I was being treated for anorexia nervosa: the black woman who walked around shouting racist obscenities all day. The man who came into the TV room, dropped his trousers, and started masturbating (to Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan, of all people, so you knew he was really crazy). The woman who pulled out all the hairs in her eyebrows and eyelashes. These people did not look sensitive. They looked ugly and sad.

Which brings me to Kanye West, now known as Ye, and probably the most famous mentally ill person in the world right today. West’s mental state has been in freefall for years and he has been talking about his bipolar disorder for a while. His manic behaviour goes off and on, and right now, it is very much on.

This latest episode started with his fashion show in Paris for his label Yeezy, for which he and his models wore t-shirts emblazoned with the logo White Lives Matter. “This is a God thing,” he informed the audience. When Vogue’s global fashion editor, Gabriella Karefa-Johnson, criticised the show, West mocked her shoes on social media. Things spiralled from there, with — and I’m condensing here, for all of our sakes — West posting messages in which he accused Puff Daddy/Puff Diddy/Diddy of being controlled by Jewish people, and then he accused his ex-wife Kim Kardashian of hiding his kids from him. He followed these rants by tweeting: “when I wake up I’m going death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE.” Because Jews, he wrote, “black ball anyone who opposes your agenda”.

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The condemnation has been universal. West’s attacks on Karefa-Johnson prompted the model Gigi Hadid to write on his Instagram “You wish u had a percentage of her intellect” and called him “a bully and a joke”. Many are talking about him being “cancelled”, whatever that even means when we’re talking about one of the most famous artists in the world. West’s former friend John Legend and — somewhat randomly — Jamie Lee Curtis have reprimanded West for his antisemitic comments. West, it is generally agreed, needs to be held accountable for his actions.

There has been an enormous amount of talk about mental health over the past two decades. Back when I was in hospital, having mental health issues was embarrassing, as though you were some kind of Jason Vorhees figure from the Friday the 13th movies, or locked in a cell with a muzzle over your face like Hannibal Lecter. Partly thanks to movies like the ones listed above, and partly thanks to better education, things have swung very much the other way.

Now, people talk openly about taking “mental health days” and being “triggered” by unpleasant comments or images, demanding that people make allowances for them and their fragile mind. Twentysomethings talk anxiously about “burn out” and it’s the rare professional athlete who at this point hasn’t talked about his mental health issues — usually anxiety, addiction or depression. Mental illness has become a kind of identity for some people, and it’s a fine line these days between being open about your problems and fetishising them. To discuss your mental health proves you are in touch with your feelings. That you are revealing your true glowing self, beneath the layers society forces on you. That you are self-aware. Sensitive. And special.

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Whatever anyone else wants to say about West, no one can accuse him of not being self-aware about his problems. He raps about “my bipolar shit” and he let himself be filmed having a full manic episode in the three-part documentary Jeen-Yuhs, directed by West’s friend and occasional collaborator, Coodie. I cannot recommend this documentary highly enough, whether you’re a West fan or not, because I’ve never before seen a movie that so clearly charts what a descent into a full-blown mental health crisis looks like.

In the first part, we see West as a young, happy and ambitious producer, desperate for a record deal. In the second part, we see him attain unimaginable success. And then in the third part, his beloved mother Donda dies and West becomes increasingly erratic — hanging out with Donald Trump, talking about running for president — until in one scene, he becomes so manic that Coodie, devastated at the state of his friend, puts down the camera, and turns it off.

This documentary was released earlier this year, illustrating with total clarity how poor mental health has corroded West’s mind and life. And yet despite that, and despite all the alleged hyperawareness of mental health these days, there is a bewildering resistance to seeing West’s behaviour as a symptom of his illness. Rather, people seem determined to see it as a reflection of him as a person.

I’m Jewish, but when I read West’s posts I didn’t feel offended. I just felt sad that an artist so talented is now so clearly out of his tree. Maybe West really does think Diddy is being controlled by Jewish people. Or maybe that reflects his true feelings as much as that man in hospital was genuinely turned on by Richard and Judy. “Being bipolar doesn’t make you racist,” people shout on Twitter. Not necessarily, but poor mental health makes you say a lot of crazy stuff, because it’s not about being sexily impetuous or soulfully sensitive. It’s about being out of your fucking mind. And I get that’s not special or sparkly, but then, tuberculosis is a lot less pretty than some of those Victorian novels made it sound. Illness sucks.

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Before I went into hospital, I was terrified of a homeless man who hung out near my school and would shout at me about Jesus while I waited for the bus. But I harboured an intense fascination with women like Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf — the usual folks overly intense teenage girls tend to be drawn towards. After I left hospital, I realised I’d been making a false distinction, between Good Mental Illness and Bad Mental Illness. Good Mental Illness was the kind I could fetishise, memorising Plath’s last poem, pouring over Woolf’s late letters. Bad Mental Illness was the kind I crossed the street to avoid, because it smelled bad. And yet, mental illness destroyed all these people’s lives, no matter how talented or eloquent. You can’t fetishise one and condemn the other.

Maybe it’s because West is so wealthy and famous that people are unwilling to make the allowances for him that they demand for themselves when they take a mental health day. He doesn’t look the part, because only photogenic teens and twentysomethings with good eyeliner suffer from mental illness, not egocentric fortysomethings who behave like arseholes.

Yet I would bet that many of the same people who are demanding West be held accountable for his actions would be horrified at the idea of sending a mentally ill person who commits a terrible crime to prison. He should be sent to a psychiatric hospital, they would say. That is correct, and the same is true of West. He doesn’t need punishment — he needs help.

Indeed, their suggestions fairly regularly force me to re-evaluate, if not their intelligence, at least their taste. “Love me, love my dog” is the law of life; and how sad it is to ask how one enjoyed my gift, and to perceive not only their lying endorsement, but the, perhaps preferable, fib that they had read it. I enjoy throwing books in the trash, as I enjoy mixing the various articles the environmentally conscious suggest should be separated for more easy recycling. In 1914, Carl Sandburg saw “the painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys”, and lately I have seen the various separated recyclables re-mixed in the dumptruck.

But we both survived the trauma. Sandburg until 1967, and myself, to this very morning of writing.

My native Chicago built some rather tacky Urban Renewal Housing on the North Side in 1960. The construction was cheap, and the style Talentless Architect, Friday Afternoon; but it was to be dedicated to Affordable Housing for — supposedly — The Worthy. Their identity would be determined, then as now, by the whim of the bureaucrats. The worthy here turned out, predictably, to be the well-to-do who knew someone at City Hall. Where do we not find human perfidy? It certainly is found in the book which is my subject.

It is Kingsblood Royal, written by Sinclair Lewis in 1947. He, like most Western literature, is forgotten today, and it’s a shame, as he wrote some very good and very important books. They, at least, were important to me, as they hipped me to literature.

I used to cut school in the Fifties to go read. I would spend two or three hours in the Public Library Reading Room browsing the open stacks. What a delight; there, as with the old, independent bookstores, one could follow one’s nose without the guidance of a machine electronic or political. In any case, I, 13-years-old, came across a book called Main Street (1920) by Sinclair Lewis and read until I laid it down. It was his breakthrough novel about the dreary life of a Minnesota Town, and it sounded just like my youth in and outside Chicago.

His Babbitt (1922) is the story of a real estate Booster — the progenitor both of Death of a Salesman and Glengarry Glen Ross. The books are masterpieces. I will not suggest you read them, in the hope that you may. And he, a most prolific gent, wrote a bit of trash, some okay fiction, and a few outliers. Outliers include It Can’t Happen Here (1935), the story of Fascism’s arrival in America, and Kingsblood Royal (1947).

This is a race story. It is not the race porn of today’s literature-adjacent plaints of mistreatment or avowals of white guilt. No. It is the story of a returning white WWII Vet, a rising cashier at a bank, who lives in the country-club set. The set takes up a lot of the members’ time drinking and dissing the servants. Their servants are all black, and their dish is about how lazy, offensive, sub-human and so on black people are, and how they are getting too big for their britches. Neil Kingsblood, our hero, agrees, and joins in the jollity.

But Neil, lamed in the War, can no longer engage in his beloved tennis; and, looking for a hobby, he takes up genealogy. What does he find? He finds that his great-great-grandfather was black.

What to do?

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How fear consumed American theatre

By David Mamet

Note, this is 1947, where a mixed-race couple, walking down a street in the South or the North did so at the risk of their lives; where the entire country was Jim Crow, and blacks, who’d been hired in the war effort were fired at the war’s conclusion. And so on. Not that long ago.

Should he “confess his taint”, he and his entire family will be ruined. He now wonders if the white community in which he lives can discern his black blood; as, indeed, they claim: “I was raised in the South and I can spot a dinge with only one drop of Negro Blood.”

He meets a returning black aviator, a combat pilot and Captain, who is now working in a barbershop. They begin chatting, one vet to another, and Neil, little by little, gets drawn into the black community. He is invited to the aviator’s home, where he is treated with chill reserve. But when he blurts out that he is himself “a Negro” he is enfolded in compassion and love. He comes to realise that blacks are not arrogant or standoffish, but necessarily self-protective among whites, as he is among blacks. But as a black among blacks he finds community.

He falls in love with a black girl, who congratulates him upon being black. He makes the truest friends he’s known since the camaraderie of the war. The book becomes that love story of every new convert. In his decision, his new friends commiserate and advise him to continue to pass, as what good would it do to come out? (The phrase Lewis uses.)

But he hears his new friends, and blacks in general, abused and dehumanised at a stag party, and speaks up for them. His country club cronies start to look sideways at him, and one uses that phrase, well-known to my youth: “what are you, a n—r lover?” He blurts out that he is a “negro”.

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The last American aristocrat

By Phil Klay

Well, his family turns on him, he loses his job, he is bullied and arrested, his home is taken from him, under a “restrictive covenant” he signed, affirming that he was Caucasian.

Is this polemical, forgotten book important? It is important to me. Here’s why: It is a book about delusion.

Anthony Trollope, a humane and compassionate author, wrote of one of his characters: “When one knew he was a Jew one saw he was a Jew.” This is the wise writer unconsciously revealing delusion. It made sense to mid-Victorian readers who, like Trollope, were unaware their consciousness had been warped into absurdity by prejudice. For the phrase cannot actually mean anything other than: “Jews do not look or act differently from Christians; but I am led to believe so, by their label.”

Neil Kingsblood, an accepted, respected, accomplished, white member of his white community, when revealed he had “one drop of Negro blood”, was found to possess all the unfortunate (and imaginary) aspects of blackness. The accidental revelation of his ancestry led him to the discovery of a community madness, of which he was, previously, unaware, and in which he happily participated.

Will some people today find the book objectionable? Yes. That they will is evidence of another community sickness, that of our own advanced time: that sensitive matters can only be treated by those claiming to be victims, and then only by their indictment of their supposed oppressors. (I will name whites, straights, conservatives, Christians — ingathered into that accommodating portmanteau: “Haters.”)

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Designated Criminal

By David Mamet

Books about black-white relations (as opposed to books about, for example, being black: Native Son, Invisible Man, Passing) can only be written by an author belonging to one of the two groups. The group to which he does not belong will assuredly find humour and likely insult in this author’s ignorance. But what is one to do?

The only book featuring Jews and written by a Christian which I, a Jew, did not find ludicrous or enraging, was Ivanhoe. Everyone else gets it wrong, including George Eliot and her Daniel Deronda.

The Christian authors portraying Jews are like the Hollywood moguls who (with the exception of their casting of Paul Newman, a Jew, in Exodus) always cast a Christian as the Jew because, supposedly, to cast an “actual” Jew would outrage Christian sensibilities.

Returning to American Literature, here are two condign books. The first is Gentleman’s Agreement (Laura Z. Hobson, 1947). Here, a Christian journalist becomes aware of anti-Semitism, and sets out to investigate.

He goes to this and that hotel and restaurant, and tries to receive service as Mr Goldberg and is told to buzz off. His family and his community turn against him, and so on, the mixture as in Kingsblood Royal. In a bellylaff scene, he upbraids his Jewish Secretary, for being insufficiently Jewish, in using an anti-Semitic phrase. It was made as a film with Gregory Peck and won all kinds of awards for the Humanity of His Performance. Joe Mankiewicz said that its moral is you should always be kind to a Jew, as he might turn out to be a Christian.

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Will we escape our age of failure?

By Martin Gurri

Our lives, yours and mine, are full of sanctimony; in fact, a grand tool of self-diagnosis is recognition of the warm joy we take in sententiousness, and its big brother, righteousness. It is a lead-pipe cinch that these sugar-coat complicity.

A second book: In 1961, John Howard Griffin, a white man, took chemicals to darken his skin and travelled two months in the Jim Crow South, writing articles for Sepia about the plight of Southern blacks. These, published in book form as Black Like Me, record his actual experience of the fictive journey of Neil Kingsblood.

Sinclair Lewis’s story might have ended with Kingsblood’s discovery that he had been given the wrong genealogical chart, and that, after all, he did not have that drop of tainted “Negro Blood”. The end, therefore, which perhaps did not need further clarification, would have been that race is a delusion. As indeed it is. Its contemporary pre-eminence to the exclusion of all other human characteristics is our current-day sanctimony, as false and wicked as bussing, segregation, and Jim Crow; and, like them, a mantra in repetition of which one can seek escape from rational thought.

Reading seems to be my hobby; and, as a hobbyist, I am delighted by discovery of the obscure. The majority of the books beloved by their time are trash. Some are rediscovered and embraced, most are, blessedly forgotten. Some few have entertainment or educational value for those with a scholarly bent. Kingsblood Royal is a smorgasbord of the above.

When we arrived last week, we considered a rehearsal, making it into a game. How many times have parents tried to shield their children from the full reality of war by turning it into a game? As the rockets begin their downward trajectory, falling God knows where, we would be somewhere underneath singing “run rabbit, run rabbit, run, run, run”.

And what have we forgotten? Blankets, Ventolin, Lego Spiderman? No, forget everything. When the sirens go, you just run. Or choose to stay in bed and console yourself with the statistical improbability of a hit, or cower in the corridor and hope for the best. But cowering in the corridor was not the reason the boys have their Israeli passports. Jews hiding in the house from those who would murder them is too freighted with memory. No, we will let the boys sleep even if the sirens sound. Fuck Islamic Jihad.

“But what about…?” Here it comes. Even the people who mean well can’t help but qualify their sympathy with reference to the children of those firing the rockets. Of course, I inwardly weep for the children of Gaza who have been killed in this latest exchange. But I also feel little but contempt for those who want me to accept this acknowledgment as a condition of their concern. It is estimated that in the last few days, more of Gaza’s children have been killed by the clowns of Islamic Jihad and their misfiring rockets than by Israeli action. Israel has the Iron Dome, the fantastically successful anti-missile system that meant 96% of rockets from Gaza were shot down before they reached their intended target. A home was hit in Sderot, a wall damaged in Netanya. But beyond minor injuries, no Israelis were hurt. The Iranians, who fund Palestinian Islamic Jihad, do not get a lot for their money.

But still, Islamic Jihad has never been interested in peace. Founded in the Eighties, they seek the violent eradication of Israel, insisting on “the jihad solution and the martydom style as the only choice for liberation”. Their modus operandi is to deliberately target civilians rather than military targets — on public buses, in restaurants. Islamic Jihad exists to kill Jews. And Israel, which exists to protect Jews, has absolutely every moral right to defend itself against them.

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Why Bishops should be political

By Giles Fraser

Attacking their leadership — the people planning to kill Jews — is what protecting Jews means in practice. But in practice, it also involves complex moral judgments of the sort Islamic Jihad would never dream of making. Yes, targeting murderous antisemites who hide out in heavily built-up areas inevitably involves risks to the civilian population. And I believe the Israelis do their best to avoid these because it is absolutely not in their interest to kill Palestinian civilians and stir up more hatred against them.

But some refuse to accept any of this. Former Labour MP Claudia Webbe’s hot take on the situation was: “15 Palestinian children murdered by Israel over the weekend”. Murdered? Seriously? Murdered means that children were being deliberately targeted. This is a lie, but it is of a piece with a whole crazy gamut of posturing that takes place around the Palestinian cause.

During last weekend’s Brighton Pride, the Palestinian flag was waved about, despite the fact that being gay in the Palestinian Territories is punishable by up to 10 years in prison. Over in Iran, they hang gay men. By contrast, last month’s Tel Aviv Pride was supported by 170,000 Israelis.

But it’s not just liberal Europeans who succumb to this ridiculous double-think. Over in Mea She’arim, Jerusalem’s ultra-Orthodox neighbourhood, they also fly the Palestinian flag. Many of its residents think the state of Israel is a secular blasphemy, with Zionism impertinently doing the work that is properly reserved for God’s Messiah. So they do what they can to rile the Zionist imposter. This despite the fact that the Rabbi most responsible for anti-Zionist sentiment amongst the Haredim — Joel Teitelbaum — was himself saved from the Nazis by Zionists. Indeed, more Jews have been saved by the head-covering of the IDF’s Iron Kipa (in Hebrew, Kippat Barzel) than by the furry ones of the Satmar Hasidism.

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But despite all this nonsense, there is some hope to be gleaned from the military action of the last few days. Most importantly, Hamas didn’t join in. Hamas are rivals to Islamic Jihad in the Palestinian Territories, the latter of which isn’t engaged politically with the everyday life of Palestinians. Of course, Hamas offered their verbal support and it may well be that they were just not sufficiently re-armed after their last pasting to do much to help. But perhaps there is another explanation.

Whisper it, but there could be more going on in Gaza than bomb-making and tunnel-digging. There are now 14,000 work permits in place that allow Gazans to work in Israel. Thousands more are in the offing, with the Israeli government likely to reward Hamas for their military inactivity. The political side of Hamas knows how valuable these jobs are to the economy.

During lockdown, for instance, Gaza saw a very significant increase in the number of little sewing circles that supply cheap fashion items to the Israelis, whose textile manufacturing industry has all but collapsed as their economy re-focused around hi-tech start-ups. And the fact that Islamic Jihad has had such a disastrous few days — its leadership eliminated, its missiles falling on their own people — only underlines the fact that, on the ground, economic activity is a far more sustainable road map to co-existence than cheap rockets from Iran. Hamas remain committed to the elimination of the Zionist entity, but perhaps at some point, even for them, jobs are more important than their murderous ideology.

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Does Prince Andrew deserve forgiveness?

By Giles Fraser

Gaza remains a place of real human misery, of course. Millions of people crammed into an area of just 140 square miles, often with no water or electricity for hours on end. But the Israelis have no interest in making matters worse for them. Indeed, quite the opposite. Yes, they will defend themselves — pre-emptively sometimes — from the threat that comes from Gaza. But this is because no country in the world would sit by as their neighbour prepared to fire on their citizens. That is probably why Ukraine sent a message of solidarity to the Israelis over the weekend. As President Zelenskyy himself has said, Ukraine will become “a big Israel” after the war with Russia.

Up to a million Jews were murdered by Nazi Einsatzgruppen units in Ukraine during the Second World War. Israel exists as a kind of sacred vow to stop this ever happening again. As a Jew himself, Zelenskyy understands this. As do my family who had great-grandparents murdered over there. This, by the way, is the right use of the word “murdered”. And it’s why my boys are citizens of this extraordinary, beautiful, troubled and defiant country. The sirens remind my family that Jews continue to be targeted. But they don’t put us off being here. In fact, they have quite the opposite effect: they remind us how much we need this place to exist. And why it is worth fighting for.

But recently moving house has posed something of a challenge to the Chelsea love in my household. We now live a stone’s throw from Brentford’s new stadium. And my boys have decided — perhaps to rile their father — that this is where their loyalty now lies. Local, family-friendly, plucky underdogs come good, and not owned by a KGB asset — I see the attraction.

Last month, I went to see my team get smashed by Real Madrid. The man sitting in front of me spent the whole game making hand gestures at the away fans. He hardly watched the football. It was as though he was only there for the loyalty, that order of belonging that is premised on a strong sense of them and us. He didn’t watch as Real striker Karim Benzema produced a masterclass of finishing. Chelsea was his family, his whole life I imagine. As his face contorted in rage at the celebration of the away fans, I began to reflect on what a terrible club I support.

I have always known we are a rotten lot, corrupted by bad money. Our owner made his billions in the wild east of perestroika. Despite having gone to prison in 1992 for the theft of government property, in 1995 he was allowed to buy half of an oil company for $100 million in a rigged auction. Abramovich has admitted in court that he paid billions of dollars in bribes to acquire Sibneft. Ten years after he bought it, he sold it back to the Russian government for $13 billion.

Abramovich’s co-investor in Sibneft was Boris Berezovsky. Abramovich and Berezovsky fell out, with Abramovich’s friend, Vladimir Putin, siding with Abramovich. Berezovsky survived a number of assassination attempts by Russian agents. Several of his friends and associates, like Alexander Litvinenko, were murdered or died in suspicious circumstances. Berezovsky apparently hanged himself in 2013, though the coroner recorded an open verdict. It’s all very dodgy. And as FSB agents were roaming London, Chelsea were doing very nicely thank you on the pitch. During Abramovich’s time as owner, the club won 18 major trophies. Our rivals accuse Chelsea of having bought all this silverware on the backs of the ripped-off Russian public — and perhaps even a few dead bodies under a flyover somewhere. And they may be right. Our owner is now sanctioned, his assets frozen.

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Why Bishops should be political

By Giles Fraser

I wish this was the end of the catalogue of accusations against my terrible team. I might be happy enough to sing about the Pope’s welcome to our Spurs rivals, but the gas noise that Chelsea fans used to greet Tottenham players as they emerged onto the pitch — a reference to the gas chambers — was so disgraceful, I probably should have walked out there and then, never to return. If the Jewish Roman Abramovich did one thing good, it was that he stopped the fans doing this. Mostly stopped.

Surely my boys are right — lovely Brentford would be a better fit, especially for a man of the cloth. So why do I still support them? Out of a sense of loyalty, I suppose. “Once a blue always a blue,” as Chelsea star Mason Mount proudly proclaimed.

Loyalty has long been seen as a virtue. We criticise friends when they are not loyal and praise our dogs for being so. Loyalty names a kind of perseverance in human relations, something without which human society would be based on a succession of short term alliances or contracts. Some may say that it is an outdated virtue, one that is rooted in the relationship of subject to monarch, or vassal to lord — oaths of loyalty having a terribly feudal feel, out of place in a democratic society. That said, the importance of family bonds is still something most of us would subscribe to; loyalty to family members, even those who are embarrassing or morally suspect.

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My mum used to propose a toast on family occasions: “Here’s to us and balls to the rest,” she would say, raising a glass. Feels a bit like the Shelbys now I come to write it down. But it was intended and received as a kind of “welcome home” family hug. It was that kind of sentiment that kept us together. Loyalty is often love in its least attractive form.

That’s something of the moral valence of “Once a blue, always a blue”. Except, if press rumours are to be believed, midfielder Mason Mount might be about to become a Red, with Liverpool leading the pack to secure his signature. And it’s not good timing ahead of the FA Cup final next weekend, when a worn-out Chelsea are, I expect, going to be crushed by Liverpool.

I don’t expect an iota of sympathy, especially not on Merseyside. Back in the Eighties, Chelsea fans would enthusiastically wave £50 notes at visiting Liverpool supporters. As I looked down at my programme, embarrassed, pretending I wasn’t with them, Chelsea would sing “Get a job, get a job, get a job”. Liverpool fans would chorus back: “Thank you very much for paying our dole.” That was 1-0 to them.

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I say this through gritted teeth, but I don’t really blame Mount for seeking fame and (greater) fortune on Merseyside, despite all his badge-kissing expressions of Chelsea loyalty. The days when a player like Tony Adams spent all his playing career at one club (19 years, Arsenal) are pretty much gone. For Mount, as for pretty much everyone else these days, the “once a blue” line doesn’t have quite the same gravitational pull as it once did. Capitalism dissolves human relationships. As Marx put it in The Communist Manifesto: “The bourgeoisie, whenever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal and idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties… and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self interest, than callous ‘cash payment’.”

So I will stick with this ghastly bunch, and won’t be crossing the bridge to Brentford — just as I won’t ever cross the Tiber to Rome, despite the Pope’s sometimes attractive embrace. Loyalty is one of those old-fashioned virtues that cements human relations, even if it means our loyalty to those who don’t really deserve it. Because for every boorish thug or Russian oligarch that wears the same colours as me, I still lie awake at night and dream of Hazard and Drogba and James. Once a blue, always a blue.

I have no idea how someone can have that much courage and emotional wherewithal at such a tender age. Miraculously, both survived. The Red Army finally liberated the city, in 1944, after which Luba made aliya to Israel where she became a senior civil servant in the Ministry of Commerce and Industry. She was a formidable woman.

Putin also imagines himself a liberator, his soldiers being some sort of new Red Army freeing Ukraine from latter day Nazis. For years, Russian state-controlled media has repeatedly cast the Ukrainians as neo-Nazis, never fully freed from the wickedness of anti-Semitism. “Mojem povtorit” the Russians say. We can do it again. We can defeat Nazism again.

Putin wants to recruit Jewish suffering — the suffering of my wife’s family, among millions of others — as some sort of ghastly pretext for his wicked war on the Ukrainian people.

Yes, there is a small far-Right element to Ukrainian politics. But the same could be said of modern-day Poland and Hungary, even in France or Germany. And I won’t dignify Putin’s narrative of liberation by arguing with it. You don’t rain down bombs upon innocent civilians if you want to liberate them. And you don’t bomb the holocaust memorial site at Babi Yar if you are intent on freeing the country from “Nazis”. And let’s not forget that the current and elected president of Ukraine is Jewish.

What is particularly disappointing, however, is that various Israeli leaders have allowed themselves to be manipulated in the service of Putin’s dangerous historical revisionism. In 2018, the then Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stood next to Putin in Moscow’s Red Square, watching Russian tanks roll past, commemorating the 73^rd anniversary of the Russian victory over the Nazis.

It helps Putin’s anti-Nazi narrative to be filmed being close to Israeli prime ministers, so it is no coincidence that one of the only world leaders to have met Putin over the past two weeks of the war has been the new Israeli prime minister, Naftali Bennett. Israel may have voted to condemn the Russian invasion at the United Nations, but you can be pretty sure that all Russian TV will show is the Russian and Israeli leaders shaking hands and smiling at each other. The message is clear: the Jews approve of what we are doing. But both Netanyahu and Bennett were always being played.

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Political posturing won't save Israel

By Giles Fraser

They probably knew it too. But both had domestic reasons for being there. First, Israeli voters like to see their leaders fraternising with big players on the world stage, and 1.2 million of them are originally from Russia. Also Israel, like London, is the home to several serious Russian oligarchs, such as Roman Abramovich, with billions invested. But most important is the fact that Russia has been an important ally in the fight against Isis in Syria —and Israeli politicians hope that Russia may even be persuaded to block any new nuclear deal that the Americans want to revive with Iran.

It is because of the politics of the Middle East that Israeli politicians are prepared to stand grinning beside Putin. “It is necessary to ensure the continued security coordination between the Russian army and the Israel Defence Forces,” Netanyahu said, before he flew out to admire Putin’s tanks. Which is why, when the Russians invaded Crimea in 2014, the Israelis said nothing. So despite the fact that Ukraine was for centuries the absolute centre of world Judaism (which is why, for the ultra-Orthodox especially, it contains a number of important pilgrimage sites – such as the birthplace of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov), modern Jews don’t really see this part of the world as particularly important. The Pale of Settlement is the old Jewish world; Israel the new one. The Russian invasion is not our fight.

But it should be. Not only for obvious humanitarian reasons. But also, as a recent editorial in the Israeli liberal newspaper Haaretz rightly claimed: “Putin’s attempt to liken the invading Russian army to the Red Army that liberated East Europe and the extermination camps from Nazi Germany borders on Holocaust denial.” To requisition the mass murder of Jews as justification for the present invasion of Ukraine is a perversion of history so vast that it threatens to undermine the very purpose for which the state of Israel was established.

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What Ukraine can learn from Israel

By David Patrikarakos

Last week, my two youngest children received their Israeli passports in the post. I felt a sense of relief that I find difficult to explain. “Home is the place where they have to let you in,” as Rabbi Sacks once explained it to me. His point was that whatever happens in the world, having an Israeli passport guarantees Jews a safe place if ever they need it. I want this option for my boys. Their great great grandparents, Luba’s Mum and Dad, were murdered by genocidal Nazis in Lviv. They are remembered at Yad Vashem in the Hall of Names alongside so many others whose blood was spilt in Ukraine.

The memory of their deaths is profoundly disrespected by Putin’s cynical exploitation. Israeli leaders have allowed themselves to become stooges in some sordid Russian conspiracy where they are forced to play act the narratives of the second world war for a gullible TV audience. And Putin has taken the memories of dead Jews and used them as an excuse to conduct a war of aggression against a civilian population and to target their Jewish leader for assassination.

Uncovering and maintaining the truth of what happened during the holocaust is quite properly a modern Jewish commandment — both a sacred and a secular mitzvah. “Though shalt not grant Hitler posthumous victories”, was how Emil Fackenheim described it. Putin’s manipulation of the history of the Jews to deliver a patently fraudulent casus belli is a lie that must be kept a million miles away from the story of the Jewish people during the holocaust. Russian propaganda is an insult to their memory.

Once again in Europe millions of people are on the move, terrified families, women and children fleeing violent men in uniforms, elderly people hiding in freezing basements, cities reduced rubble. It looks like history, but it is today. Dressing up as liberators, the Russians have come as the aggressor. They have now become the very thing that they say they hate. And there is a special place in hell for people such as this.

It’s easy to read Jeffrey Cohen’s account of being held hostage in a Texan synagogue at the weekend as an uplifting tale of bravery and accomplishment: it tells of a terrifying stand-off with a deranged, gun-wielding attacker, brought to an end after nearly 11 hours when a rabbi threw a chair at the assailant and managed to escape with two other hostages (another had been released earlier in the day).

Thankfully, the only person killed that day was the terrorist, 44-year-old Malik Faisal Akram. Rabbi Charlie Cytron Walker had nothing but praise for the recent security training provided to the synagogue by the FBI and Colleyville Police Department. It had prepared them for the situation and saved their lives. Other residents spoke of how the community came together. The attack’s conclusion was deemed a triumph of humanity; it was, in effect, something to be celebrated.

And yet the truth couldn’t be more different. Yes, there is still much about the Akram that remains unclear: a debate is still raging over his motivations, and whether he was inspired by Islamist ideology or whether the state of his “mental health” is to blame.

But two conclusions can already be drawn — and both are deeply concerning. The first is that the attack should never have been allowed to happen; the second is that such acts of violence are likely to become more frequent.

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Europe is blind to the next jihadi threat

By Liam Duffy

During the Obama years, terrorist attacks seemed almost routine. But for much of the past several years, we’ve seen their frequency decrease in the United States, largely thanks to the defeat of Muslim terror groups and the disillusionment of many young Muslims with radical Islam.

In that period, as Akram’s attack demonstrates, we have let our guard down. And the Islamists have noticed. They’ve taken this quiet time to regroup, raise money, recruit extensively, and grow stronger. It is classic Islamist dawa strategy.

Law enforcement is tight-lipped when it comes to confirming whether Akram fits into this narrative. But that should not prevent us from questioning how America became so complacent. How else could a suspected Islamist from the UK with connections to Tablighi Jammat enter the US without anyone blinking an eye?

Convicted criminals are usually denied entry to the US, but Akram was granted a tourist visa simply by lying on his application. With the stroke of pen, he erased his long criminal history, which included serving prison time, on three separate occasions, for harassment, theft and attacking a family member with a baseball bat. By ticking a box, he managed to expunge from history the fact that he had been under investigation by MI5 as a possible Islamist terrorist threat as recently as 2020. He was welcomed into America where he could travel freely and somehow allowed to purchase a gun.

Yet this is more than a failure of mere complacency; it is the clearest sign yet that the structures and institutions we had in place following 9/11 to counter Islamism have all but eroded.

This is largely down to a failure of leadership. To the world, the United States has spent the past decade nurturing an image of weakness and chaos. Common among jihadis is the idea that the American spirit is waning and Islam is ascending. Nothing could have bolstered this argument better than the Trump administration’s decision to make peace with the Taliban, and the Biden administration’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.

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By Simon Cottee

Elsewhere, America’s political elite responded by further hamstringing their country: overseeing the politicisation of the very institutions responsible for counter-terrorism. Instead of directing our talent and resources towards justified threats, our agencies prefer to chase “domestic terrorists”, including those supposedly hiding out in school board meetings, and “white supremacists”, claiming that they represent “the most lethal threat to the homeland today”. The Obama administration even shifted away from the term counter-terrorism, instead preferring the vaguer term “countering violent extremism”. How can we expect anti-terror officials to do their job when “terrorism” itself has become a taboo word?

What makes this doubly concerning is that this problem is no longer confined to America. Rather, what we confront is a general crisis within Anglo-American societies, particularly within our respective intelligence communities. The attack may have unfolded in Tarrant County, Texas, but its seeds were sown in Blackburn.

There, British security services concluded that Akram did not pose a threat to society. There, the local community failed to speak up when he started to display multiple signs of radicalisation: he became estranged from his family, suddenly turned very religious, embraced Wahhabism, and travelled to Pakistan twice in the same year. For all their differences, the UK and the US have one thing in common: woefully and willingly unprepared anti-terror organisations.

With the chaos unfolding in Westminster right now, it seems unlikely that substantive change in Britain is on the horizon. But in the US, with midterm elections looming, and with a Congress more focused on the threat of Islamist terrorism, rebuilding the infrastructure needed to prevent terrorist attacks is within the realm of possibility. And given the bar is now so low that someone like Akram can enter the country, buy a gun and storm a synagogue, any change is likely to be an improvement.

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The myth of lone-wolf terrorism

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

So yes, we should absolutely celebrate the fact that the rabbi and his congregants survived last weekend’s attack. But we should not delude ourselves into thinking that Malik Faisal Akram was a one-off. Nor should we pay heed to those who over the weekend were so ready to downplay the role of anti-Semitism in Islamist ideology, as if Akram had picked a synagogue for his attack on a whim.

There are, I fear, many more like him out there. Both the US and the UK need to be more prepared. Next time, we might not be so lucky.

They were from a particular subculture within the lesbian movement, known for flaunting their predilections for sadomasochism, pornography, and public sex. They were outrageous by most people’s standards — including my own. These women argued that the practice of S&M was rebellious and liberatory; that it allowed women to break free of the expectation to be sexually submissive.

Memories of it all came flooding back as I watched Rebel Dykes, a film about that particular tribe. It follows a group of close friends who met at Greenham Common peace camp and became part of that significantly rebellious lesbian subculture. There are clips of the women having public sex shows at BDSM nightclubs; marching in full regalia on anti-Thatcher rallies, and joining forces with gay men to demand action around AIDS.

Of course, my tribe of lesbians was at odds with the rebel dykes. We campaigned against male violence and abuse of women, and, like the US feminist Robin Morgan, believed that “pornography is the theory; rape is the practice”. We railed against acts of sexual sadism and fought hard to dispel the misogynistic myth that women enjoy being abused and degraded during sex. In my view, the S&M that the Rebel Dykes celebrated was simply a re-enforcement of the way violent men treat women.

For their part, they painted us as dull and sexless, dismissing us as joyless prudes. Roz Kaveney, a transwoman involved in the ‘kink’ scene back then, would mock my tribe, saying that lesbians like me thought that “holding hands in 20 different positions” was hot sex. That’s another thing that struck me about the film: the parallels between now and then. Lesbians and women who are critical of porn and S&M and sexual exploitation today are treated in exactly the same way as we were back then: portrayed as anti-sex prudes.

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The talking heads in the film have great fun re-visiting their youth, spinning tales of drunkenness, sex with multiple partners, and direct action. They talk about Greenham Common women’s peace camp, where a group of them broke into the squaddies’ bar and stole all the booze. But the film mainly focuses on the squatting culture in London, and the so-called “lesbian sex wars” that raged through the UK in the early to late Eighties. Those wars were fought over the turf of porn, kink, S&M, and public sex.

In April 1985 I went along to the very first extraordinary general meeting (EGM) of the newly founded Lesbian and Gay Centre in London. The centre should have been a haven for the entire community, with its café, bar, bookshop, creche, meeting rooms, media resource, offices for rent to lesbian and gay projects and enterprises, and a regular disco. It could not have been more perfect, on paper. But its management committee was involved in a huge dilemma. Who could use the centre, and for what, and which views would be acceptable to be aired in the premises? At that stage, the management committee was an all-white group of men and women, and they were keen to make it more accessible to a diverse crowd.

The main item on the agenda at the EGM was the S&M issue. Although the Management Committee had initially allowed groups advocating for and practicing S&M to meet at the centre, they had reversed that decision following complaints from the Lesbians Against Sadomasochism (LASM). These women objected to the sight of leather, chains and Nazi regalia in a space that was supposed to be protective of persecuted minorities. The packed meeting was extremely tense, and nothing was resolved.

The film includes fascinating, grainy footage of the event. One clip shows Linda Bellos, a black, Jewish, working-class lesbian opposing S&M ideology, while a young S&M dyke in the audience, also black and working-class, was being nudged by white women to speak up “as a black lesbian”. The attempt by both sides to use identity politics as a way to claim more credibility and ‘right to speak’ was counter-productive, as each time a Jewish woman, for example, said how offended she was at symbols of Nazi Germany (such as the peaked leather cap) being used in S&M role-play, one from the other side would claim she was ‘subverting’ its meaning.

In a subsequent meeting, the extremely polarised issue of dress codes came up. A group called the Sexual Fringe, which represented the S&M contingent, wanted an “anything goes” policy whereas the hard-core feminists wanted to ban leather jackets (something I was opposed to, on the grounds that leather jackets per se were not in any way offensive). The main topic of conversation was whether certain items of clothing and accessories could be seen as racist, fascist or antisemitic. There were some sadists who liked to lead women (who identified as masochists) around on all fours on a leash. There were others who liked to wear chains, swastikas, whips and handcuffs. This was an unusual meeting in that certain things were resolved, for once. It was agreed that the swastika should be banned, and it was also agreed, albeit grudgingly, that leading a woman around on a chain on all fours should also be banned.

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Generally, though, neither side saw eye to eye. When the fetish club Chain Reaction was opened by the S&Mers in London in 1987, home to everything from mud wrestling to exhibitionist sex shows, and strippers. LASM picketed the club. We handed out leaflets explaining why, as far as we were concerned, eroticising pain and humiliation was the very antithesis of women’s liberation. Our leaflets read: “there can be no defence of a practice which is racist, anti-Semitic and woman hating. How is this different from what men do to women?” But the party went on inside. Nothing was resolved.

At another meeting, in 1988, Joan Nestle, a “sex positive” lesbian heavily into butch/femme role play spoke. There was a massive debate between the feminists and the pro-S&Mers during that meeting, and I could see why so many were captivated by Nestle. Funny, charismatic and honest, she appealed to so many of the working-class women in the audience who felt judged by the hard-core feminists. More than once in the film, references are made to how middle class the anti-S&M feminists were in contrast to the Rebel Dykes, but this gives an inaccurate impression. I was one of many working class protesters against S&M, and the sexual libertarian movement that inspired much of the Rebel Dyke standpoint was rooted in French post-structuralism — hardly a topic for down The Dog and Duck.

The Rebel Dykes loved being provocative and bad taste riffs were common, verging on harassment. For example, when Lisa Power, a Stonewall founder who is interviewed in the film, started the lesbian sex-toy business, Thrilling Bits, she named “our smallest and most inoffensive vibrator ‘the Sheila’” after anti-porn feminist Sheila Jeffreys, which was a pretty ugly move. The black dildo in the Thrilling Bits collection was named “the Whitney”, (after Whitney Houston) but interestingly this was not mentioned in the film.

The arguments over S&M, public sex and anti-Semitism raged in America, too. I visited San Francisco in 1985, having been told that a new magazine, aimed at lesbians, had been launched into this crucible. It was called On Our Backs. The title itself was poking fun at the feminist magazine, Off Our Backs (meaning “women, there is no need to be on our backs for the patriarchy”). On Our Backs took a pro kink, pro porn stance, and featured S&M content.

I requested an interview with the editors of On Our Backs, and turned up looking like something out of Bunty magazine. In my pale blue linen trousers and white cotton blouse and Birkenstock sandals, I exuded an air of innocence that sharply contrasted with the image of the leather-clad editors. Looking me up and down, one of the women told me that she had considered asking me to pose for the magazine, but had now decided against it. I was not offended, merely relieved.

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During the conversation I asked the women if they had a line in the sand that they would not cross in terms of pornographic and sadomasochistic content. One of them gave me an example: “We had a story submitted by a woman to fantasised setting fire to her I lover, and it was very graphic, but we couldn’t decide between us whether or not it was too extreme to run it, so it is still sitting in our in-tray.” If it was not already obvious to me that there could be no peaceful coexistence between feminism and S&M practitioners, that moment crystallised it.

The film, rather than draw any conclusions about the Rebel Dyke scene is a nostalgic trip down a particular memory lane. A number of the interviewees, including Roz Kaveny and Lisa Power, are still actively campaigning to discredit feminists — in particular those of us who critique pornography, kink, and extreme trans ideology.

That’s what struck me particularly forcefully: that not much has changed. Today, feminists who oppose porn and prostitution as forms of violence against women are seen as anti-sex and ‘whorephobic’; the Queer movement is enthusiastically embracing kink as an identity as part of the alphabet soup of LGBTQQIA+. But the Rebel Dykes did not have the institutional support that the feminist hating Queer Isis of today does.

For all the S&M lesbians saw themselves (and clearly still do, going by the views expressed by the talking heads in the film) as edgy, progressive and sex-positive, they were anything but. Buying in to the misogynistic myths that women love to be hurt and humiliated during sex — that pain is erotic; that pleasure can be derived from the steel-capped boot on the neck — is nothing short of capitulating to patriarchy. I will continue to fight for the liberation of women from sexual violation, because for me, the true rebels are those who refuse to see masochism as anything to celebrate.

“There are two kinds of egoists in the world,” wrote Rowan Williams after meeting Tutu. “There are egoists who are so in love with themselves that they have no room of anyone else and there are those egoists that are so in love with themselves that they make it possible for everybody else to be in love with themselves.” Tutu was the second sort of egoist. Desmond Tutu loved being Desmond Tutu, but in such a way that he encouraged other people to believe that they could also be in love with who they are and take joy in it.

This cuts across what many in his generation thought about being a priest. When I was taught to celebrate the Eucharist, for instance, I was encouraged not to show any personality in my recitation of the holy words of consecration. The important thing as a priest is to get out of the way, to be a conduit between other people and God. Don’t put yourself, your personality, between the congregation and the divine. Don’t modulate your voice, don’t try to inject meaning into your words. Your job is to disappear. Say the words like you are reading from the telephone directory. The congregation don’t come to church for you.

Tutu did it very differently. Some in the old school thought what you got with Desmond Tutu was the Desmond Tutu Show, and they slightly disapproved. But this wonderful little man from South Africa, with his impish sense of fun and Old Testament prophet morality, had a totally different theology from that of the Old School. And it was from this theology that all his activism and politics cascaded — “the glory of God is a human being fully alive”, as the second-century church father Irenaeus put it. Tutu loved that line and it often cropped up in his sermons. It captured his theology in a nutshell.

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In other words, Desmond Tutu was very much a Christmas Christian. God comes into the world as a human being so that human beings might regard themselves as divine, a part of the divine life. Tutu once remarked that as all human beings contain the image and likeness of God, we ought to genuflect before everyone we meet.

Tutu often told the story of his parish priest in Johannesburg, the legendary Fr Trevor Huddleston, once doffing his hat to his mother — a white man simply acknowledging the humanity of a black woman being a revolutionary act in the context of South Africa in the Forties. It was a genuflection, of sorts. And this is where Tutu’s theology and politics grows from: all human beings reflect God’s glory, all of them. His hatred of apartheid was at root theological, rather than political — though this is a false binary, of course. His point was that apartheid was a heresy. It was a failure to see God in others; in those who are of a different colour, in those who are lesbian and gay, and most radically of all, in the oppressor too.

But this theology of the person was in no sense individualistic. Perhaps the most important contribution that African Christianity has made to Christianity has been through the development of the idea of Ubuntu — the idea that “I am because you are”. We are not individual cells of separate Godliness, but through God’s presence within us all, we are all brothers and sisters. And so in order to be fully what God intended, we have to be reconciled with those from whom we have become estranged. Forgiveness was not some sentimental touchy-feely emotional weakness, but a tough-minded determination to recognise our own humanity as inescapably bound up with others. Confessing past wrongs with the hope of some sort of reconciliation was a way of putting the pieces of the self back together.

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Tutu was hated for this insight as much as he was loved. When he chaired the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, he was putting into practice a version of this theology: that only through forgiveness could a community find the gift of a common future. Forgiveness meant breaking the cycle of tit-for-tat revenge. It wasn’t about having warm and fuzzy feelings about those that had participated in the evil that was apartheid. It was the belief that a future was possible, but only through a process of confession and forgiveness in which the image of God is restored in others. This was a basic priestly insight turned into a political process.

There were times when he got it wrong, of course. His extension of the apartheid tag to the situation in Israel/Palestine was a mistake. Perhaps inevitably, he saw the world too much through the lens of his own history, and was sometimes blind to its differences. That’s why many Jews think of Tutu as a much more morally ambivalent figure.

He was also hated by the hard Left as much as by the Right. Tutu had absolutely no time for Marxism. At heart, he was a prayerful cassock-wearing Anglo-Catholic Anglican priest of a very familiar sort. He wasn’t a political radical, but a faithful servant of the church, with a huge personality, preaching what he saw with enormous courage in wicked times. And it was because he was a priest that the apartheid regime never dared to touch him. He called it as he saw it, including in his vociferous condemnations of the ANC as they descended into corruption and petty infighting. Tutu could be the friend of anyone, yet he was no one’s patsy.

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Tutu once said that if he ever walked on water, the South African press would have chosen the headline “Tutu cannot swim”. We forget now how much he was hated and traduced by the whole apparatus of racist apartheid. How his life was threatened. He is now seen as a hero of human rights, which isn’t quite accurate. Yes, he used the secular language of human rights, but it was the Imago Dei — the imprint of God in us all — that was his basic guiding insight.

Will we see his like again in the Church? These days our bishops are largely chosen for their management skills and abilities to run a spreadsheet. Tutu showed us God by being so wonderfully himself, a human being, flawed no doubt, but fully and magnificently alive. His theology and his personality were perfectly aligned. That’s why we loved him. May he rest in peace and rise in glory.

They might be wearing Hugo Boss and driving Volkswagens, but Nazis don’t really seem to live on the same planet as us; and that’s why, maybe, Nazi content is sort of like True Crime or UFO stories. And, of course, there’s the taboo part of it: most of the Holocaust freaks I’ve known are either Jewish or anti-Semitic, all of them fascinated by this primal bloodlust that it’s more polite to ignore.

But where does Albert Speer fit into this narrative? Hitler’s Minister of Armaments and lead architect, known for his grandiose designs for the “Thousand Year Reich”, was one of the lucky Nazis. He was sent to prison for 20 years, but afterwards he was able to profit from his actions: in 1970, the man who had commanded an estimated 12 million slave labourers, about 2.5 million of whom died, wrote a best-selling memoir, Inside the Third Reich. He was later approached by Kubrick-protégé Andrew Birkin about a film adaptation, and, in conversations that Birkin recorded as they workshopped their screenplay in 1972, downplayed his relationship with Hitler and his knowledge of wartime atrocities. Fortunately, Paramount Pictures did not pick up the script, and it was not produced.

I couldn’t help asking myself, while watching Vanessa Lapa’s Speer Goes to Hollywood, composed of dramatisations of those Birkin recordings and footage from the Nuremberg trials: what is the point of Nazi documentaries, and why am I watching one? I suppose the straightforward answer is Holocaust Remembrance, as with Yom HaShoah and public memorials and the Holocaust Studies lessons that are mandatory in sixteen US states.

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But if Holocaust remembrance is really the point of Holocaust documentaries, I’m not sure these films are up to the task. The most Holocaust-conscious people I know have tended to be, let’s say, “Holocaust-critical independent researchers”, like the shaved-head kid with an Iron Cross ring that sat in the front of my college Holocaust Studies class and “asked a lot of questions”. I think he may have thought it was a workshop.

I’ve never met someone who doesn’t know the phrase “six million”, but I’ve known a number that would say “six million sounds like a lot”, and I’m not sure Speer Goes to Hollywood is going to make much of a difference for them. If these films are simply preaching to the choir, that’s fine; but does that mean Nazi films are just True Crime for boys?

That said, I suppose Nazi documentaries may still serve some salutary function in American society. In an era of increasing groupthink and hyperpoliticisation, we might consider that Nazi eugenicists were, actually, “following the science”, with the eager collaboration of leading American scientists funded by the Rockefellers. And with today’s poorly educated often decried as “Nazis”, we might do well to reflect that the German profession that voted for the Nazi party in the highest numbers was physicians. Speer might fit in there: reminding us that Nazis can be charming, well-spoken, and professional.

Perhaps there’s some value in Hannah Arendt’s idea of “the banality of evil”: that evildoers aren’t scary, “perverted and sadistic” monsters, but instead thoughtless, “terrifyingly normal” joiners. Arendt’s thesis has since been criticised as more research shows that Adolf Eichmann did, actually, have some real ideological investment in the extermination of the Jews. However, as a general rule, there’s some truth there: people tend to think they’re doing the right thing, or at least not committing a crime against humanity — and they tend to do the easiest thing under the circumstances.

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But how do you show banality in film, a medium designed to hypnotise the masses with spectacle and splendour? The most obvious answer can be found in Claude Lanzmann’s nine-hour-long Shoah (1985); a 355-minute torrent of interviews about the most revolting atrocities, described through minute, twist-of-the-knife probing, but with almost nothing to see. There aren’t photographs; there aren’t newsreels; there aren’t, God forbid, animations. There’s mostly absence: the empty field of stones and grass where there was Treblinka, the grey pond, wide and boring, where thousands of Jews’ ashes were dumped. And, sometimes, that absence extends to the interviews, showing how the Final Solution was executed by commonplace acts and with, even, commonplace feeling: in one chilling interview, a few residents of the village of Auschwitz calmly, undramatically, say they’re happy the Jews are gone.

Speer Goes to Hollywood doesn’t have the visual subtlety of Shoah; it’s more or less what you’d expect, built on familiar black-and-white archival images of rallies, camps and propaganda. But I suppose it, actually, implicitly denies the banality of an evil thesis. Speer mythologised himself in two ways: first, that he was a great architect, and second, that he wasn’t interested in genocide, just in making some really impressive buildings. As he says, “I was just 29 and I would have sold my soul to Mephisto”.

Yet his explanations, an exercise in cognitive dissonance, are sometimes inadvertently absurd in their coldness: for example, when talking about the Jews in Weimar Berlin, he says: “I can’t really say [I had] an anti-Semitic feeling. It was a feeling of disgust when I saw it.” He later claims that though he knew Hitler was planning to annihilate the Jews, he had “no direct knowledge” of the camps since a friend had told him never to go to Auschwitz because “terrible things [were] happening there”.

But however hard he was trying to whitewash himself, he still comes across as narcissistic and deluded. When he emerges from prison, he cheerily says to excited journalists: “You see that after 20 years I’m still relatively good looking”. And when Birkin tells him that “Paramount and the Jewish Brigade associated with them” (wow!) have rejected the script, since only two out of its one-hundred-ten pages address the extermination of the Jews (wow!), Speer states, “That is their problem” (wow!).

Paramount didn’t produce the film, but ‘the Speer myth’ — this poor handsome man; he had no idea what they were doing at those funny places out East — did make him millions in book royalties. Still, I’m not sure how many Holocaust-heads today truly believe that he didn’t know about the camps, given that correspondence released in 2007 made it clear he was lying.

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And yet he still commands a unique fascination. Perhaps Speer seemed less obscene; perhaps, 15 years after the end of the war, his “poor-me” memoirs made mankind seem kinder. I don’t know. Speer was a weird figure. And he was neither a politician nor a military man; he was an architect and urbanist, a fairly influential pioneer of sustainable building and planning. He was also a moving writer, who wrote of Hitler’s unhappiness and Eva Braun’s loneliness in ways that are genuinely absorbing. He was almost respectable.

Here’s the thing, though: he was still an official in the Nazi Party, who, as his own book makes clear, was intimate with Hitler, Goebbels, and the whole gang. It’s clear why Speer lied, and not all that surprising how he lied: the real question, which this latest film and countless before fail to ask, is why anyone believed him.

He likes to quote from two of my books. One follows the unusual fate of Dreyfus supporters who lived long enough to experience the Second World War and the Nazi occupation of France. The second book attempts to understand why so many former “anti-racist” activists from the Left and the far-Left became collaborators and why so many former anti-Semites of the Right and the far-Right took part in the Résistance. Sometimes, Zemmour quotes me accurately. Often, he adds his own selective emphasis to my work and attributes interpretations to me which are his and not mine. On occasion, he will start a sentence with “as historian Simon Epstein says,” before wheeling out a misrepresentation of something I have written or, worse, something I have not written at all.

I haven’t registered my disapproval before. Firstly because I didn’t really care enough. Zemmour, who I didn’t think was such a bad egg, was not alone in using and abusing history for his own ends: this has been part and parcel of intellectual life, and especially of the polemic-obsessed media, for some time. I also used to find it funny — really funny — to see this old Gallo-Roman country, the Church’s eldest daughter, rely on a Jew to fulfil the threefold mission of eulogising France’s lost greatness, bemoaning  its besmirched identity, and proudly raising its old standard once more. At times, it felt Zemmour was the new Joan of Arc. It was he who was holding the sword others had dropped and rallying the troops for battle.

I do not know what mark the man will leave on France’s history. Will it be providential or tragic? Or — and this cannot be ruled out — fleeting and benign? Or perhaps even comical? But that is not why I am writing. What I am interested in here is the position he will occupy — and doubtless already does occupy — in the long and tormented history of the Jews of this country. France’s Jews, like the rest of the diaspora, know they are exposed to anti-Semitism, an intractable problem which alternates between phases of remission, sometimes short and sometimes long, phases of acceleration, flare-ups, and then further remission. Jews also know that some among them — a minority thankfully — cave under pressure and accept anti-Semitism. In some cases, they even help to propagate it.

It used to be the far-Left that best illustrated this problem. In the winter of 1953, Jewish communists in the Soviet Union competed with one another to lend credibility to dark conspiracy theories about Jewish doctors. More recently, Left-wing apologists of Islamism have included Jews, who profess a radical hatred for the State of Israel and the Jewish people. These anti-Zionist Jews try to make themselves useful by mildly scolding their fellow activists — who profess to be humanitarians — for chanting “Death to Jews!” at pro-Palestine demonstrations. They explain, gently, that some demands are best kept to oneself, and that these especially should not be uttered in public — for obvious tactical reasons.

What’s different with Zemmour is that he is on the far-Right and not on the far-Left. He is akin to Trump-supporting ideologues in the US and their Hungarian counterparts and is, in France, at the forefront of this new way of doing politics. His spin on Dreyfus (who, in his eyes, wasn’t really innocent) has a rotten smell. His apology for Pétain (who, in his eyes, wasn’t guilty really) puts him firmly in the camp of the post-Vichy far-Right. It also positions him on the edge of the neo-Nazi, ultra-far-Right (only the edge, of course; as a Jew, he will never quite belong). The same goes for his opposition to the Pleven and Gayssot laws, without which racism, anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial would be permissible. And then there were his comments about the Jewish children who were buried in Israel after being brutally killed in Toulouse, which were truly despicable.

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When Zemmour castigates women, immigrants, homosexuals, socialists, centrists, elites, or metropolitan liberals, he does it out of profound conviction, fascinated as he is with the rhetorical heritage of the far-Right — which he has himself expanded, copiously, with his rants.

Media savviness, too, motivates his skewering of Jews. His historical mission, as he sees it, is to reconcile the patriotic bourgeoisie and the working classes. In concrete terms, this means that he is betting simultaneously — and this is difficult — on both traditional Right-wing voters and supporters of the populist far-Right. The fact that he is Jewish reassures the former group (“he can’t be a fascist so we can vote for him!”) The fact that he maligns Jews despite being one himself entices the latter (“there’s no way he’ll be bought off, we can trust him!”).

The former bunch appreciate his harking back to author Charles Péguy and his admiration for De Gaulle. The latter like his scorn for Zola and his rehabilitation of Pétain. His unconcealed Jewish roots help him plot out a march on Paris which, in a complete ideological mish-mash, passes through both London and Vichy.

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If the trend revealed by recent polls is confirmed — in other words, if he manages to definitively capture the two groups of voters he needs to remain a contender — and if he also manages to recruit non-voters by using his swagger to pull them out of their apathy, he will have a supply of votes perfectly sufficient to shake up the 2022 presidential election. Given certain conditions, and with a little luck, he would be in a position to do what both Le Pens failed to do, namely to seduce republican voters without alienating anti-republican voters, and vice-versa. He would be in a position to shatter — or at least crack — the “glass ceiling” which has kept the far-Right out of power for so long. He would achieve this thanks to his patter, his strategic know-how and his stubbornness. But it would also be in part thanks to his Jewishness, which makes it impossible to call him a Nazi or a fascist. It gives him more leeway on everything controversial.

Unlike Henry IV, the French Renaissance King who was born a Protestant, Zemmour won’t have to reason that “Paris is well worth a mass.” Historically, he is perhaps in the tradition of Arthur Meyer, the editor of the Gaulois newspaper, who converted to Catholicism in 1901. He also borrows from Edmond Bloch, who rubbed shoulders with the French far-Right in the 1930s and also ended up converting to Catholicism. But Zemmour, who aspires to lasting renown where these two predecessors enjoyed only passing notoriety, will not have to follow them to the font. Far from being a hindrance to his irresistible rise, his Jewishness is his trump card. Let’s be frank: this is both masterful and unprecedented. As a political observer, I find it fascinating. As a Jew, I must admit I find it disgusting.

This essay appears with the permission of DDV, the journal of the International League against Anti-Semitism, where it was originally published. 

Two things. As these are not philosophies but tricks, they are less likely to affront; one can always say of a trick (and what are techniques but elaborated tricks?), “I just learned this last week…”

First: when the baby gets you up in the middle of the night, do not look at the clock. Anyone who’s had children will nod in understanding — you’re up anyway, why pay twice?

The second trick is The Designated Criminal.

My notion of hell is the cross-country road trip with the whole damn family. Here everything, of course, is always going wrong. Some kid is complaining, spouses are feuding about directions, and all is misery. Now this traveler and now that offends against reason and good order and everyone ends up blaming Father, who, as the sole voice of reason, will now turn belligerent. Hot, tired, weary, angry, thirsty and lost, the car rolls on.

How to get from Coast to Coast? Appeals for calm (from Mother), obedience (that’s right), fellow-feeling, and so on will not avail. But a technique (trick) may. It is The Designated Criminal.

On setting out the family must establish a rotation. Each car member, then, on his appointed day, will be The Designated Criminal. On his lucky day, everything that goes wrong in the car is his fault. The affronted family are happily then leagued against the diabolical offender in their midst.

It works like a charm.

But The Designated Criminal may also be practised as oppression. For there are families and other organisms which employ the technique not as a means of maintaining esprit-de-corps, but of exercising control. Here the criminal is designated once and for all time, and will live and die in his chains.

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In the co-dependant family one child or parent is always in the wrong. We have all seen it and some have been taxed with participating in the loathsome farce: that Dad is a fool, Mom is a dunderhead, Little Bob is a lazy good-for-nothing, Little Suzy is a pre-pubescent whore and if she doesn’t wear more modest clothes she will end on the street, and so on.

And we know of the continual indictment of The Jews, the Witch Trials of Salem and McCarthy, the chattel slavery of Black Americans, and the continuation of that vile racism as the indictment of Whites.

The mechanism of the Designated Criminal can be used both for social equilibrium, in the car, or, politically, for disruption of the body politic. The first case, The Orderly Rotation of Blame, is the essential engine of democracy. The Game’s Rules (The Constitution) are designed to ensure the periodic exchange of power. The Ins and the Outs, and their adherents and dupes, may not understand the transfer of power as a game; but they are involved in one as much as the folks in the station wagon.

The motorists enjoy a process which elevates family unity over individual discomfort; the voters, the self-importance of saving the world from mindless fools. But it’s the same game.

If played according to the rules the rotation of power promotes the health and longevity of the organism. The Ins are allowed to tax the limits of legitimate incumbency, the Outs to misuse the permitted latitudes of opposition. And then, as in a football game, offense and defence shift.

But what if the game is not played according to Hoyle?

What if a player or contingent takes advantage of the rules themselves to achieve a goal other than balance? What if put-upon Dad, for example, says, “I know which Young Traveller is today’s Designated Criminal, but Samantha has just done something so egregious that I am going to suspend the rules and humiliate her”.

Readers will feel the affront of the interjection. As will not only young Samantha, but the whole family. For they had agreed to suspend their individual feelings in favour of group unity. And Dad has just proclaimed that they were fools to do so — that they had made a bargain which, it seems, the car’s driver reserved the right to abrogate, and, thus, that anyone may be the next-accused.

Now, the once-happy car, all occupants free to enjoy not only the trip but the game, are forced into co-dependence. The game is over, and the Ref (of whose existence the car was previously unaware) has ruled that actual indictment of the other is now the order of the day and those not supporting the new rule will suffer. The enjoyment of Free Speech has been superseded by the necessity of obedience to power. The car has just experienced Terror.

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We need to talk about 9/11

By Lionel Shriver

The occupants, now, do not know what the new rules are, but only that they, having been changed once, may continue to be changed at will, by those possessing or bidding for power. Now, rather than the joy of improvisation (of the communal comedy), the rule of silence, obedience and denunciation is in force.

This is the state of the sick, co-dependant family. Here it is not that some things may be false, but that all things must be false. For if the subordinate members do not know what is and what is not permitted, they must devote themselves, in preference to any productive activity, to protection from power.

Far worse than the frowns of the car which does not know The Designated Criminal we now have the false smiles and the sad head shakings of the sick family, which is to say, of the Left.

When we know that it’s our turn on the electoral ducking stool tomorrow, we, when in power, may moderate our behaviour. In a crumbling Democracy, the power-mad, like Dad taking the reins, have come to the Dictator’s realisation. That is, “Wait a second. All I have to do is rig it so I can hold my seat indefinitely”. This, of course, is the aperçu of most every politician from dogcatcher to President, down through time. (George III said of Washington that if he chose to relinquish the Presidency he would be the greatest man who ever lived.)

***

One cannot credit the Politicians of the Left with even the delusion that they are Doing Good. And, if they do, then what? They did not take an oath to do good, but to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution.

Must they come to bend and break the rules in favour of 1) their good ideas, 2) the necessity of staying in office, 3) theft? Of course. That’s why we have elections. To roll the dice. The co-dependant, terrified society comes to think that, having achieved the perfection of leadership, it’s a grand idea to call it quits, abolish the electoral college, mail ballots to everyone on earth, require no voter identification, import new voters, and so on.

Just as the inspired politicians see that perpetual hegemony might be had by mere suspension of their Oath; their dupes, the electorate, learn to suspend their reason, and substitute hatred of the indicted for their new-found fear of power — a fear so powerful it must be relegated to the unconscious.

Just like the children in the car.

When Dad trashes the rules he changes the whole point of the exercise. The building of family happiness and unity (which, we assume, was, after all, the whole purpose of the trip) becomes an indoctrination; and, the child sees, safety must now be his primary concern. He may keep silent, or join in the condemnation of Little Trevor, but should he object, “what about the Game?” he is, most certainly, now the new Criminal.

Our electorate is split into the affronted Right and the supine Left. Those who wish to preserve our Constitutional Republic, its rules, and the culture from which they spring, are indicted by those in momentary power (both political and asserted) ad-lib.

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Will magic defeat America's elites?

By John Michael Greer

There is no merit in supporting various contemporary blasphemies (“Birthing Parent”, and so on). Unless they are untrue. The merit comes from the affiant’s vocal sacrifice of his reason, and, so, of his self-respect, in support of The Cause.

This is the contemporary terror. Not that we’re faced with the enormities, the crimes, delusions, and lies of a Politician (when were we not?), but that we are now frightened of whomever was screaming last.

From “New Business Item 39” posted on the National Education Association’s website on July 5, 2021: “The N.E.A. will provide an already-created, in-depth study that criticises empire, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeniety, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarcy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of oppression at the intersections of society.”

This is the country’s largest Teachers Union. What do these words mean? That the teachers will be put in charge of criticising. Whom? Whomever the N.E.A. designates.

And how might one, however convinced, ensure that he will not transgress the rules? There are no rules, for the categories are infinitely expansible. (Larry Elder, an African American running for Governor of California, and a lifelong champion of America and of his race, was called “the Black Face of White Supremacy,” L.A. Times, August 20, 2021.) And what in the world are “the intersections of society”?

In Woody Allen’s film Sleeper (1973) he is transported to the future. There he learns that the world he knew came to grief in 1989. He asks how and is told: “A man called Albert Shanker got his hands on a nuclear warhead.” Albert Shanker was the head of the United Foundation of Teachers, and then the American Federation of Teachers.

This may be the rock on which the Left comes to grief: the insistence on infecting one’s children with hatred. Young parents four generations away from The New Deal are insisting that they will not abandon their children to the blasphemies of the N.E.A. and its servitors, the Democratic Party. They are finding that there is a mechanism created to protect them from a despotic government, and that it is The Constitution and the organisations derived therefrom.

It is not incumbent on us Jews to prove we do not drink the blood of Christian Children, nor of white American citizens to apologise, nor of citizens to assert their loyalty to various confederations of thugs, and shriek heresies and treason or risk blacklisting as “of insufficient zeal”.

What does it mean to be “cancelled”?

It seems to mean that some group asserting power has mobilised its forces in social media and that their indictments have, in turn, been echoed and endorsed by multitudes. But we all know, or should know, that the controllers of the algorithms are constantly aware of and manipulate our prejudices through their presentation of that called information.

Fear of the heretic is spread through social media, but who knows, and how could one know, that the numbers and the tweets are real? One cannot. They are pixels on a screen which stampede the fearful into actual action against the indicted.

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How Satanism conquered America

By Mary Harrington

Would the controllers of the blogosphere stoop to such subterfuge as cooking the numbers? They limit access to their outlets ad lib, banning any person or idea they do not endorse. Why would they not also warp the number or content of the blogs to suit or, indeed, confect them? (I worked, for a year, as a Contributing Editor (utility man) at a very prominent national publication. One of my duties was Letters to the Editor. This involved not only answering but writing them. I assume the practice was universal and that it continues in the new media.)

I live in a liberal neighbourhood outside of Los Angeles. The residents here are miserable. Traditionally it was Not Done to acknowledge each other’s presence on the streets. A “good morning” uttered to a fellow dogwalker was considered as if one had exposed oneself. (This latter, in fact, now accepted as a permitted practice of the Homeless.)

Since Covid, the masked or the unmasked cross the street to avoid each other, glaring.  Signs on the homes proclaim that Love Is Love, but the residents hate and fear each other. Nancy Mitford wrote of the Liberals, “they are all so unhappy, and all of their plans fail so miserably.”

I was elected a non-person by the Left many years ago. It’s uncomfortable, and it’s costly and sad to see the happy fields in which I played all those decades — Broadway, book publishing, TV and film — fold up and Hail Caesar, but there it is.

The question for the young is: what kind of country do you want for your children? The question for the aged (myself) is: “what did you do in the War, Daddy?”

I’ve been involved for near 50 years in dealing with folks in the mass. It was not a social experiment for me, but a game: The Theatre. I learned very young that the correct study of the dramatist was neither his own feelings, nor those of the actors, but the attention of the audience. I understood that it was not my job to teach them anything, nor to induce a feeling in them, but to perform a sort of magic trick — to understand their behaviour in order to control their concentration. Why? In order to give them a treat. Just like a magician.

I sat with them night by night and year by year, and it was a joy to feel their conjoined attention, and to learn from it and its absence how to improve the play. As Billy Wilder said, “individually, they’re idiots, but together they’re a genius”.

The horror of the last year’s slide into despotism has showed me the reverse of the medal.

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Britain needs a cigarette

By David Hockney

Watching the good play, the audience suspends its reason in order to be entertained — at Hamlet, as much and identically with watching a woman be sawed in half. The audience enjoys the trick while knowing, and because they know she is not going to be harmed. Just as they know Hamlet’s Dad is not coming back from the dead.

But just as the techniques of stage magic are identical with those of the confidence game, the understanding of the dramatist — that the mass can be suggested, and, so controlled —is the same as that of the Dictator. Here fear replaces happy anticipation; and, as we see, outrage at the indicted masks an unavowable fear.

The children in the car must immediately come to support the new regime or risk abandonment. The protection it offers is illusory (as who knows who will be next), but the illusion, to them, is preferable to knowledge of their powerlessness.

In the mass the alternative to submission is blacklisting, poverty, censure, et cetera. Finally, this is the same alternative offered to the children. They may court protection from fear only by remaining submissive. Just like the Electorate.

© David Mamet 2021

Rooney has written another novel about comfortable young westerners overthinking their love-lives. The Israeli state would welcome an edition, but she is withholding it from Israeli readers as a political gesture. Had she written a novel about the suffering of young Palestinians in the occupied territories, and the Israeli state sought to ban it, I imagine she would join all right-minded folk in pressing for a Hebrew edition to be produced.

Sally Rooney has not decided to boycott an entire language. Her decision to refuse the Israeli publisher Modan to publish a Hebrew edition of her latest novel is the refusal of a specific Israeli publisher rather than the refusal of a Jewish language. You may argue the two will add up to the same thing – which non-Israeli publisher is likely to want to produce a Hebrew edition? — but the distinction in principle is not meaningless, and it’s the distinction that she herself makes.

In a statement she said she refused to work with a publisher “that does not publicly distance itself from apartheid and support the UN-stipulated rights of the Palestinian people”, adding: “The Hebrew-language translation rights to my new novel are still available, and if I can find a way to sell these rights that is compliant with the BDS movement’s institutional boycott guidelines, I will be very pleased and proud to do so.”

I think this is a silly move, but it’s not so obviously silly and/or malign as to be slam-dunked in 280 characters. We need to keep this a manageable length, though, so rather than start from 1967, or 1948, or 19th-century pogroms and the birth of Zionism, let’s start from Rooney’s position — which is that Israel’s treatment of its Palestinian population, and its illegal settlements, are illegitimate and deplorable. Let’s take that as a given, whether or not we agree with it. And let’s shelve, too, the argument that you’re only allowed to boycott Israel if you also boycott Russia, Saudi, China and any other countries whose human rights records bear similar challenge. It’s not necessarily a trivial objection — a key part of the IHRA’s definition of anti-Semitism is holding Israel to a double standard by “requiring of it a behaviour not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation” — but it would be, if we’re to approach this issue (as I’m trying to) on Rooney’s terms, to make the perfect the enemy of the good.

Let’s take Rooney’s decision on its own terms. She sees Israel as a baddy. She supports the BDS movement, which holds it legitimate to punish Israel for its badness by economic sanctions and cultural boycotts – on an analogy with the isolation of apartheid-era South Africa. (Is Israel an “apartheid state”? Let’s shelve that one also.) So she won’t let Israel have Beautiful World, Where Are You? because, essentially, they are a baddy and so they Can’t Have Nice Things.

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Sally Rooney needs to be famous

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I’m trying to get to the nub of this, which is the question of what her decision achieves — or hopes to. Sanctions and boycotts are intended to strike a blow against a regime, not against its people. (I can’t speak for Rooney, but I’m presuming she deplores the Israeli state rather than its Jewish inhabitants.) The most powerful arguments against them have always been that in seeking to do the former, they achieve the latter. And, indeed, you can argue that thanks to the backfire effect, they sometimes help the regime by uniting its people in being pissed off about the sanctions.

Still, in economic terms, a successful boycott will seek to hurt a country’s GDP; it will discourage international investment; it may specifically prevent it buying weapons, energy and the other things that a regime needs to thrive. And in cultural terms, it will seek to damage its soft power, and the regime’s internal claim to legitimacy, by signalling its isolation from the international community.

So to take the example of apartheid South Africa, you could make a case for refusing to play international cricket there, or disapproving when major rock stars played Sun City. There’s propaganda value to hosting an international sporting tournament — those who blether on about sport being “above politics” haven’t been paying attention — or having Dolly Parton play your national stadium. It signals, soft-power-wise, that your country, and by extension its government, is a legitimate member of the great family of nations. Bad luck on innocent cricket fans of all ethnic and political stripes; but more infuriating, you’d hope, to the cricket-loving white supremacists in charge of the country who felt humiliated by the snub.

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But books, I submit, are a totally different type of good from weapons, financial instruments, petroleum, sporting events or Dolly Parton concerts. They are no use to a regime; and they can sometimes be a nuisance to it. Reading is a private, rather than a communal event. Governments, as a rule, couldn’t give two hoots about what its citizens are reading at bedtime. You can’t hoist the flag over a scattered population of readers losing half an hour here or there, on a timetable of their own devising, in an imaginary world.

The reason that when states do take an interest in books it’s to ban them is precisely that they don’t fit into an authoritarian order (Israel, I should add, is not in that sense anything like an authoritarian regime). The widespread liberal enthusiasm for the free circulation of books links to this — as well as to the idea, though we shouldn’t push it too far, that fiction is in some way a moral agent. Here we get to George Eliot’s old line that “if Art does not enlarge men’s sympathies, it does nothing morally”. Books can change minds, spread ideas and, yes, enlarge sympathies.

So, to repeat, what does Rooney intend to achieve? She’s a bestseller, sure; but not to the extent, I imagine, that missing out on her new paperback will damage the Israeli economy. The publishing house is a private rather than a state concern. There’s no soft-power blow that withdrawing her book strikes to the prestige of the Israeli regime, either. As I say, they couldn’t give a toss which of their citizens get to read about the tangled love-lives and troubled consciences of Rooney’s protagonists.

And in deciding that ordinary Israeli citizens should not get to read her book (my guess, for what it’s worth, is that most of her Israeli readers will be of a liberal internationalist bent in any case) Rooney seems to sell her own work short by indicating that there’s nothing in it that might do the private and disaggregated good of enlarging sympathies, changing minds, expanding sensibilities. That it’s just product, like the tub of Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream that you also can’t buy in Israeli occupied territories.

Perhaps, as with Ben & Jerry’s, an Israeli boycott will be good branding for that product in the liberal west. But it’s hard to imagine it will do a damn thing for the Palestinians.

The synagogue was named for the philosopher and physician Maimonides, who led the Jewish community here in the 12^th century, when Cairo was the most important Jewish centre in the Middle East. The building was nothing but a roofless shell, but I discovered a work crew laying planks in one of the rooms, up to their knees in fetid water. It turned out that the Egyptian government — the same regime that took possession of much of the property of the 80,000 Jews who’d been forced out of the country two generations earlier — was engaged in a restoration project.

A polite young engineer on the site showed me the location of the stand where the Torah scroll was once read. Another man, in civilian clothes but with some vaguely military authority, told me not to take pictures.

There couldn’t be anything bad about the restoration of a synagogue, could there? It was hard to explain why none of this felt right; why I preferred to see the building left to rot, rather than see it made up like a corpse at a wake. I had the same feeling when I saw other journalists refer seriously to the “Jewish community of Cairo”, quoting a woman who was its “President”.

There was no community, just a regime-approved simulacrum designed to allow everyone to pretend that an ethnic cleansing hadn’t taken place, and that something dead was alive. It was Weekend at Bernie’s. At the time of my visit, the Egyptian Government was trying to get one of its officials elected to a top cultural post at the UN, an effort hindered by this same official’s past support for burning Hebrew books. A synagogue renovation couldn’t hurt his cause! The real Jews were long out of Egypt, but their imaginary avatars were still hard at work serving the narrative needs of others.

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By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

In Cairo, and at similar sites I’ve visited elsewhere in the Middle East and Europe, I’ve felt — in the words of the author Dara Horn — an “unarticulated sense that despite all the supposed goodwill, something was clearly off”. Horn has now articulated that sense, and many other important and elusive senses, in a superb new essay collection, People Love Dead Jews. (I should mention that I spent a summer with the author on a youth programme three decades ago, and have remained in touch.) Horn comes at her subject with a deep grasp of history and a personal commitment to the living Jewish tradition, with an acerbic sense of humour that pops out now and then — and also, refreshingly and necessarily, with anger.

One memorable essay recounts a bizarre trip to several “Jewish heritage sites” in Harbin, China, near the Siberian border. The city is known for its vast Ice Festival every winter, and also for being founded by Jews who were sent there by Tsarist Russia as part of a railway project, but were then dispossessed and driven out by a mix of imperial Japanese occupiers, White Russian bigots, and rapacious communists of both the Soviet and Maoist variety. (Horn quips that “Jewish heritage sites” — a benign term used in many countries for the purpose of multicultural branding and drawing Jewish tourism — sounds better than “Property Seized from Dead or Expelled Jews.”)

The author visits “the largest Jewish cemetery in the Far East”, which turns out not to be a real cemetery at all, but just gravestones on empty ground. The original cemetery was re-zoned years ago and the Harbin municipality moved only the markers, not the bodies, which now seem to be under an amusement park.

The names of those Jews have inevitably been forgotten. A very different posthumous fate befell Anne Frank, the subject of another essay in this book, who, in the decades since her murder at age 16, has been turned into a global brand. Horn is cutting about the way her famous diary has been used as a feel-good story that flatters readers in the same way that a renovated synagogue flatters the multiculturalism of the Egyptian state.

The book’s most famous sentence — “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart” — is something we all like to hear. But it obscures the obvious truth of the text, which was written a few weeks before Anne was turned in by Dutch neighbours to die in a German camp. No one was good enough to save her. “It is far more gratifying,” Horn writes, “to believe that an innocent dead girl has offered us grace than to recognise the obvious: Frank wrote about people being ‘truly good at heart’ before meeting people who weren’t.”

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And it’s easier to love a Jewish girl who can no longer express her potentially uncomfortable conclusions about her own life than it is to tolerate her annoyingly living co-religionists. In 2018, the Anne Frank museum in Amsterdam, located at the site of the house where she hid with her family, wouldn’t let a Jewish employee wear a kippah, explaining that this violated the museum’s “neutrality”. The directors changed their mind only after four months of deliberations, Horn observes, “which seems like a rather long time for the Anne Frank House to ponder whether it was a good idea to force a Jew into hiding.” A similar observation might be made about a place like Belgium, which also has nice Jewish museums and memorials, yet just passed a law banning kosher slaughter, a necessity for those living Belgian Jews who would like to practice their religion.

Looming over Horn’s essay collection is the place that is now home to the largest number of living Jews, the state of Israel. Israel is the ultimate demonstration of Horn’s thesis, though she mostly, and wisely, steers clear of the topic. Many people eager to venerate their vanished Jews are simultaneously uncomfortable with the ones who are still alive in the tiny corner of the Middle East where they fled after most other places on earth became unlivable.

Horn skirts close in one moving essay about a group of Yiddish actors and writers in the Soviet Union of the 1940s who were exploited for propaganda, then killed when they were no longer useful. The communists could tolerate Jews, she writes, “provided they weren’t practising the Jewish religion, studying traditional Jewish texts, using Hebrew, or supporting Zionism” — meaning that nearly all of Jewish life was out of bounds. “The Soviet Union thus pioneered a versatile gaslighting slogan, which it later spread through its client states in the developing world and which remains popular today: it was not anti-Semitic, merely anti-Zionist.”

This differentiation, which outlived the Soviets and is increasingly popular on the Western Left today, is largely lost on the plurality of Jews who are Israelis, and on the vast majority who think a Jewish state is a good idea. Older people here in Israel still remember how in the Yom Kippur War of 1973, just 28 years after the concentration camps closed, the same liberal countries of Europe that were expressing pious regret for the recent extermination of their Jews wouldn’t allow desperately needed American resupply flights to land in their territory en route to Israel, which had just been attacked by two Arab clients of the Soviets and was struggling to recover.

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And in 2021, young Jews can still see how countries like France, Germany, and the UK lay solemn wreaths at Holocaust memorials while participating in the isolation of the Jewish state at the UN, where the Human Rights Council, to give just one example, has condemned Israel more times than all other countries on earth combined. They can also observe how activists in places awash with Jewish heritage sites and Holocaust museums are energetically promoting a boycott of “Zionists” with telling success.

Horn doesn’t go there, in part because she doesn’t need to; her inspired essays say enough. But it is that kind of hypocrisy that’s at the heart of her argument. People Love Dead Jews helps explain the acute anxiety of many Jewish citizens of Western countries in 2021, who feel the ground shifting as old forms of thought reappear in public on both the Left and the Right — and as it becomes clear how few lessons have really been learned.

Any professional Instagrammer would shudder at the amateurish unsophistication of the video. But that is the point: Zemmour, 63, a bestselling author fired by his publishers this summer and a TV polemicist regularly sued for hate speech by advocacy groups (so far he’s won more often than he’s lost), reaches the parts of the electorate others don’t.

Although he still hasn’t formally declared his candidacy, his ramped-up media presence in recent months finally prompted polling institutes to include him in their first round voting intentions surveys. In three weeks, Zemmour jumped from 6% to 15%, ahead of Hard Left three-time candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon (9%), Green primary winner Yannick Jadot (9%) and Socialist Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo, who in the same period dropped from 7% to 5%.

But Le Z’s chief victims are all on the Right. He has all but killed off Marine Le Pen, who has dropped from 28% this summer to 17%. The two main Centre-Right candidates, Paris Region president Valérie Pécresse and Xavier Bertrand, both former Sarkozy Cabinet members, are lagging at 12% and 14% respectively, with Michel Barnier, the former Ogre of Brexit unexpectedly turned sovereignty champion, battling them for the Républicain nomination at 11%.

All are uninspiring: le Pen has been left seeming incompetent since her defeat by Macron in 2017; Pécresse and Bertrand are spouting the same things France has heard a hundred times before; and Barnier is baffling because the French, unlike the British, mostly don’t know who he is.

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Zemmour, much like other disruptive populist figures, appeals to those voters (and many no-longer voters) who had despaired of ever finding a candidate expressing their concerns. He speaks to their fears: the loss of French identity and rising insecurity caused, he believes, by unchecked immigration. His books, which have sold in the hundreds of thousands, compare a rose-tinted past Republic, where teachers were respected, fathers held solid jobs, families stayed together and classical culture wasn’t derided as pale and stale.

So far, so Trump — with a touch of Tucker Carlson. A Le Figaro journalist, Zemmour came to national pre-eminence when he was given his own daily debating show two years ago by CNEWS, a rolling news TV cable station which was re-inventing itself as the French Fox News. CNEWS’s ratings shot up, overtaking its CNN-like rival BFMTV. Le Z’s style, however, couldn’t be further from Trump’s. “Unlike my rivals, I write all my own books,” he jokes. He is highly cultured, even if one might argue that his erudition is preserved in aspic: he quotes 18^th-century philosophers and 19^th-century historians, with nary a concession to popular topics. (He does like football and the Rolling Stones.)

This fits French particularism: Les Déplorables here rarely object to cultural literacy, as long as they don’t feel it’s used to belittle them, Énarque-style. (Emmanuel Macron specialises in such putdowns.)

“Je comprends rien à ce qu’il raconte, mais il parle drôlement bien,” is a typical reaction to a Jacques Bainville- and Charles Maurras-quoting tirade by Le Z. His style and accent are demotic, his sentences are clear and his opinions trenchant. In a country where columnists, even in tabloids, prefer weighty circumlocutions to punchlines, this singles Zemmour out.

In common with Donald Trump, he relishes dropping live grenades in any debate. His first polemical essay (he’d already written a number of political biographies, including one of Jacques Chirac), published in 2006, was called Le Premier Sexe, in clear reference to Simone de Beauvoir’s 1949 The Second Sex. It bemoaned the “feminisation” of values, and whenever talking about it Zemmour never shied from adding fuel to the fire. “How did women enter the National Assembly and the Senate? Through parity laws that forced parties to select them. And I need not tell you how they were picked… They put in friends, wives, mistresses, etc.”

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He believes in the “Great Replacement” theory: he described in his Le Figaro column those areas in Paris where “one feels best, physically, the disappearance of the French population […] while, coming from the suburbs, at the end of a long journey from the depths of Africa, an Arab-Muslim people has replaced the former inhabitants.” He has continually hammered home his idea that foreign immigrants to France should give at least one “traditional” French first name to their children, drawn from the saints’ calendar, helping them to assimilate better into French society. “Your parents should have called you Corinne,” he told the television personality Hapsatou Sy, born near Paris of Senegalese parents.

In this, the Paris-born Éric Justin Léon Zemmour, son of French-Algerian Jews who had to leave Algeria in the Fifties during the independence war, harks back to the old French Républicain model of “assimilation” rather than of “integration”. “I’m a Frenchman of Berber origin,” he says. His peculiar brand of nostalgia dovetails with the long-standing history of France as a country of immigration, that, until recently, seamlessly crafted Frenchmen and women from anyone who wanted to become French.

This approach proved successful for centuries. So much so that the character who most defines, fondly, the French foibles, Astérix the Gaul, was created by the sons of immigrants: René Goscinny, a Polish-Argentinian Jew, and Albert Uderzo, an Italian builder’s son. (Another Italian builder’s son, François Cavanna, founded Charlie Hebdo.) This resonates with Zemmour’s audiences, who smart from being hectored by New York Times journalists shrieking that France is a country riven by structural racism.

Zemmour has used his personal story as a shield while positing particularly contentious theories, such as his idea that Marshall Pétain, the President of the puppet Vichy régime under German Occupation, “made a pact with the Devil, allowing the Nazis to deport foreign Jews in France in order to save French Jews”. This is a known far-Right trope in a country that carries the complicated trauma of the Collaboration.

It’s hard not to see here the influence of the old Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine’s father and founder of the National Front, now 93, whom Zemmour used to regularly visit in his Château de Montretout lair just outside Paris for long, lively discussions. Le Pen, who was fired from his own party by his daughter, himself joined the Resistance for a few weeks in 1944, aged 18. But he’s specialised in obsessive remarks about the Holocaust ever since. He is more of a provocateur than a dyed in the wool anti-Semite (which is not the case of a fringe he emboldened within his party) and probably helped cultivate Zemmour’s own taste for scandalous statements.

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By John Lichfield

Le Pen was never forgiven in France for his provocations; hence his own daughter’s symbolic parricide. But what is interesting about Zemmour is that, like Donald Trump, his mounting crowd of partisans discount his verbal excesses as just “Le Z being le Z”. In a country where, for centuries, strong opinions have had to be coated in supercilious obfuscation (there’s a reason why, for decades before the advent of the Internet, the French press was losing money), Zemmour is largely seen as an unscary shock jock, not a threatening fascist — except among the chattering classes, whom he enrages. This, of course, serves him.

What he has achieved, though, is in putting the three-I concerns of his potential voters — immigration, identity and insecurity — at the centre of the political discourse. Even a character as cautious and grey as Michel Barnier, in an effort to gain traction for the Centre-Right nomination, has now demanded a five-year moratorium on immigration to France, and attacked ECJ rulings as harmful to French sovereignty.

“The debate on immigration only exists in the [Paris] media now, no longer in public opinion,” says the shrewd social geographer Christophe Guilluy, the man who theorised “La France Périphérique”, the French version of David Goodhart’s Somewheres vs. Anywheres. This is an area where the rest of the political class, especially on the Right, usually runs scared. Their every new statement now pushes for “chosen immigration”, more means for the police, stricter criminal sentencing. Yet as former members of previous governments, however, none of the Républicain candidates seems credible on the subject.

Zemmour seems keen. He has hired a campaign team and rented a 4,000 sq ft campaign HQ less than a kilometre from the Élysée, funded by a sympathiser financier, Charles Gave. But he’s no professional politician. This an obvious asset now, that could turn into a flaw in the heat of a long campaign. If current trends hold, though, and it’s a big “if”; Zemmour might well get to the second round next year.

While all polls give a clear victory to Emmanuel Macron in the run-off today, against any candidate, the President’s reasonably high ratings of 40% last week have now slid to 34%. He is also facing a winter of discontent, with energy costs skyrocketing. His prime minister Jean Castex has just announced that the hikes would be deferred until next May, which utterly coincidentally happens to be after the April election. Added to which, 2017’s fresh young man in a hurry has now become the incumbent in a fractious country.

This is all to the disruptor’s favour. Zemmour has suddenly made France’s tired political race risky again. What if Macron didn’t even manage to clear the bar of the first round?

They fete themselves, and attack the Labour leadership, which they treat like a pantomime villain, with boos and hisses. Starmer is obviously Sylvia Plath’s Daddy: “Daddy, I have had to kill you”. The leadership named this event “Cancelled” on the conference app, but changed their minds, and this is their revenge. I can hear their narcissism in their cadences, and their applause. It is their Conference. They are Labour. When a trade union leader says her union is not affiliated to the Labour Party, they cheer. The obvious question: so why are they?

We hear Richard Burgon MP, and John McDonnell MP, then Corbyn comes, still denied the Labour whip. I marvel at the vanity of this supposedly humble man, but I never believed in his humility, any more than I believed in his anti-racism. Anti-racism is only meaningful when you extend it to your political enemies, and he never did. He ignored the abuse of live female Jewish MPs but stands in solidarity with dead Jews, who need nothing from him, can’t attack him, and are as theoretical to him as voters. The humble change their minds, and he never does: his humility is performative, in a shy glance at the youthful supporters, in a tender bowing of the head. He looks sorrowful — he lost — then happy: I still have you. To be fair, he does sound like the most sensible man in the room. But that is his job: to sound sane and vexed — Magic Grandpa — while his supporters bully and scream. “In the last leadership election, our members and unions were promised unity, but instead we are given division,” he mourns. He will spend the whole of Conference inciting division, and haunting Conference with his vanity.

He pleads for organisation: “If we want the Labour Party to be a vehicle to win elections to confront the climate emergency and redistribute wealth and power to the many from the few, then we need to come together” for policies “the majority of people actually want, not what the establishment and its media mouthpieces insist they should want. If our leadership won’t champion that path, our movement must and will.”

He speaks for a long time. I watch them as they get bored and shuffle about. I am not surprised by their boredom. Corbyn is a drug to them, and it is preferable to meet your drug on your own terms. Like the Queen, he is more magnificent in their heads. I think they treat him as he treats the voters: as theoretical.

The drama is in opposition here, the fun: and I am guilty of it too. I ignore the real Conference, in which Starmer wins most of the votes, glumly and determinedly securing the machinery of the party, and patiently being stalked by broadcast journalists who copy Paxman but have none of his gifts and so mostly sound like angry shoppers demanding a refund. I look at the edges: for the far-Left in flight. They are, I decide, very like chickens in nature and behaviour: when they feel threatened, they flock together, and they make a lot of noise.

I find Piers Corbyn standing outside Conference, talking into a megaphone. He does not speak to an audience because there isn’t one, beside me. He is talking to the megaphone, to which he seems surgically attached: to himself. “There were massive pterodactyls,” he says. There was a context, but the megaphone failed both of us.

I go to Jewish Voice for Labour [JVL], Corbyn’s ancient Pretorian guard of Jewish anti-Zionists, picketing Conference with a banner showing every one of their leadership scolded, or warned. It fills the page. You would think they might be ashamed, but they aren’t, because, like Corbyn, nothing is ever their fault. They are not as mad as the man with the painting of Keir Starmer segueing into Joseph Stalin, who killed 50 million people, standing just outside the Conference centre. “It is more his attitude to democracy,” he says, when I point out that Starmer has not killed 50 million people, or even one. But they are close behind.

At their event, which is called, hopefully, Labour in Crisis, they talk about the purge with all the self-knowledge of — well, people who don’t know a lot about Russia. I listen to 80 non-Jews enabled in their Jew hate by a clutch of Corbynist Jews. They are paranoiacs. “Maybe we should turn our phones off,” says Leah Levane, who was expelled from the Labour Party the day before, “Who knows who is listening? One of my comrades,” she adds, “suggested that I announce I am taking a big risk by appearing on a platform with myself”. She summarises Conference from the far-Left perspective, and quite well: “This is a shitshow.”

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John McDonnell MP is at the back, standing for ease of getaway. He needs it. Because Tony Greenstein, expelled from Labour for anti-Semitism, attacks a journalist from LBC while saying: “I don’t trust you!” He takes his telephone — he says the journalist is recording the vulnerable, meaning himself — and throws it on the floor. The journalist argues, but when he leaves the room, they applaud. Later, when Greenstein speaks — “it was never about anti-Semitism” — he says, meaning mainstream Jewish opposition to JVL, and it was — they cheer again. They love Greenstein because they love failure: he is their dilemma in a man. For them, it is easy to ignore an assault on a journalist if it is a journalist they dislike. It is easy, too, to laugh at Greenstein, who looks more like a child’s scruffy toy than anything else. Except, one day, the Greenstein will be bigger, and the journalist will be smaller.

It goes on all week: the Defend the Left rally, the Tribune rally, Labour against the Witchhunt [LAW], where Jackie Walker and Chris Williamson, both expelled from Labour, appear. At LAW, where Greenstein is again self-appointed security, a speaker says: “We would normally be full, but people are afraid to come.” I hope they don’t tell themselves that about the electorate. But they still believe in false consciousness: in the theoretical voter.

The night before Conference closes, the Socialist Campaign Group of Labour MPs meet in the circus tent at The World Transformed – the parallel far-Left conference. It features many of Corbyn’s allies. It is the shadow Shadow Cabinet. There is a banner in the corner that says, “Take Back Control”. It may be a joke. They stand out into the night in monstrous rain and, because Corbynism is a religion, they chant a creed: “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn.” Corbyn speaks last, but is here from the beginning, which surprises me — does he not have better things to do? Of course not: he only speaks to his supporters, because he is a god in tiny rooms.

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Barry Gardiner MP calls the crowd, “the people who give us all hope” and he has never needed hope more. “There is no meat on the shelves,” he cries, as evidence of catastrophe. He stops himself and says, “Sorry about the vegans.” A man shouts: “Fuck Starmer, fuck Starmer!” They veer between defiance and despair: “All the dreams and optimism have been sucked out of us”. I notice someone is playing patience on their iPhone. They will need it.

“Despair will get us nowhere,” says Nadia Whittome MP. “Don’t leave. What would have happened if Jeremy Corbyn had left?” John McDonnell MP agrees: “You cannot win the fight if you are not in the struggle.”

Richard Burgon MP, who depends on repetition for all his oratory, and manages to sound both stupid and convinced, shouts: “The Labour left is alive! The Labour left is winning on the Conference floor! The Labour left is winning in the streets, and it will one day win a leadership election!” Lloyd Russell-Moyle MP makes the mistake of calling Starmer, “a nice man”. There are jeers: “Keir Out!” Then: “Keith, Keith, Keith!” It sounds quite chilling when they shout it in unison; I have never been afraid anywhere as a journalist except with the far-Left. Again, they must not leave: “When the phoenix rises again,” says Russell-Moyle, “we will be here, and we will win the General Election.” But they won’t – not by screaming, “Keith” in circus tents. Do they know that? They go back to shouting, “Keith! Keith! Keith!” which I believe is the real purpose of this rally. I do not know why they think this taunt is so deadly, but it does expose their classism and ageism: taunting the lower-middle class Boomer who really is called Keith.

Starmer’s strategy is to ignore them, while taunting them with policy: during his speech to Conference — calm, appropriate, and thrillingly Blairite — he speaks through them. Still, they heckle and hold red cards up — it’s a football metaphor, which they planned: Show Starmer the Red Card. Except they aren’t the referee, not this time. They shout, “It was your fault!” during a Brexit section and “£15 an hour!” — which is the minimum wage they seek. One holds up a sign that says, “No purge”. Another shouts, “Free Julian Assange,” as if Starmer has Assange in his possession, and can hand him over. Mostly they seem confused: when another shouts, “Where is Peter Mandelson?” he sounds as if he genuinely wants to know.

Then — calmly, appropriately, thrillingly – Starmer says words to give them pain, all of which are a warm bath to the Red Wall voters Corbyn lost: police; patriots: NATO; patriots; NATO; police. I wished he had kissed a model of a nuclear submarine; or put a judge’s black cap on his head; or toasted The Queen.

The far-Left hated it. But the far-Left has lost. When it recovers, perhaps it will come to love it. Because the struggle is everything, and the struggle lives on.

In some respects, as an approach to understanding history, CRT has a certain credibility. Ibram X. Kendi’s retelling of American history in Stamped from the Beginning is lucid, well-crafted and internally consistent in its description of racism as both a motivating force and by-product of the American tale. He uses it to rationalise and support his claim that African Americans have failed to attain the fruits of American life in the same way as whites — higher education, corporate leadership, home ownership and intergenerational wealth — but suggests this is due almost entirely to racist policies embedded in American institutions and law.

It certainly does not serve any country’s history to ignore such things; they are fundamental strands of the national tapestry. But CRT and its adherents present an all too one-sided view. Its founding father, legal scholar Derrick Bell, even claimed African Americans had not made progress since Abolition, obliterating the enormous contributions — in politics, arts, culture and elsewhere — made by African Americans in the face of widespread discrimination.

CRT takes an opposite approach to many black leaders — Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois — who sought not to lower standards, but to raise them. Indeed, Black Americans made significant progress in terms of incomes and skills in the 1940s to the 1960s, before many of the most heinous forms of racism were abolished. Relying on whites to achieve an anti-racist enlightenment has never been a good strategy, in any era.

But rather than draw inspiration from this, today’s racial activists decry the habits often associated with success as reflections of “whiteness”. Some even denounce habits such as punctuality, rationality and hard work as reflective of “racism” and “white privilege”. Mathematics and science have also been dismissed for being reflective of “racism” and “white privilege”. Yet as African American economist Glenn Loury has observed, CRT wipes out agency by downgrading “western” concepts and “impedes the acquisition of traits that are valued in the marketplace and are essential for human development.”

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CRT also gives short shrift to many other histories. Most working-class Americans, particularly outside the American South, had little contact with black workers. Their struggles were not against African Americans but against the white factory owners who controlled capital. Working-class Americans or Brits of the last century do not fit easily into the role of oppressors, nor have they enjoyed the economic benefits CRT imputes to them by dint of racial privilege.

Also cast into what Trotsky famously called “the dustbin of history” are the family stories of most Americans, Canadians and Australians — most of whom came to supply cheap labour. Engels writes about the Irish being “demoralised by dirt and poverty”, living in the worst slums of Victorian England.[1. Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, translated by W.O. Henderson and W.H. Chaloner, (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press,1958), p.34] Whether in the United States or in Britain, Irish migrants were oppressed by their fellow whites. Although many Left-wing historians now downplay this repression, it was only in the middle of 20^th Century that being Irish Catholic disappeared as a disqualification for the highest office, through the election of John F. Kennedy.

Other newcomers, such as Italians, also faced discrimination and prejudice. But few faced more strenuous opposition than Asian immigrants, who were banned from immigrating or even owning land. During World War II, the US Government actually shipped Japanese Americans off to concentration camps, albeit not for extermination but to address the racist paranoia of their mostly white neighbours — a crime not perpetrated against white German Americans.

Today, Asian-Americans and groups like Hindus in the UK generally outperform whites in school and incomes — despite a history of discrimination against them, even after leaving harsher discrimination in East Africa. Instead of embracing this history, many advocates of CRT see this success as an affront. Although clearly “people of colour,” Asians have transcended “whiteness” by dint of hard work and educational achievement.

As a result, at Harvard, the birthplace of CRT, Asians now face official discrimination, much as Jews did in the last century. In the same vein, when violence is inflicted on Asians, advocates of CRT even suggest that it is somehow the product of white nationalism. Meanwhile, some racial theorists, like Robin DiAngelo, accuse Asians of being “white adjacent”, non-whites who succeed to copping Anglo attitudes.

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But perhaps no group has been more forgotten in the broad assault on “whiteness” than the Jews. CRT, notes David Suissa, publisher of the Los Angeles Jewish Journal, forces people of whatever background to allow themselves to be defined by their peculiar “systemic ethos”. This means that Jews are whites like any other, despite millennia of persecution in virtually every country where they have settled. Their right to a separate identity is denied; their unique history, obliterated.

However successful they may be today, it took centuries — including a 365-year exile — for Jews to become full citizens of the British Empire. In America, where their rights were guaranteed by the Constitution, they still struggled against fierce WASP opposition, seeking to block their ascent into the highest echelons of business, professions, media, culture and politics. Given their history, Jews often identified with black communities, and the oppressed in general, and were particularly early and disproportionate backers of African American equality.

It is strange, then, that while CRT advocates seek to obliterate three thousand years of unique history, much of the Jewish Establishment — including the Anti-Defamation League — has been slow to distance themselves from Black Lives Matter, even after riots led to desecrations of synagogues. They even embraced BLM allies like Al Sharpton, a Brooklyn preacher with a history of leading anti-Jewish protests.

In modern America, Jewish leaders would rather adopt the politically acceptable focus on white nationalists as their biggest threat. But that doesn’t change the fact that despite several bloody incidents perpetrated by individual white nationalists, a significant proportion of recent attacks on Jews came from African Americans, criminals, the mentally ill or by Palestinian activists. Neo-Nazis are not thick on the ground in Brooklyn or the Fairfax district of Los Angeles where recent acts of violence have occurred.

Meanwhile, CRT, as Rabbi Meir Y. Soloveichik has noted, represents an increasingly secular America: “a strange form of moral Puritanism without faith, and therefore without forgiveness.” Its functionaries on campuses and in the street often embrace their dogma like the sometimes hysterical Chinese Red Guards, who demonised their own country’s rich history to create a totally new one. Mao would certainly have understood such things as dismantling “the systems of hegemonic power” and introducing compulsory “anti-racism training” throughout education, business, and government.

The authoritarian nature of the movement is not hard to spot. Ibram X. Kendi has called for an Orwellian federal Department of Anti-racism with extra-constitutional power to abolish any law deemed insufficiently “anti-racist”, He identifies racism and capitalism as “conjoined twins”: both will have to collapse before racism can be eradicated. Of course, this is hard to reconcile with the lack of racial harmony in China and other socialist countries, much less the vast fortunes Kendi and BLM receive from the oligarchy.

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The good news is that CRT’s racialist agenda may not become a permanent fixture. The vast majority of Americans — including millennials and minorities — do not, for example, favour defunding the police. Most American voters — by wide margins — reject the notion of teaching Critical Race Theory in schools, even though the effort is adopted by the billionaire class as well as corporate HR departments, most Democratic politicians, the White House and the powerful teachers’ unions.

Equally promising is the growing alarm among liberals —including TV host Bill Maher and journalist Andrew Sullivan — whose devotion to the ideal of colour-blindness is dismissed by CRT adherents as a “fantasy”. Similarly, former Clinton advisor Bill Galston has pointed out that CRT is a “doctrine” that rejects the Enlightenment, “tacitly requires deconstructing the American order and rebuilding it on an entirely different foundation”. In other words, it is not a project likely to be enacted democratically.

Perhaps nothing more reflects the “on-the-street” reality, as opposed to Twitter, than the growing tendency towards intermarriage and interracial dating — not only in the US, but in Canada, Australia and the UK. Inter-racial dating in America is up 40% since 2003, according to the Census, while interracial marriage has soared from 3% in 1967 to roughly one in six now.

There is, of course, more work to be done. African-American incomes — as well as those of Pakistanis and West Indians in the UK — have not kept pace. And there are still racial imbalances in imprisonment, confrontations with law enforcement and worse health effects, particularly during the pandemic.

But whatever is needed to help African Americans will only gain political support if it focuses on alleviating the economic and health challenges of all races. The key to addressing our racial divides, notes Richard Parsons, former President of Citigroup, lies not with pushing racial distinctions but promoting economic growth and opportunity. There will never be “unity”, he suggests, until people “feel it in their pockets”. The goal should be to do whatever it takes to address poverty and distress, whether in the south Chicago ghetto, Appalachia or the British Midlands.

Whether they realise it or not, CRT and its backers appear to be undermining this goal. In the last decade, the percentage of Americans who consider relations between black and white communities as “poor” has almost doubled, to near 60%. Certainly, policies of “reverse discrimination” seem likely to stir resentment. People don’t like to be forced to beg forgiveness and make recompense for the sins of their fathers, especially when they have no reason to believe their fathers , most of whom immigrated well after the Civil War, have done nothing wrong. Indeed, it’s hardly surprising that the anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish far-Right — including the neo-Nazi National Socialist Club, Proud Boys and Aryan Nations Arizona — has targeted anti-CRT protests as a way build support.

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Despite the persistence of these racists, there’s still a reason that non-whites continue to move to Britain and its colonial offspring. After all, these places offer important legal protections not common in the developing world. China’s autocratic Xi Jinping may offer “the Chinese dream”, but the number of immigrants from China living in the United States more than doubled between 2000 and 2018, reaching nearly 2.5 million, with many others heading to Canada and Australia. There is little such movement to China — where the foreign population is barely one in a thousand —or most other Asian countries.[2. Carlos Echeverria-Estrada and Jeanne Batalova, “Chinese Immigrants in the United States,” Migration Policy Institute, January 15, 2020]

In the end, our shared historical legacy — so different than China — represents the essential basis upon which we can expand and improve our multi-national societies. It does little good to demolish the historical bonds we, as citizens, feel, even as we recognise that our greatest heroes — whether its America’s Founding Fathers, Lincoln, Churchill, Roosevelt or Martin Luther King — were in some ways flawed.

The solution to the racial crisis in the West requires not separating people by race but by finding common grounds upon which to create a successful, diverse and coherent society. Without “awareness” of our history, its differing tangents and permutations, we, as classicist Michael Grant once noted, will be “blindfolded in our efforts to grapple with our future”. Communities that don’t fit a certain label — whether they are Jewish or Asian — will continue to find their histories obscured. And more important, we will steal from ourselves and our children the common sense of past needed to forge more perfect unions.

Even so, a vast Holocaust memorial will soon rise in Victoria Tower Gardens, next to parliament, against opposition from local residents and many British Jews, including Holocaust survivors. But the last obstacles are overcome: the government has pushed it through because they want it.

There is already an adequate memorial in Hyde Park — size does not matter here; Albert Speer loved size — and a permanent exhibition at the Imperial War Museum less than a mile from parliament. The newest memorial — there are more than 300 already worldwide, rising seemingly in harmony with anti-Semitism itself, like a bad symphony — will attempt to convey meaning through what looks like a giant toast rack, or a child’s toy; simple for ease of understanding.

They all do that. The Holocaust memorial has become an architectural cliché. For some reason blocks are favoured, as if part of some giant cosmic warehouse, and that all adds to the ennui; the numbness; the nothingness. There is no Holocaust memorial better than a live Jew, or, even better, a Jew who is not afraid. But it’s too late for that. Britain did not behave perfectly: far from it. We offered nothing during the Evian Conference of 1938, convened by the League of Nations to discuss German and Austrian refugees. The Evian Conference is not much discussed, probably because it locked European Jews in a prison the size of a continent for ease of murder. Joseph Goebbels was thrilled by this dismal indifference to Jews, writing in his diary that the Nazi regime was better than the so-called “civilised” world because it was more honest.

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In fact, Lord Winterton, a member of the House of Lords and the British representative at Evian, apologised to Germany for “unwarranted interference in affairs of state”. His official quote was: “The United Kingdom is not a country of immigration”. Foreign office memos were reliably anti-Jewish: “this office spends too much time dealing with the wailing Jews”; “Why should the Jews be spared distress…when they have deserved it?”

After an international outcry, 288 German Jews were admitted to Britain from the refugee ship the St Louis — “the voyage of the damned” — after America and other countries shut them out. (Three other countries eventually took refugees from the ship but many perished.) The captain Gustav Schröder even considered wrecking the ship off Cornwall to save his passengers. 10,000 Jewish children were admitted to Britain — the Kindertransport — after lobbying by MPs including Eleanor Rathbone and Josiah Wedgwood, Quakers and British Jews, though their parents were excluded, of course. There were British rescuers. The banker Nicholas Winton saved 669 mostly Jewish children from Czechoslovakia before the war. The Mills and Boon novelist Mary Burchell smuggled valuables out of Germany so refugees could meet the financial requirements to enter Britain. Frank Foley, a passport control officer — and spy — in the British Embassy in Berlin “bent the rules” to save Jewish families. But the small quota of Jews allowed to British-controlled Palestine — 15,000 a year from 1939 for five years — was never filled. After the war the British government agreed to take any Jewish children still alive in continental Europe. They found 732, some of whom were the Children of Windermere, sheltered for a while in the Lake District. Rescue, as I said, is the perfect memorial. And that was that: until now.

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Why build a Holocaust memorial here, now — a sort of awful twin to the Palace of Westminster, which is likewise otherworldly and alienating? I, who experience Britain as a haven — my ancestors are Polish Jews and between 1941 and 1945 Polish Jewry declined from roughly 3,400,000 to 300,000 with mass murder (we do not know the exact figures, for obvious reasons) — will not be able to look at it. I have an idea that it will sully, for me, something sacred. I know, of course, that not all minority communities feel this way: why should they? It is one Jew’s emotional response. Many British Jews want this memorial and lobbied the Conservative government for it.

But even if your motives are decent, all the evidence points one way: Holocaust memorials, by themselves, do not work. They have not worked: the news will tell you that. We do not know what works. A stable political system might help — anti-Semitism is, most prosaically, a pressure valve in times of social and economic distress — as would a detailed rebuttal of every lazy and ancient libel against the Jewish people: the deicide; the well-poisoners; the puppet masters. Those who call Jews puppet masters will have a lot to say about this memorial. They are saying it already. They say our misery is favoured, that we exploit it, that we have special access to power to ensure a large memorial to our dead.

For example, the Church in Britain is planning a formal apology to the Jews for medieval anti-Semitism. But it won’t talk about the role of the scriptures in inciting it; they remain. Teaching the Holocaust outside the confines of wider Jewish history is pointless. Without an educated and engaged population aware of the context of this genocide — and all genocides, separately — the Holocaust assumes the dimensions of a fairy tale. Enter the Palace of the Ugly Toast Rack, children, and be afraid, but do not be wary. Here is a place of such unique evil it has nothing to do with you. Build the structures high and they are inhuman. The only thing people really need to understand about the Holocaust is that it happened to people like them; to avoid another they must do something. Will the memorial facilitate that?

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No, it reads like denial, and cynicism, a kind of national virtue signalling: Britain turns its face to the place it has done least wrong, to distract from wrongs elsewhere. To read of plans commemorating Jews — easy to rally support for, since they are dead — while politicians tut at migrant boats and fantasise about interning refugees on islands is nauseating. Europe is facing the greatest refugee crisis since the war. The government is playing catch-up in bronze because it’s easy. Perhaps, in 80 years, when the current migrants are shut out, and dead, they will be honoured with an ugly memorial.

There is a memorial already in Victoria Tower Gardens: Samuel Sanders Teulon’s memorial to Thomas Fowell Buxton, the abolitionist. That it is to the abolitionist rather than the enslaved is typical. It is obvious what should be memorialised by the British state at the centre of its pomp: slavery and murderous colonialism. But that is too loaded for a government led by a man whose novel Seventy-Two Virgins is little more than a collection of racist epithets. Better to let compliant Jews have their memorial and, to the rest, nothing.

Beautiful trees will be destroyed: the opposite of the Jewish dictum to choose life. The Buxton memorial — such as it is — will be overshadowed; black pain dwarfed, quite literally, by Jewish pain. A promise will be broken: in 1879 a donation of £1000 was given by the Rt Hon W H Smith, on condition that Victoria Tower Gardens would serve local people in perpetuity. It will become a target for anti-Semites, and their myths of Jewish power. And, finally, as a Holocaust survivor pointed out to me this morning, it’s on a flood plain. That should be enough.

I wrote the script for that film — so Bouyeri pinned a note to Theo’s chest when he killed him, declaring that I would be next.

During his trial, Bouyeri said very little. But what he did say chilled everyone present. He declared he was not sorry for Theo’s murder; that he would do it again. As Geraldine Coughlan, who covered the trial for the BBC, recalled: “There was total shock in the courtroom. Some people were actually standing up because they couldn’t believe what he was saying. It was really without emotion.”

Bouyeri was a pure, cold-hearted killer, radicalised to believe a narrative that anyone who disparages Islam or the Prophet must die. Over the past week, I have repeatedly thought back to that trial, and Bouyeri’s unswerving belief in his Islamist worldview. For it seems to me that, sixteen years later, his need to shape the world within a narrative has found an unlikely new following here in the West.

Of all the narratives competing for our attention, there is none as volatile as the one that tells the story of Israel-Palestine. Indeed, there is no other conflict in the world that manages to combine all the highly charged story-lines of our time: the narrative of the oppressor versus the oppressed, of the coloniser versus the colonised, of the genocide perpetrator and system of supremacy.

It is a subject on which everyone seems to have a strong opinion. It is overloaded with emotion; with people desperate to tell their side’s “truth”. Instead of a thoughtful, conscientious approach, people rush to defend their “side” — and, in doing so, swiftly drift away from facts, and closer and closer to narratives that dismiss and overshadow objective truths.

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It was a false narrative that led Mohammed Bouyeri to kill Theo, and express his intent to kill me. So I don’t say this lightly: the narratives circulating today regarding Israel and the Jewish people are equally dangerous, and are already wreaking havoc around the world. How else are we to explain the fact that, since the most recent conflict erupted between Israel and Gaza, acts of anti-Semitism have spiked in many corners of the Western world?

Of course, for several decades, there have been clandestine pockets of anti-Semitism throughout Europe and the US. This is not a new phenomenon. Despite the horrors that culminated at Auschwitz, anti-Semitism has been haunting our societies for years, continuing to be taught in far-Left, far-Right and Islamic circles. I first encountered these teachings as a child in Africa; as a teenager I joined the Muslim Brotherhood, where I was taught to believe that Jews were not even human, but descendants of pigs and monkeys.

Today, however, anti-Semitism is no longer confined to the fringes of society, but instead has started to leak into the mainstream. Social media has turned it into a contagion, normalising anti-Semitic tropes and attacks. Following the recent outbreak of violence in the Middle East, the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism found “17,000 tweets which used variations of the phrase, ‘Hitler was right’” in just one week. Likewise, anti-Semitism has ferociously spread across Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. This is in large part due to a group of popular “influencers” who — along with their thousands of young, impressionable followers — use their platforms to highlight the Palestinians’ plight. No doubt they think they are fighting a just cause. What they may not realise, however, is that they are inadvertently harming Jews, including those living in the West.

I say “inadvertently” because I believe the majority of users posting infographics and memes about Israel-Palestine are simply under-educated and ill-informed. After all, one cannot explain thousands of years of history between Arabs and Israelis in a few screenshots, let alone 280 characters.

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By Ayaan Hursi Ali

Take supermodel Bella Hadid, who, as Daniella Greenbaum Davis has pointed out, has almost four-times as many Instagram followers as there are Jews in the entire world. In response to the conflict, she joined a pro-Palestinian protest in Brooklyn, chanting: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” — an anti-Semitic slogan coined by the Palestine Liberation Organization to call for the elimination of Israel.

Until recently, it was a chant frequently associated with the likes of Hamas, a terrorist organisation whose 1988 charter explicitly called for genocide of the Jewish people. But in today’s hysterical climate, one of the West’s most famous celebrities can use it and expect applause. Indeed, when the Israeli government accused Hadid of advocating for the elimination of the Jewish state, many of her fans attempted a semantic defence, claiming that Hadid was innocently advocating for a free Palestine, without any harm to the Jews.

But this is where the role of false narratives becomes increasingly alarming. It is my opinion that Ms. Hadid was unaware of the context and history of the chant; I do not believe she understood she was calling for the elimination of Israel, or the expulsion or genocide of the Jewish people. Similarly, I do not believe that she, nor her niece’s father, singer Zayn Malik, understood the implications of describing Israel as a “colonizer”.

Yet we must not ignore the fact that such descriptions have a pernicious impact on society at large. For whether they realise it or not, sinister actors and adversaries — look no further than China — have started to capitalise on the ignorance of our progressive elites, using their narratives to harness and spread more anti-Semitism.

Indeed, Jewish communities across the world are already experiencing the fall-out from a new wave of anti-Semitism that has been legitimised by celebrity activists. This month, for example, has also seen the rise of a second frequently misunderstood slogan: a version of “Khaybar, Khaybar, oh Jews, the army of Mohammed will return”, which dates back to the massacre of the Jews by Muhammad and his army in Khaybar, northern Arabia, in the 7^th century.

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By Edward Luttwak

Today, it remains a battle-cry used by Muslims when attacking Jews or Israelis; in the past month alone, it has been used not only in Istanbul, Casablanca, Kuwait City, Doha and Karachi, but in western Europe, too: in Utrecht, Warsaw, Vienna, Rome, Munster, London, Brussels, Berlin and Amsterdam.

The resurgence of anti-Semitism Europe, in many ways, is unsurprising; it has been simmering under the surface for over a decade. Yet despite a number of terrible anti-Semitic attacks in recent years, America, by comparison, has felt relatively immune — immune, that is, until now. Indeed, I have friends who moved to the US from Europe a decade ago to escape anti-Semitism. This month, for the first time, they are now questioning whether it is safe to walk to synagogue or wear their kippahs.

And is it really so hard to see why? Last Saturday, a man was arrested for attacking Jewish diners outside a restaurant in Los Angeles “on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon”. Two days earlier, a Jewish man, Joseph Borgen, was attacked by a group of pro-Palestinian activists in New York City’s Times Square. They reportedly beat him with a crutch, sprayed him with mace, called him a “dirty Jew” and explained that “Hamas is going to kill all of you”. Remarkably, a photo of one of the men accused of assaulting Borgen, Waseem Awawdeh, recently appeared in a now-deleted Instagram photo posted by Bella Hadid from a pro-Palestinian protest.

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Yet what I found most disturbing was how Awawdeh’s comments following the attack mirrored those of Mohammed Bouyeri’s after he killed Theo van Gogh. Just as Bouyeri refused to apologise, Awawdeh reportedly proclaimed from his jail cell: “If I could do it again, I would do it again.” A video has since been released, purporting to show Awawdeh leaving prison on bail; his friends welcome him outside, put him on their shoulders and proclaim that he was a “hero”.

And herein lies the problem: when such odious acts as Awawdeh’s can be represented as heroism, you suddenly see how easy it is for false narratives to turn into deadly fantasies.

And the apparatus? Well, that’s the machinery that helps you to decide whether or not to take these words seriously. The masthead of UnHerd. The byline. My bona fides, that sketch what I do when I’m not here, brightening your day. And, most importantly, the little numbers that show I’ve attempted some homework and give you the means to mark it. The footnotes[1.  Thanks for looking. You’re my kind of person. And you may be already thinking: is this a true footnote, or is it an endnote? Digital texts blur this distinction.].

The footnote is a small thing, but so much depends on it. Good writers can use it to supply data that might otherwise disrupt the flow of their story. The single most pleasurable element of Matthew Sturgis’s excellent Aubrey Beardsley: A Life (1999), for instance, is the footnote revealing that Dame Edna’s creator Barry Humphries furnished the information that the subject’s name should be pronounced “Ah-brey” and not “Orbrey”[2. Matthew Sturgis, Aubrey Beardsley: A Life (1999), p. 30. Humphries heard it from Beardsley’s contemporary, the painter Charles Moresco Pearce]. In fiction, Susannah Clarke and Flann O’Brien have used footnotes to add depth and curiosity to their own strange invented worlds[3. Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004) cites a number of invented occult texts; Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman (1967) cites invented scholarly works on Professor de Selby, who believes that water can be diluted and that night is a product of “black air”]. In most non-fiction, the footnote (and its sister, the endnote) articulates a covenant of trust between reader and author: an assurance that sources are being used with honesty and integrity. It confirms good and scrupulous work; reveals error, bad faith and intellectual poverty. When it comes to distinguishing the bullshit from the good stuff, the footnote is your friend.

So let’s work through the two examples that made me want to write this piece. They emerged in the last few days from opposite ends of the political spectrum — if such a thing still exists. One went viral, the other failed to spread — though it did provide a glimpse into a deep reservoir of prejudice.

The first came in the form of a scientific paper claiming that face masks were not only useless against the spread of Covid-19, but might in themselves “cause health deterioration, developing and progression of chronic diseases and premature death” [sic]. The study had appeared in the journal Medical Hypotheses in November 2020, but attracted little attention until mask-averse commentators tried to share it on social media — and found that it was being blocked or red-flagged. At which point ‘Facemasks in the COVID-19 era: A health hypothesis’ became a cause célèbre.

The celebrants were a familiar cast of culture warriors and conspiracy theorists, among them Diamond and Silk, a pair of pro-Trump activists with 2.38 million Facebook followers, Raheem Kassam, co-host of Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast and author of Enoch Was Right (2018), and Naomi Wolf, whose current conspiracy theories about vaccines, time travel and Israel’s influence over Dr Anthony Fauci defy both decency and easy summary. As they posted and tweeted, news sites of the kind unlikely to win a Pulitzer lit up like Diwali, many following the line that “Big Tech tyrants” had suppressed a “peer-reviewed study done by Stanford University that demonstrates beyond a reasonable doubt that face masks have absolutely zero chance of preventing the spread of Covid-19”.

Trouble was, this study was neither peer-reviewed nor a product of Stanford University. Its author, Baruch Vainshelboim, is a clinical exercise physiologist with no institutional position at Stanford or apparently anywhere else[4. “The author’s affiliation is inaccurately attributed to Stanford, and we have requested a correction. Stanford University has never employed Baruch Vainshelboim. Several years ago (2015), he was a visiting scholar at Stanford for a year, on matters unrelated to this paper.” Email (21/04/21) from Julie Greicius, Senior Director, External Communications, Stanford Health Care, School of Medicine]. (He did not respond to requests to clarify his status.) His paper appeared in Medical Hypotheses, a peculiar anything-goes journal whose tolerance for fringe ideas has led it to accept papers proposing that that high-heeled shoes cause schizophrenia, masturbation alleviates nasal congestion and Gulf War Syndrome is a form of beef allergy.

Did this discredit him? Not much, according to the American Institute for Economic Research, which praised the editorial ethos of Medical Hypotheses and the “well-published and well-cited” Dr Vainshelboim for “a devastating analysis of the harms caused by widespread, universal masking”. Dr Vainshelboim is certainly prolific. According to Google Scholar he has published six papers in the last 300 days, on subjects a various as lung transplants, cardiorespiratory fitness and handgrip strength in the elderly. And his analysis is devastating, if you care about proofreading or believe that a citation should accurately reflect the source to which it leads.

Vainshelboim’s paper has 67 references. If you go to the trouble of following them, you get the measure of his work. His claim, for instance, that masks cause a build-up of C02 in the lungs – now thoroughly debunked – is supported by an article in Medical Hypotheses that seems as flaky as his own. His assertion that the case fatality rate of COVID-19 is considerably less than 1% is backed up with a paper from March 2020, the earliest days of the pandemic. A study with which he argues the uselessness of masks actually draws the opposite conclusion: “Surgical face masks,” it reports, “significantly reduced detection of influenza virus RNA in respiratory droplets and coronavirus RNA in aerosols.” When the thread of each note is pulled, all that really remains of Dr Vainshelboim’s thesis is his mangled assertion that he is “providing prosper information for public health and decisions making.”[sic]

Bad work like this circulates because it appears to be academic research in the same way that Mickey Mouse appears to be a mouse. Its apparatus — abstract, footnotes, references, tables — beguiles the eye, particularly one already convinced it can discern the shape of an authoritarian New World Order. When challenged, conspiracy theorists often tell their detractors to do their research — by which they usually mean sharing online articles they haven’t quite finished. Dr Vainshelboim’s paper is a perfect addition to the reading list, and can now take its place in a pseudo-scholarly system where rotten sources move endlessly along lines that were established long before Alex Jones or David Icke were born.

Which brings me to my second example. A deep historical one from the fascinating space of the Twitter feed of the former Labour MP Chris Williamson. “This thread,” he declared last week, “is essential reading for anyone interested in creating a better society that isn’t run in the interests of wealthy elites.” The wealthy elites, it turned out, were the Rothschilds, whose name, in this context, seemed not so much an anti-Semitic dog whistle as an anti-Semitic Spinal Tap guitar solo.

The hero of the thread shared by Williamson was Abraham Lincoln, who, it related, had rejected the offer of a 24% interest bank loan from the Rothschilds bank and instead opted to pay his Civil War troops by issuing the greenback dollar. “Democracy will rise superior to money power,” declared Lincoln, in a quote with a plausible citation —  “Senate document 23, p. 91, 1865” — which was then followed by a cry of Rothschild vengeance, attributed to the London Times of 1865. “That government must be destroyed, or it will destroy every monarchy on the globe.” One of Williamson’s followers suggested that this story should form part of the school curriculum.

So where did this come from? Perhaps Williamson wasn’t aware, but the original poster had found these details in an online article by one Justin Walker. It had also attracted the attention of the think tank Modern Money Scotland, and the tax campaigner Richard Murphy, Visiting Professor of Accounting at Sheffield University Management School, briefly an economic adviser to Jeremy Corbyn. Murphy hailed the piece as proof that the banking reforms he favours were “a battle tested (literally) alternative to debt and austerity based economies” — and posted it on his website. Which was unfortunate. Because all the key sources in this article are false — the invention of 19th-century conspiracy theorists.

The vengeful speech attributed to the Rothschilds never appeared in The Times. It is a fiction that has been circulating since the late 19th century, as evidence of English perfidy. (It had some strange fans, and in 1898 received a sustained disquisition in the house journal of the Koreshans, a Florida cult that believed the earth was hollow.) It is often attributed to The Hazzard Circular, but hereby hangs another strange tale: the Circular is an 1880s forgery that purports to reveal a plot against America by a cabal of English bankers — and may have no material existence beyond its excited quotation in the work of figures such as Sarah Emery, author of Seven Financial Conspiracies Which Have Enslaved the American People (1887)[5. The quote is read aloud from a copy of the Hazzard Circular in this Congressional hearing from 1935].

But what about the quotes from Abraham Lincoln? The footnote is our friend. There is no Senate document 23 from 1865. Flip the year to 1939, however, and we end up in a Congressional Committee with Senator Robert L Owen, who is sharing a long string of Lincoln quotes in which the President rails against “money power”. And here’s the really odd bit. Lincoln said none of these things. They are words imagined into his mouth by the Canadian money reformer G.G. McGeer in his book The Conquest of Poverty (1935)[6. Gerald Grattan McGeer, The Conquest of Poverty (1935), pp. 186-7]. McGeer was an anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist as well as a ventriloquist. The Conquest of Poverty argues that Lincoln was murdered by “the ‘secret foes’ of the nation … the money dealers, the members of the age-old craft of usury, whose prototypes were responsible for the crucifixion of Christ.[7.  Ibid., p. 212]”

Richard Murphy quickly removed the Rothschild quote from his website, apologising for his unwitting circulation of something potentially anti-Semitic. But Abraham Lincoln represents a tougher problem. One of McGeer’s phoney quotes forms part of the argument of Murphy’s magnum opus, The Joy of Tax (2016)[8.  Richard Murphy, The Joy of Tax (2016), p. 60.]. It’s part of Murphy’s perfectly reasonable case for reducing the power of the markets over the economy. And no wonder it fits so well: it was written in the 1930s, not the 1860s.

The citation is “Library of Congress, No, 23 … p. 91.” And we know where that leads. Where all footnotes lead. To sources, fair and foul. To those little numbered elements, often ignored, that form the body of the text, and show us its substance, and how it was made, and how to judge it.

That is my father’s family. My mother’s was comically different. “As goy as it gets,” a friend once remarked. Seeking to escape a dysfunctional and claustrophobic working-class home in rural Leicestershire, she dreamed of another life. Running away to become a nurse, she imagined something more exotic, well-travelled, urban. And her name for that became “Jewish”.

She had no idea what that really meant, of course. But when she met my father’s mother in her Golders Green flat, she marvelled that they said “darling” all the time and had carpet in the loo. This is what she wanted. But by then my father was already in full flight from his Jewishness. When Nazi bombs fell on London, he was evacuated to a small Christian prep school in Devon where they wore little pale blue crosses on their caps. The war stole his history. And we never spoke about it.

This was the joke of my family background: I have a non-Jewish mother who pretended she was, and a Jewish father who pretended he wasn’t.

It is nearly a decade now since all this buried history unexpectedly caught up with me. I had just resigned from St Pauls following the Cathedral’s decision to evict the Occupy movement from the cathedral precincts. And I was in search of a new job.

I had landed an interview in Liverpool, and having a bit of time to spare beforehand, I went to check out the synagogue that was just along the road from the Cathedral. I understood there was some distant family connection. Chancing my luck, I banged on the door, and was welcomed in by the caretaker.

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There on the wall was a large oil painting of my great great uncle, Rev Samuel Friedeberg, who ran the synagogue for over 40 years. I stood staring up at his face for a good ten minutes. Then I left, filled with some weird and uncontrollable emotion. I had to stop and sit at the side of the road. All I could do was cry. And I really didn’t really know why.

The Friedebergs had arrived in Britain sometime during the reign of George I, which makes them among the oldest Jewish families in the country. Over time, they pulled themselves out of the ghetto in Portsmouth, and began to do increasingly well for themselves. They were constantly changing names, trying to fit in, trying to deflect the brutal anti-Semitic culture of the Portsmouth Point. Mordechai became Mark. Bilhah became Elizabeth. And eventually, Friedeberg became Frampton or Fraser.

Why had that paintings so affected me? A few months before the Occupy episode, I had been interviewed for the post of Bishop of Edinburgh. And I was asked “Where are you from?”, a once innocuous question that is now politically freighted. Identity politics has turned it into a threat, rather than an open invitation. I blithely explained the provenance of Fraser, that, no, it didn’t imply some deep Scottish connection. As it happens, I wasn’t all that bothered that I was not chosen for the job. But I was seriously disturbed by the question.

And I think seeing that portrait in the synagogue exploded the same buried question in my emotional life. Where was I from? Even my name felt made up: Giles — an attempt to claim some sort of poshness, chosen by my aspirational originally working-class mother — and Fraser — an attempt to disguise Jewish origins. It was like I, too, was made up, something confected, artificial. A lie.

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By Giles Fraser

What, then, of my Christianity? Was that also an elaborate disguise? Generations of my father’s family had struggled to climb their way into the establishment, to be more English than the English, distancing themselves from the more recently arrived Jewish immigrants from Russia. And what to make of Samuel Friedeberg — dressing up in clerical collars, mimicking the clergy of the Church of England, styling himself Reverend as many Jewish clergy did at the time? Being a Canon of St Paul’s Cathedral was the ultimate family triumph. And, for me, it didn’t work out. Disraeli once described himself as the blank page between the Old and the New Testaments. Queen Victoria didn’t understand him, but I do.

My attempt to reckon with this complex and conflicted past is going to be published this month. Chosen: Lost and Found between Christianity and Judaism is no doubt a curious book. “Part autobiography, part religious reflection, part ghost story” is how the journalist Paul Vallely has rightly described it. I suspect that many immigrant families will understand those tangled emotions that attend the desire to fit in with a new culture, the various adjustments that it requires, even the questions of betrayal that it sometimes raises. I, too, call the book a ghost story because my forebears come at me as ghosts, figures that I ignored for most of my life, and ones that have not received a proper burial.

It is a religious reflection, too, because of the curious hybridity with which I have struggled. And something that was baked into the very origins of Christianity itself — a religion founded by a Jew, whose first followers were Jews, and yet one that, within a few generations of its origins, was distancing itself as much as it was able from its Jewish beginnings. In other words, Christianity itself requires a great deal of unscrambling. Because in the attempt to ingratiate itself with the dominant Roman culture, Christianity is also the product of a kind of wilful forgetfulness of its past, a betrayal even. And intellectually, I think we are only just beginning to work this through.

But what sort of work is working it through? And how does working it through help? In 1915, Sigmund Freud — a secular Jew with a complex and ambivalent relationship with his past — published Mourning and Melancholia. The difference between these two conditions is crucial. Melancholia is the unconscious pain of buried loss, one that does not even know how to name what has been lost, or indeed is even aware that something has been lost. It is a kind of miserable stuckness where a kind of diffuse unspecified unsettledness seems to stay with you, wearing you down. Mourning, on the other hand, is the conscious attention to what has been lost, allowing grieving to take place. And eventually healing.

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By Giles Fraser

I think my reaction to that painting in a Liverpool synagogue was the first indication that something was wrong, that there was a pain of loss I was not even able to name.

Where are you from? I think any immigrant will understand the attempt to hide one’s previous commitments in order to proclaim oneself loyal to some new situation, that feeling of unnamed guilt as old loyalties are replaced by new ones.

And not just immigrants: social mobility itself, that totem of progressive politics, often means the abandonment of one culture for another.

But deep change is nonetheless unsettling. And some of it takes generations to work through. The Hungarian psychoanalysts Abraham and Torok speak of “transgenerational haunting” — our ghosts echoing down the family tree, often carried by the things that are not said, by our silences.

Little wonder “Where are you from?” remains such a threatening question.

Giles Fraser’s ‘Chosen: Lost and Found between Christianity and Judaism’ is available to pre-order now. It will be published on April 29th. 

The capital’s strictly Orthodox Jewish, or Haredi, community has an infection rate of at least 64% — UK-wide estimates range from 7% to 30%. And according to the new study by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), that figure rises to a staggering 74% among adults and secondary school children.

When I visited the area in North London last week — the study’s researchers have asked the press to refrain from naming the community’s precise location for security reasons — there was little to suggest that it has endured a pandemic quite unlike any other in the world. Smartly dressed children skip down the steps of their schools into waiting minibuses; men with sidelocks and dark frock coats rush to synagogue, their wide-brimmed black hats draped with makeshift plastic coverings to protect them from the elements.

Storm Darcy is sending snow across this enclave of the city, with strong easterly winds wending their way from Ukraine — the same place from where the biggest stream in ultra-Orthodox Judaism, and its 18^th-century codes of dress, originated. Over the past few weeks, a chill wind of publicity has also been blowing through the area, home to 25,000 Haredim — the word comes from the Hebrew “to tremble” before God — the largest community in Europe.

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It culminated last month with coverage of an illegal wedding held at a state school and attended by 150 guests, though other recent stories about the community have covered everything from forced marriage to benefit fraud. But, like so much about this complex corner of London, the picture is far more nuanced than it first appears. Yes, life here is going on largely as normal, but most of the manifold physical interactions which may seem to break lockdown rules are, in fact, perfectly legal.

Unlike Christians, who may go to church once a week, Orthodox Jewish men pray three times a day, and the government has allowed communal worship in England since July 4. All Haredi children are also still allowed to attend lessons. They come under the government’s category of “vulnerable children” as they live in overcrowded households and attend schools that ban internet access at home. Even those who go to full-time unregistered “yeshivas” — which controversially escape Ofsted scrutiny because they offer a religious curriculum so restricted that they are not deemed schools under the Education Act — are allowed to continue attending, because the category also applies to “out-of-school settings”.

But their initial exposure to Covid-19 was also a product of bad timing. With its raucous celebrations and door-to-door gift giving, the festival of Purim fell in early March, less than a fortnight before the first lockdown was imposed. As one person who works in the community told me: “It was the Haredi Cheltenham Festival.”

As ever, there are also socioeconomic reasons for its high rate of infection. Larger families increase the risk of catching the virus and also mean higher-than-average levels of deprivation. The average Haredi woman has between six and seven children; the average British woman has fewer than two.

“Many families live in very crowded conditions, not out of choice but because there is a real dearth of housing,” explains Rabbi Herschel Gluck, as we talk in his back garden. The rabbi, his long white beard flowing from beneath his disposable mask, bristles at any suggestion that Haredim — known for being insular and resistant to modern mores — are “backwoodsmen” who simply don’t understand what’s going on. “I’m totally sick of this attitude that somehow we’re dealing with people who are not aware,” he says, pointing out that many use WhatsApp or have broadband for work.

And for those who don’t: “The message has been delivered in every way that you can think. We had a car going around with a loudspeaker, leafleting, advertising. If anything, I would say they are too aware. Because they are now also aware of all the conspiracy theories, the misinformation.”

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One of the most unusual things about LSHTM’s study, which involved 343 households and 1,759 individuals late last year, was that it was initiated by the Haredim themselves. Its Medical Advocacy and Referral Service charity approached the scientists and even offered funding. “It’s the only time it’s happened to me in my career,” says Dr Michael Marks, who co-led the study.

Since publication, he has written in a local community newspaper warning that the data is no reason to relax. For while his findings are, on a human level, truly remarkable — some might say disturbing — they also raise profound scientific questions. If, for example, three-quarters of the community’s adults and secondary school children have been infected, does that mean that it now has herd immunity to the virus? And if that’s true, how should its existence influence policy decisions over the lifting of lockdown restrictions?

Dr Marks, however, is cautious about making any assumptions. “There isn’t a strict biological threshold for herd immunity,” he says, and especially because of the chance of reinfection and new variants, “we certainly wouldn’t think that the community has achieved [it].” Moreover, in more densely populated areas such as this one, where there are greater opportunities for viral transmission, any threshold would be higher than average.

Marks says he has no reason to believe that rule-flouting was a significant factor in driving up the community’s infection rate, pointing to non-compliance nationwide, and the fact that Haredim are merely hyper-visible. “When you see people who break the rules and they look like you, you think, oh, they’re probably just taking their dog for a walk. We notice when people who don’t look like us break the rules.”

Yet for many Haredim, it is judgment from within the wider Jewish community that is the most painful. One recent comment piece in Jewish Chronicle said that “much of the lifestyle for many Haredi communities is completely incompatible with the fundamental principles of Judaism”.

It certainly has exposed fault lines in Britain’s Jewish population. Even before the pandemic, mainstream organisations had been working hard to connect with a Haredi fringe that is in the ascendancy. Roughly 20% of all Jews in Britain are Haredi (about 60,000) — and within a decade, most Jewish children in Britain will be. But bridge-building has its limits. Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, representing mainstream Orthodoxy, tweeted about the recent illegal wedding story, saying the event “amounts to a brazen abrogation of the responsibility to protect life”.

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Eli Spitzer, a Haredi headteacher who knows 12 people in the community who have died from Covid, believes the runaway infection rate mainly “comes down to a lack of compliance”. He says Haredim were “just as scared as anyone else” in March and “paid an enormous price” to observe the first lockdown (you try entertaining seven children indoors without iPads or CBeebies). But he adds: “I think the horse had already bolted at that point in a community of this nature,” and it was then too late to tell people to continue turning their lives upside down to ward off a virus that had already run riot.

Though he says most have therefore “sat out” this lockdown, he is mystified by the idea that he and his neighbours have put religion above the preservation of life. “It sounds like they think there are people dropping dead all around us, that we just continue praying and we’re oblivious to mountains of corpses.”

True or not, it’s clear that Jews across the board have been disproportionately affected by Covid. Last year, Public Health England found Jewish men aged over 65 died at twice the rate of Christians, even after adjusting for socio-demographic factors. There is no data on the mortality rate among Haredim specifically, but while their infection rate is up to nine times the national average, it is unlikely their death rate will be anywhere near as high. This is because the median age of a Haredi Jew is just 14, compared with 40 for the rest of the country.

But locals are clearly conscious of the scrutiny. Signs outside schools warning that masks are mandatory are in Yiddish, the everyday language of residents here. A second set in English is there to send a message intended for non-Haredi eyes: “Look, we are upholding the rules.”

Rabbi Gluck detects a double-standard. While other minority communities — also disproportionately affected by the virus and more likely to display “vaccine hesitancy” — have received compassion, he suggests there is a sense among some that Jews have brought it on themselves. “I think people do not have the same sympathy for the Jewish community,” says Gluck. “Many people, their parents, their grandparents, were guinea pigs for science under the Nazis. We can understand that they have a certain amount of healthy ambivalence to accepting medical opinion without question.” Gluck himself was filmed being vaccinated, “so my position is clear”.

Even so, it is difficult not to conclude that there has been a catastrophic failure by a leadership that is able to wield extraordinary power. Spitzer points out that most UK Haredi religious institutions belong to global organisations that are capable of telling you “how to wear your socks”. But now, he explains, “the leaders will not issue directives that they don’t think will be popular, because they’ll lose their position.”

Still, perhaps the community’s extraordinarily high infection rate can be best understood by taking a look at those leaders who do “issue directives”. Take the case of Rabbi Yossi Teitelbaum, who allegedly circulated leaflets in December that highlighted spurious “loopholes” to the lockdown restrictions. His punishment? Earlier this month, he was put in charge of “Covid coordination” by the community’s main umbrella group.

The new leader does seem sincere in his desire to decontaminate the party. But however committed Keir Starmer and his allies may be to expelling members, it’s a bit like painting the Forth Bridge. Kick one out and another will emerge.

The problem runs deep. But the problem isn’t Labour per se. The party was never the origin of anti-Semitism in British politics. Members didn’t wake up one morning and decide that because Jeremy Corbyn was leader they would start to hate Jews. The anti-Semitism was latent. It was within them, inculcated and maturing over years. Mr Corbyn gave them a feeling that it was ok to say certain things publicly, but the real issue is why they harboured such anti-Semitism ideas in the first place. And the blame for that lies with academia.

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Campus anti-Semitism is the hidden story of the past few years. A Community Security Trust report published last month recorded 123 university incidents in the past two years. Indeed, such is the scale of the problem that, as editor of the Jewish Chronicle, I constantly hear parents and prospective students saying that they will not consider some universities because of their reputation for anti-Semitism.

This is anti-Semitism that hides in plain sight; it is recorded and is a major topic of discussion within the Jewish community. But there has, until very recently, been little focus on it from elsewhere — as if somehow those responsible are merely overgrown kids getting a bit too overheated in debates over the Middle East.

But this is a complete misunderstanding of the real problem. Far from it being the preserve of students, campus anti-Semitism often emanates from, is propagated by and is defended by academics and the university authorities themselves. When examining problems on campus the focus should be primarily on academics, not students.

Take what happened at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). It was reported last week that the university has agreed to pay £15,000 — the cost of his tuition fees — to Noah Lewis, a former student who had to withdraw from his course because of what he called a “toxic, antisemitic environment on campus”.

SOAS’s first ‘investigation’ recommended that Mr Lewis be paid £500 to cover a few expenses. Mr Lewis appealed, and the independent panel set up to consider his appeal was withering in its judgment, arguing that the first panel had simply ignored the student’s broader complaint about the environment at SOAS.

Mr Lewis had complained that there were racist daubings on campus and that criticisms of Israeli policy “often morph into attacks on the State of Israel and then further progress into blatant attacks on Jews in general”. The full account he provided to the appeal is shocking even for those of us used to this sort of thing. That’s probably why the appeal panel recommended setting up a further independent investigation into what it said was prima facie evidence that there was indeed a “toxic, antisemitic environment” at SOAS.

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The real importance of the appeal ruling, however, is not that it upheld the accounts provided by Mr Lewis. It’s that the appeal exposed the institutional failure of SOAS’s own academics to treat Mr Lewis’ complaints properly. This is a story that is repeated time after time.

Worse, it is often the academics who are responsible for fostering such an intolerant atmosphere and who are then protected by their colleagues. Fifteen of the incidents described in the CST report were perpetrated by academic staff, including four at the University of Warwick, two at the University of Leeds and two at the University of Nottingham.

In November 2019, for example, a Jewish student at the University of Warwick alerted CST to a lecture on Israel and Palestine by Goldie Osuri, Associate Professor of Sociology. The student reported that the lecturer had said to students, “this idea that the Labour Party is antisemitic is very much an Israeli lobby kind of idea…”.

Warwick’s Jewish Israeli Society then released a recording of these comments and submitted a complaint to the university on behalf of the Jewish student, who wished to remain anonymous. In response, Dr Osuri emailed the entire class informing them of the complaint and recommending that her students look at the website of Jewish Voice for Labour (a notorious Corbynite group set up solely to deny claims of Labour anti-Semitism) which, as Dr Osuri put it, “argue that the claims of anti-semitism against the Labour Party are orchestrated”.

The Jewish student understandably felt targeted and intimidated by Dr Osuri for being involved in a complaint, even before it had been investigated. Then the university said it could not consider the recording and would seek to punish whoever was responsible for it as it breached data protection.

The investigation later dismissed the student’s complaint, ruling that Dr Osuri’s statement was legitimate “within the principles and values of tolerance and freedom of speech”. But — extraordinarily — the president of the Jewish Israeli Society (who had submitted the complaint against Dr Osuri on behalf of the Jewish student) was told by the university authorities that a complaint had been made against him by Dr Osuri and another academic, and that he was being charged with “Violation of the Policy on Recording of Lectures by Students” and “bullying and harassment and a defamation of the academic reputation of Dr Goldie Osuri”.

It took three months for this investigation to be completed, with all charges dropped.

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The whole sorry episode reeks of attacking Jews for daring to complain about perceived anti-Semitism. It effectively sends the message to Jewish students and those who represent them that they should shut up and put up with whatever they are faced with, to exculpate the offender and find a way to blame the complainant. To blame the Jew for his own victimhood, in other words — an all too familiar theme in history.

Another example, at Bristol University, is equally revealing. In February 2019, two Jewish students reported to CST what they considered to be anti-Semitic content taught in a lecture in the course “Harms of the Powerful” by David Miller, Professor of Political Sociology at the university. Prof Miller was said to have shown a PowerPoint slide with a diagram featuring a web of Jewish organisations, placed under or subservient to the “Israeli government”.

The topic was ‘Islamophobia’, and the slide was part of Professor Miller’s explanation of his theory that the “Zionist movement (parts of)” is part of a global network that promotes and encourages hatred of Muslims and of Islam. The PowerPoint presentation used by Miller during the lecture included CST and other mainstream UK Jewish organisations and leaders in this diagram, implying that they are part of this alleged Islamophobic network.

A Jewish student in the lecture gave CST a written statement that “as a Jewish student I felt uncomfortable and intimidated in his class. I know and understand what he says is false, it is clear however that a number of students in the class believe him, just because he is an academic”. The same student claimed that “I fear that if he found out that I was Jewish this would negatively affect my experience throughout this unit”.

A different Jewish student in his class further stated that “I don’t think it is right that I should have to sit in a lecture or seminar in fear. Fear that he will offend me personally or for fear that he is going to spread hatred and misinformation to other students who, in turn, can pass on these false ideas”.

Out of respect to the students’ desire to remain anonymous, CST wrote to the university authorities. Their response, in all seriousness, was simply to say that the Head of School had discussed the letter with Professor Miller through his line manager. Indeed, because the students wish to remain anonymous, Bristol still refuses even to consider that there has been a formal complaint.

In a Zoom meeting this August, Prof Miller described CST — a charity which exists solely to examine anti-Semitism and protect the Jewish community from it — as “people who must only be faced and defeated”. He elaborated in a newspaper interview, saying CST “is an organisation that exists to run point for a hostile foreign government in the UK…this is a straightforward story of influence-peddling by a foreign state”.

The University of Bristol authorities responded by seeming to closing ranks, describing CST as an “external third party”, saying that it would therefore not enter into a discussion with it over Miller.

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It is quite rightly said that what happens on campus is a prelude to what happens in real life a generation later, as fashionable academic ideas seep out of the academy and as the students influenced by those ideas move into positions of influence in wider society. These are the academics who set the tone and agenda for much of campus life — and for those students who, over the next decades, will be setting the tone for national life.

That is why, quite apart from the facts of these incidents themselves, they matter so much.

Defeating the intellectual cancer that has spread among some academic communities will be a difficult and lengthy process. But there is a more immediate and practical step that can be taken. Last month, Oxford University became the latest to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism (which, you may remember, was the cause of a long battle within the Labour Party during the summer of 2019). The vast majority of Russell Group universities have now adopted it — as has Warwick. 

It is helpful because as well as offering a clear definition it provides a series of concrete examples which demonstrate why certain behaviour — such as holding individual Jews responsible for the actions of a foreign government, Israel — is anti-Semitic.

Education Secretary Gavin Williamson may not have many fans, but he has been a tireless advocate of the IHRA definition, even warning that universities could face cuts if they refused to adopt it. The real test will come when one of the institutions that has adopted it has to confront the behaviour of one of its own staff members. We will, I fear, not have long to wait.

Good news is flowing from the region: the Jewish state, also at the behest of Trump has established ties with Bahrain, the UAE and Sudan. Of course, the most recent news did not please everyone. Some frowned upon the fact that the US released the information before Morocco or Israel; others criticised the power imbalance between Morocco and Israel on one hand, and Palestine and Western Sahara on the other. The latter has been waging a war of independence against Morocco for several decades, led by a socialist separatist group with Islamist ties.

Hamas, naturally, is outraged and denounced the Moroccan treachery; while in its customary partiality against the Moroccan monarchy, the French media — both mainstream, such as Le Monde, and more independent sites such as Mediapart — quickly attacked both Trump and King Mohammed VI of Morocco for an agreement in which both Palestinian and Sahraoui self-determination was jeopardised.

This grumbling contrasts with the elation and relief felt by many Jewish families around the world as the first candle of the Menorah was lit, and by many Muslims in Morocco who can recall what things were like before the 1960s. Having grown up in Morocco, and with a father who remembers those happier times of coexistence, I was moved to tears by the sight of Israelis dancing in the street to traditional Moroccan song, waving flags of both countries and pictures of the King Mohammed.

Almost a million people in the Jewish state are of Moroccan descent, from families who were exiled six decades ago, a mere blip in time compared to the thousands of years they’d spent in the Maghreb. For them, as well as Jewish North African communities in France and increasingly in London, the deal is a hugely welcome Hanukkah gift during a difficult year.

The first Jews in Morocco were Berber, converted via commercial bonds as early as the 2nd Century BC. One of the most ancient synagogues is in Zagora; a funerary stone in the Roman ruins of Volubilis mentions Caecilianos, a member of the Jewish community, and some Jewish cemeteries have been in use for two millennia.

This original Jewish population was joined in the seventh Century AD by refugees from Spain escaping the persecution of the Christian Visigoth kings. By that stage the Maghreb had fallen to Arab invaders and provided a springboard for the conquest of Spain in 711, which would subsequently prove a more welcoming home to Jews for centuries. Yet Islamic rulers in Morocco had fits of intolerance, too: in 1033, Muslim chief Tamim Ibn Izri massacred 6,000 Jews in Fez and forced the surviving women and children into slavery.

The arrival of Spanish Jews after the Reconquista coincided with more peaceful relations, with this part of north Africa ruled by a succession of dynasties. Jews were dhimmis — forced to pay the jizya in order to be under the Sultan’s protection — but this status by no means excluded them from Moroccan commercial and political life. Paradoxically, because Jews worked in professions Muslims recoiled from for religious reasons, they found themselves in charge of essential diplomatic and commercial duties, at such a high level that they were called tejjar as-Soltan, the Sultan’s merchants.

Moroccan Jews were not just moneylenders, but also extremely skillful craftsmen and artists. Their contribution to music, architecture and literature was enormous and their relations with Muslim neighbours were often more than friendly. Depending on the area, Jews in Morocco received their religious education in Berber or in Moroccan Arabic — a language quite different from classical or literary Arabic — and wrote in Yehudia, a variant of Hebrew transliterated in the Arabic alphabet.

The unconditional respect of Hebraic customary law was inscribed in the Moroccan Constitution in the 1920s by which point, after centuries of rule by various Berber dynasties, the country was effectively under the control of France under a protectorate.

Yet things would deteriorate, and sharply, following independence and the establishment of Israel, and over two hundred thousand would flee, leaving behind them deserted mountain villages and empty shops and townhouses, so much so that only 3,000 Jews are now still living in Morocco.

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The initial anxieties of the Moroccan Jewish community had much more to do with the rampant hostility against Jews in Europe than with Morocco, although Nazi Germany’s attempts to spread its ideology had little success in this part of the world. Morocco’s king Mohammed V — grandfather of the present monarch — protected the country’s Jews during the Second World War, and when the Vichy-allied government attempted to impose ghettos in the country, Mohammed replied: “I entirely disapprove the new laws … and repeat what I have already said in the past, that the Jews are under my protection and that I reject any distinction that should be made among my people.” Morocco’s Jews survived, and in recent years there has been talk of making Mohammed V a Righteous of the Nations.

Following the war, the first Jews to leave the country did so in order to follow the dream of an independent Israel, but conditions at home were to drive many more away in the following decades.

In the aftermath of Moroccan independence in 1956, the leading party Al Istiqlal (“The Independence”) — still a major force in the country — emphasised national identity by making Islam the official religion of the state, and Arabic its primary official language. Not Moroccan Arabic, mind you, but literary or standard Arabic, which is to Moroccan Arabic what Latin is to French and is barely understood, let alone spoken, by most Moroccans.

It led to de facto estrangement of Berber, French and Spanish-speaking Jewish Moroccans. If this was still of little or no consequence to the inhabitants of once-heavily Jewish small towns such as Erfoud in the Sahara, it definitely felt painful to Jewish inhabitants of Casablanca or Rabat, who were in charge of important commercial or administrative duties.

Then, in 1961, Egyptian president Gamal Abd-El-Nasser’s visit to Morocco triggered the first wave of open hostility against Jews. As the Arab League tried to define itself in opposition to both western capitalism and Russian communism, Jews were stigmatised as non-Arabs, and erroneously perceived as too western to be Moroccan.

By this stage many Jews were trying to escape Morocco illegally, but as the tensions increased, it was getting harder to get official travel documents. Even phone calls and postal service was gradually restricted, not so much through legal enforcement as boycotts by Moroccan socialist organisations. Cornered by the Arab-promoting Istiqlal on the Right, and by the USFP (Socialist Union of the Popular Forces, founded in 1959) on the Left, the Jews quickly found themselves deprived of any strong political ally.

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For many people it was a clear example of double-think. Muslim Moroccans would call for a boycott of Israel but at the same time maintain close connections with their Jewish neighbours as individuals. A militia, the Misgeret, was established to provide self-defence for Moroccan Jews, but it soon turned its activities towards helping them to secretly escape the country through the Mossad-backed Operation Yachin.

Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and King Hassan II — Mohammed VI’s father — would eventually negotiate a formalisation of this departure, Morocco asking for financial compensation given the loss in financial and human capital. Entire villages were encouraged to depart at once, torn from centuries of shared memories with little to no preparation. Within just three months in the summer of 1967 half of the remaining Jews left Morocco, and it was by no means a happy story. Once in Israel, Moroccan Jews had to take on new jobs, settling in towns that seemed to have sprouted up overnight in the desert, in tiny two-bedroom flats that looked nothing like what they had been promised. For many, the dream of the Promised Land turned to disappointment as they discovered something they never expected — European Ashkenazi racism against the Sephardic newcomers. A song sarcastically recalled “They asked me where I come from, I said I am from Morocco, they said ‘Leave’; they asked me where I come from, I said I am from Romania, they said ‘Welcome’.”

Today, one million Israelis are Moroccan by descent, including 12 current government ministers. Israeli Jews from Morocco are, on many levels, more Moroccan than the majority of Moroccans, who have since undergone 30 years of Arabisation and increasingly Islamisation that belies their Berber and multicultural identity. But it is through Morocco’s religious diversity that the kingdom can, with luck, fight religious fundamentalism imported from the Arabian Gulf.

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Last year, in spite of the travel difficulties, 100,000 Jews visited Morocco, of whom 30,000 came from Israel. They came to visit shrines, pray in synagogues and recite the Torah near their ancestors’ graves; they came back to the land of their forefathers, and to keep alive something that might otherwise disappear. Moroccan Judaism has a lot to teach to religious scholars and Biblical specialists; but it also has a lot to teach about a lost civilisation of poetry recited to the tunes of the ‘oud, of Andalusian arts and crafts forgotten in years of wandering, of memories of shared jokes and shared tales. Moroccan culture and history would not be the same without its Jewish elements — including the philosopher Maïmonides, singers Sami Al Maghribi and Zohra el Fassia, or politician André Azoulay, current adviser to the king.

Although most still oppose ties with Israel, Moroccans on the whole appreciate the historical place of Jews in their society. When the position of Hebraic law was submitted to public vote in 2011, Moroccans chose to keep all the articles that ensure Jewish freedom of private and public religious practice, despite strong pressure from radical Islamists within the kingdom and abroad.

My father still remembers fondly how Muslim kids used to spend Jewish feasts with their Jewish friends, and hosting them in return during Muslim festivals. I’m moved whenever I hear the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra play traditional Moroccan music — tunes celebrating beauty, love, wine and merrymaking, that are truly, authentically Moroccan, but which Moroccan youth have forgotten, and that fundamentalist Muslims frown upon.

And when I hear Sephardi grandmothers talking in Moroccan Arabic with that distinctive Jewish accent, either in Paris’s Sentier or on Brent Street in north-west London, I feel a kinship that is hard to put into words but that can move me to tears. And so in these troubled times, when anti-Semitism takes a new face, it warms my heart to see my native country welcoming back its most genuinely Moroccan citizens.

An old story has resurfaced: that Dahl particularly hated Jews. The Official Roald Dahl website buried an apology on its pages last week, probably because Netflix is in the process of adapting Dahl’s most famous books, and this PR problem must be addressed.

“The Dahl family and the Roald Dahl Story Company deeply apologise for the lasting and understandable hurt caused by some of Roald Dahl’s statements,” it said. Why do they say “hurt” and not “fear”, as if Jew hatred were merely a lapse in manners? “Those prejudiced remarks,” it goes on (“remarks” is a pale euphemism) “are incomprehensible to us and stand in marked contrast to the man we knew and to the values at the heart of Roald Dahl’s stories, which have positively impacted young people for generations.”

What this man they knew — and yet didn’t know — said was this, to Mike Coren of The New Statesman: “There is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity, maybe it’s a kind of lack of generosity towards non-Jews. I mean, there’s always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere; even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason. I mean, if you and I were in a line moving towards what we knew were gas chambers, I’d rather have a go at taking one of the guards with me; but they [the Jews] were always submissive.”

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He’s wrong. Jews have a long history of not being submissive from Mount Sinai to Masada to Warsaw; but it is interesting that submission is, for Dahl, a raging man, a characteristic he appreciates only in the Charlie Buckets of this world.

What made Dahl? Like many Jew haters his life was pitted with tragedy: anger can absolve you from pain. He was bullied at the minor public school he attended because his Norwegian parents thought he should be an English child. “In the changing room,” he wrote, “they held me down while one of them filled a bath brimful of icy-cold water, and into this they dropped me, clothes and all, and held me in there for several agonising minutes. “Push his head under water!” cried W. W. Wilson. “That’ll teach him to keep his mouth shut!”

He was an immigrant then, an outsider — like the Jews. Perhaps he felt like a solitary outsider — unlike the Jews.

So, his family didn’t know him, and Dahl’s pondering on, first, how the Holocaust was a response to “the Jewish character” and, second, how much better he would have faced the death camps than Jews, who are shamed even by the manner in which they approach their murder, has nothing to do with “the values at the heart of Roald Dahl’s stories”. The children’s books are devoid of Jew hatred, though the Feminist and the Socialist and the genuine anti-racist — the Oompa-Loompas were originally “African pygmies” — have complaints. When the NAACP complained about the Oompa-Loompas originating in “the very deepest and darkest part of the jungle where no white man had ever been before,” Dahl turned them orange while complaining that the opposition was “real Nazi stuff”. The reliably sympathetic biographer Donald Sturrock calls their African descent, “a fanciful detail”.

Dahl loved money – perhaps he was again projecting in his hatred? – too well to write anti-Jewish children’s fiction. But his second adult novel, Fifty Thousand Frogskins, (never published) contains, “sly, knowing” Jews. The leading character in the short story Madame Rosette (1946) is, “a filthy old Syrian Jewess”.

In a letter to Dirk Bogarde, Dahl called a producer, “the wrong sort of Jew. His face is matted with dirty, black hair. He is disgustingly overweight and flaccid though only forty-something, garrulous, egocentric, arrogant, complacent, ruthless, dishonourable, lascivious, slippery.” He told the Independent in 1990: “It’s the same old thing: we all know about Jews and the rest of it. There aren’t any non-Jewish publishers anywhere, they control the media – jolly clever thing to do”.

The more sceptical biographer Jeremy Treglown wrote this about Dahl’s first novel Sometime Never (1948): “plentiful revelations about Nazi anti-Semitism and the Holocaust did not discourage him from satirizing ‘a little pawnbroker in Hounsditch called Meatbein who, when the wailing started, would rush downstairs to the large safe in which he kept his money, open it and wriggle inside on to the lowest shelf where he lay like a hibernating hedgehog until the all-clear had gone’.” But no one reads Sometime Never. The Netflix deal is secure.

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I don’t care about Roald Dahl. He’s not a great artist and I suspect he knew it. He turned to children’s fiction after his career in adult fiction failed. (He suggested Kingsley Amis write for children, and when Amis said he had “no feeling for that kind of thing” Dahl replied, “Never mind, the little bastards’d swallow it”.) That he is smaller than his fiction is normal, though it’s depressing to find a man who wrote about friendly giants and magical peaches being quite so conventional in his spite.

What I do mind, though, is that as I write this piece, my seven-year-old son comes in and asks if he can read to me from Danny the Champion of the World. It’s not even the first time this week that I have had to think about how a writer my son admires hated Jews. My husband was reading Rudyard Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill to him a few days ago. It contains a poem called The Song of the Fifth River: “There came dark Israel / For whom no river remained” until God provided “The Secret River of Gold!” “Why is Israel dark?” our son asked. My husband replied, numbly, “Because it had no river”.

In the chapter The Treasure and the Law, Kadmiel the Jew describes how the Jews control the world with their wealth, and cause mass death: “All over the world the heathen fought each other…..these meanly dressed ones [the Jews] decide between themselves how, and when, and for how long king should draw sword against king, and people rise up against people. There can be no war without gold, and we Jews know how the earth’s gold moves with the seasons”. Then Kadmiel says he poisoned the well.

I don’t know what to say to my son. I don’t want to write him A Child’s Guide to Anti-Jewish Children’s Fiction or tell him, seriously, there is no positive image of the Jew in European culture until Gottfried Lessing’s 1749 play The Jews, which closed in Berlin because no one could believe in a heroic Jew. I already tear pages detailing the Holocaust from children’s encyclopaedias and children’s history books, trying to keep a secret the world seems anxious to tell him. His bookshelf should be a place of ecstasy and security, without traps set by dead misanthropes. But Dahl didn’t really like children. Perhaps I will tell him that: and that his stories are good because he didn’t like children. He likes sucking them up tubes and turning them into mice and all this is plausible when he writes it.

Perhaps I will also show him this letter from JRR Tolkien, a far superior writer, and man, to Dahl. It is a response to a 1938 letter from Rütten & Loening, a German publishing house keen to publish The Hobbit — if Tolkien could confirm his Arian descent.

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“If I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin,” Tolkien wrote, “I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people. My great-great-grandfather came to England in the eighteenth century from Germany: the main part of my descent is therefore purely English, and I am an English subject — which should be sufficient. I have been accustomed, nonetheless, to regard my German name with pride, and continued to do so throughout the period of the late regrettable war, in which I served in the English army. I cannot, however, forbear to comment that if impertinent and irrelevant inquiries of this sort are to become the rule in matters of literature, then the time is not far distant when a German name will no longer be a source of pride”.

That’s subtler, and kinder, than anything Dahl could write; although Tolkien too revised The Lord of the Rings after pondering whether his portrayal of dwarves was anti-Jewish. It is without end, like fiction itself.

So perhaps I will tell him the truth: that you can write wonderfully about fruit, and childhood agony, and still be not the World’s No. 1 Storyteller — as the website says — but an absolute fool.

By this logic, evidence of prejudice is insufficient qualification for racism; the group you are prejudiced against also needs to be structurally oppressed. This explains why many say that white people can’t be victims of racism; they may suffer prejudice, but they are not systematically disadvantaged in school, employment and the criminal justice system on the basis of their race. And this is why, for many, there is no distinction between racism and structural racism; racism is structural by definition.

But this definition raises an important question: that if racism is about disadvantages in education, employment and the criminal justice system, what does this mean for ethnic minorities who are not disadvantaged in contemporary Britain along those lines?

The Labour Party, an avowedly anti-racist movement, has been plagued in recent years by accusations of anti-Semitism. The recent EHRC report found “a culture within the party which, at best, did not do enough to prevent anti-Semitism and, at worst, could be seen to accept it”.

Many Labour supporters and sympathisers have tried nobly to make sense of this contradiction. In a recent article, Novara Media writer Ash Sarkar distinguished anti-Semitism from other forms of racism. Anti-Semitism, she contended, is unrelated to “systemic disadvantage in either the jobs market or the criminal justice system”. Sarkar emphasised in a later tweet that she does not think Jews are privileged, or that they don’t face racism; she simply thinks that the racism they face is different from the racism other minorities face.

Nevertheless, Sarkar seems more sympathetic to the structural definition of racism. She argues, for instance, that “better party strategy, or fairer media coverage, does not result in a healthier anti-racist politic”. This is because “the bullying of black MPs might be stamped out, but it would not mean that Labour’s policy on policing or immigration would improve”. So a “healthier anti-racist politics” is one that focuses on structural inequalities rather than interpersonal prejudice.

The anti-Semitism scandal within the Labour Party has been specifically about the spread of noxious ideas and instances of interpersonal abuse. Sarkar, on the other hand, argues that anti-racism is actually about dismantling the material inequalities in our society, and that “racism against Jewish people does not result in the harsher prison sentences, wage gaps, stop and search or unequal healthcare outcomes that we see with other groups“.

Jews, by this logic, do not qualify under this definition of racism, which emphasises structural inequalities — that same definition to which Sarkar and many others are most attached to. If structural inequalities are the basis for racism, then Jews in contemporary Britain cannot by definition be victims of racism.

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This concept of racism is not only insensitive to anti-Semitism; it also fails to account for prejudice against other minorities in Britain. British-Indians and British-Chinese people, for example, have the highest educational attainment out of all ethnic groups in the country. They also have the largest percentage, as a share of their population, in the higher managerial, administrative and professional roles.

More than 30% of British-Indians are employed in professional roles — the highest rate of all ethnic minorities in the country. They are stopped and searched by the police at the same rate as white people; British-Chinese people are stopped and searched at an even lower rate. How can the structural definition of racism, then, account for racism against these particular ethnic minorities?

One could argue that it is a basis for explaining racism against some groups but not others. But invoking structural inequalities, without explaining how and why race is the critical factor in these inequalities, shows this definition falls foul of the disparity fallacy: that different outcomes in education, employment and the criminal justice system are necessarily a consequence of race.

Structural inequalities might be a consequence of race, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that they are. If these outcomes were necessarily because of race, this wouldn’t just mean that minorities with worse outcomes were racially disadvantaged. It would also imply that some minorities, like Jewish people, are racially privileged. (And remember: if you are racially privileged, you can’t be a victim of racism.)

This would seem to be the view of Andrew Murray, one of Jeremy Corbyn’s advisers. Murray says that Corbyn struggled to empathise with Jews because “he’s empathetic with the poor, the disadvantaged, the migrant, the marginalised… Happily, that is not the Jewish community in Britain today”. He adds that Corbyn would have empathised with the Jewish community in “the 1930s” or at “Cable Street” — but not now, and this is because “the Jewish community is relatively prosperous”. Murray’s statement is delivered with the grace and subtlety befitting an aristocratic communist.

Murray was expressing that Jews don’t count in an understanding of racism that emphasises structural oppression. This is an instance of one account of racism monopolising the other ways it manifests itself. This isn’t simply wrongheaded. In the case of anti-Semitism, it is especially dangerous. As the German social democrat August Babel said, anti-Semitism is the “socialism of the fools”. Jews supposedly possess power and privilege; so to call them out thus makes one a foe of structural inequalities.

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This is why the rapper Wiley, in his hate-filled logorrhoea on Twitter, promoted the (untrue) view that Jews played a disproportionate role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. This is linked, in his mind, to the exploitative role of Jewish music managers in contemporary Britain. Wiley genuinely believes he was identifying and condemning structural racism.

One of the saddest parts of that episode was seeing some young black men on my social media feeds expressing sympathy with him. If racism is about prejudice and power, what language can we use to condemn black men from working class backgrounds endorsing anti-Jewish ideas? As the writer John-Paul Pagano puts it, “when racism poses as resistance by victims of racism, as anti-Semitism often does, it disqualifies Jews from concern”.

Similarly with American rapper Ice Cube, who shared on his Twitter account a painting of hook-nosed men sitting atop slaves. In light of the death of George Floyd, he thought he was just identifying the forces hindering racial progress; like Wiley, he was convinced he was expressing anger at the structural inequalities that plague his country.

The French comedian Dieudonne M’bala M’bala, after multiple convictions of hate speech against Jews, also rejects the charge of anti-Semitism; he affirms he is simply inveighing against the Establishment and Zionism. He, too, filters his racial prejudice through the paradigm of fighting structural inequalities.

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Ethnic minority people can express rage at racism without deploying anti-Semitic tropes; they can even adhere to the structural definition without resorting to anti-Semitism. But the issue is that this definition is blind to the prejudices against Jews and other minorities. Chinese people, Indians and, increasingly, Nigerians in contemporary Britain do not easily fit within the paradigm of structural oppression.

This is not to say that racism can’t be manifested structurally; of course it can. But racism is more complex than simply looking at which groups are distributed at the bottom or top of our society’s institutions. Recognising the messy truth is more important than endorsing a clean narrative. The former enables you to finely target different manifestations of prejudice; the latter stunts your curiosity and compassion.

Labour activists and avowed anti-racists will only be able to express genuine compassion with Jews once they recognise that the structural definition of racism is not simply limiting but dangerous, adding fuel to the already-dangerous flames of anti-Semitism.

Dead Jews don’t complain and are easy to assemble in support; a true anti-racist, though, will fight racism when its victims are his political enemies. He ignored Luciana Berger’s plea to ask his social media followers to stop attacking her and Ruth Smeeth with racist and misogynistic tropes. That would have been meaningful. Ignore Jews who tell you that the Jewish community is more pro-Corbyn than the media will tell you: it isn’t.

I would like JVL to release its membership statistics, so it can stop pretending to speak for more than a clutch of Jewish people. They have demonised the mainstream Jewish community and they have helped Corbyn supporters chase all but one female Jewish MP from the party. (For now, Margaret Hodge remains, but Corbyn supporters desire her to leave. Read Twitter for the manner in which they ask her. She is entirely dehumanised, and they should know better what that is, and what it means, and where it ends).

If these groups believe, as they say they so, that Zionism is murderous, why do they not act to protect non-murderous Diaspora Jewry, rather than incite hatred towards it? They have no answer. They have, at best – and this is a generous analysis — been used.

But I am, in one sense, in sympathy with them: I am willing, if not happy, to stay in a Labour Party that also contains Jeremy Corbyn. I rejoined the day he was suspended, and I will stay, at least for now. I believe Corbyn to be a Jew-hater for everything he has done to imperil British Jews: that he is not conscious of it is hardly my affair.

I should thank him. These last years have been an education for British Jews. That which was once theoretical — it is true there was a lull in anti-Semitism post-War, and that was the true aberration — has bloomed again. We have returned to the Status Quo. There is no Jew-hate without Jewry and, you might cynically argue, the opposite is likewise true. Why does the only surviving tribe of the ancient world endure? Part of the answer is in Exodus 32.9, and I write that even though I have no faith: “The Lord said to Moses, ‘I have seen this people, how stiff-necked they are.’”

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The creation of Boris Johnson

By Tanya Gold

If you believe that a small minority in Labour, in the world, are fanatical Jew-haters — and I do, and many of them were attracted to Corbyn’s Labour — you need not be too fearful for Jewish life. The Longest Hatred is old news, after all; we should accept it. We should not ask what we desire but what can we live with? It is not the perpetrators who make the pogrom. It is the would-be bystanders who hold the balance; by their actions shall Jews be judged imperilled or secure.

Jew-hatred is many things, but it is, most prosaically, a pressure valve: when society fractures — or believes itself to be fractured — it thrives. Perhaps that is why it found a home in Corbyn’s Labour, for they believe their world is entirely broken. That the ancient Christian Jew-hatred has metastasised into modern socialist Jew-hatred (they are reliably irreligious) is one of the only things in the last half decade that has made me, reliably, laugh; aren’t they supposed to be progressives?

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The moral vacuum at the heart of power

By Tanya Gold

But what if this worldview jumped out of fragments of news, and their own neurosis and rage, and into life: what if the country was entirely broken? What if a series of corrupt, incompetent, nativist Conservative governments, succoured by a warring Labour Party, destabilised the country without end? Would British Jews be safer then — really?  The Weimar Republic fell during economic crisis when the Left was split; we should remember that always.

Conservatives have celebrated this week, happy that Corbyn’s suspension is over-turned, happier that Keir Starmer, in response, has denied him the whip. They congratulate themselves on their anti-racist credentials, even as the Muslim Council of Great Britain has asked the EHRC for an enquiry into Conservative Islamophobia, which is just and is, so far, denied. Even so, they write thorny rebukes on Twitter. They shouldn’t: their Judeophilia is grisly and opportunistic, even if it soothes some Jews. It is also worthless; whatever they offer, it will not last. Racisms rise together. The Left and Right, when engaged in Jew-hatred, will meet each other there in solidarity.

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Jeremy Corbyn is nothing without Labour

By Giles Fraser

A Jew-hater is no longer leader of the Labour Party. He may be a member still, thanks to an Corbyn-leaning NEC panel who expeditated his case before new processes could be established, but he is denied the whip. He is shrunken.

Starmer has pledged to eradicate Jew-haters from the party, which I think is unlikely, but they might be silenced if outnumbered and that is good enough. His first act as leader was an apology, which I think was heartfelt; he asked to be judged on this. It is early days still. Only Twitter rushes to judgment, because it can’t help it. The Jew-hating rhetoric on Twitter is fierce, but I would be amazed if Labour voters felt the same way.

Judaism is about acts; Christianity is about faith. Yet it is Jews who need faith now: in Starmer’s Labour. I understand as well as any Jew the trauma the last five years has brought: something in memory reborn before us. Even so, Jews who left under Corbyn should return; each one is a defeat for the Jew-hating elements. Britain is a still-functioning democracy. A social democratic Labour Party is something worth saving: if it isn’t, what is?

Except that, well, I don’t. By which I do not mean that I don’t have any views at all on the issue; more that the opinions I hold are the kind which are ignored or dismissed by most in the party, because they can’t easily be co-opted by either of the two warring tribes (and therefore leads both to regard me as some kind of faintheart or enemy).

After 26 years of activity in the labour movement, there are some things about which I am sure. One is that there is a strain of the Left — mainly embedded within the far-Left — that is anti-Semitic, virulently so, in some cases. It is small, but it exists. It will often cloak its anti-Semitism in criticism of Israel. Indeed, its obsession with the transgressions of that small country, when the misdeeds of certain other nations are more numerous and at least as bad, leads one to conclude that there is something else going on. Occasionally, it will lay bare its true beliefs with swivel-eyed rantings about “Zionist” control over the media or financial system. It is, quite frankly, comprised of irreconcilable extremists who are beyond reason.

I think it reasonable to conclude that the election of Corbyn as Labour leader, and the concomitant upsurge in far-Left influence and activity, led to a growth in the number of these crackpots infecting the party’s ranks. And, from my own vantage point inside the party, I saw that they were not identified and expelled with anything like sufficient vigour.

I know, too, that while most who raised concerns about anti-Semitism inside the party were well-meaning and justified, a small number chose to weaponise the issue because they loathed Corbynism and wanted rid of it. To say so is regarded as heresy in some quarters, but you don’t have to be a Corbynite to recognise that there has been some degree of naked politicking in this debate. It is idle to pretend otherwise. This politicking by a minority has served to create something of an accusatory — and deeply unpleasant — atmosphere across the Left which, on occasion, saw legitimate vigilance and a desire to clean the stables develop into hyper-sensitivity and recrimination.

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How hysterical leaders fail workers

By Paul Embery

I experienced this first-hand last year. In a Twitter debate over free movement with the folk singer Mike Harding, I argued that Britain’s working class was rooted, communitarian and patriotic whereas its middle class was more rootless, cosmopolitan and bohemian. The debate had absolutely nothing to do with Jews or Jewishness in any way, but when some anorak pointed out that Jewish intellectuals were referred to as “rootless cosmopolitans” in Stalin’s Russia, I was condemned by some on the Left as an anti-Semite.

It became clear to me pretty quickly that all resistance was useless. I could have pointed out that I was a supporter of Trade Union Friends of Israel and had joined one of its delegations to the Middle East, that I had visited Auschwitz and laid a wreath on behalf of my own union, or that the Israeli ambassador had invited me to a reception celebrating the 70^th anniversary of his country’s creation. But, frankly, it wasn’t worth it. Pitchforks had been drawn and minds made up. Even my own union leadership publicly denounced me. People were walking on eggshells everywhere.

So, then, just as there are some things about which I am certain, there are others about which I am not. I do not know if Jeremy Corbyn is an anti-Semite. Truly I don’t. If I believed he was, I would say so without hesitation. And as much as partisans in the debate claim to know the truth of this, I do not think they possibly can.

We know that Corbyn has consorted with undesirables, some of whom are unquestionably foul anti-Semites and from whom most decent people would run a mile. We have seen the stories about murals and wreath-laying near the graves of those linked to the Munich massacre. But we also know the Corbyn who stood against apartheid and has been a lifelong and vocal campaigner against racism. So to the question of whether Corbyn dislikes Jews for no other reason than that they are Jews, I can only respond that I am unable to make a window into the man’s soul and provide the answer for you. And I am sceptical of anyone who asserts certain knowledge on the point.

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This makes some allies of mine tear their hair out in frustration. I think of two in particular, both as hostile to Blairite “centrism” as they are to the far-Left. Neither is driven by political factionalism on this question. One cannot understand how anyone could see Corbyn as anything other than a rabid anti-Semite; the other cannot fathom how anyone could see him as anything other than the victim of a wicked smear operation. Both would be pleased if I intervened publicly on their side of the argument. It isn’t going to happen.

This local dichotomy reflects the divide on the issue across the wider party over the past five years. One is either anti-Corbyn or anti-Jew. Subtlety and nuance can go whistle in this most ugly and tribal of internal clashes in which only primary colours will do.

That those who harbour feelings of hostility to Jews must be drummed out of every place within the labour movement where they reside, and that a party with deep and proud roots in Anglo-Jewry must never again be seen as a home to such individuals — no matter how small they are in number — goes without saying. While always allowing for due process, the party machine must be leaner, sharper and more efficient in despatching anti-Semites from its ranks in the future. Sir Keir Starmer will, I am certain, continue to make improvements in that regard.

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Keir Starmer's woman problem

By Joan Smith

The effect of this terrible affliction on the Labour Party should grieve anyone who cares about it. Indeed, it should grieve those with little affection for the party itself but who understand the importance of a viable and reputable opposition. The last thing that either the party or Britain needs at the moment is a Labour civil war. Yet, with yesterday’s decision by the general secretary, David Evans, to suspend Corbyn, that prospect seems inevitable.

One cannot help but conclude that Evans has boxed in Sir Keir in a way that raises the stakes dramatically. Any decision to reinstate Corbyn would be perceived as weakness and an affront to Jews, while his expulsion risks a veritable bloodletting. The gauntlet has been well and truly thrown down.

For the sake of my party and my country, and no less significantly for the health of the future relationship between Labour and a Jewish community that deserves so much better, I hope these people know what they are doing.