David Baddiel's very personal documentary/polemic Jews Don't Count discusses anti-Semitism and examines why, in his view, it’s so often seen as a lesser form of racism, if it’s even considered racism at all.
At a time when vital discussions are occurring about representation, diversity and inclusion, Baddiel asks, why have Jews been neglected from the conversation, especially by people who consider themselves progressive?
Based on the book of the same name, Baddiel’s film fleshes out his ideas in a range of honest, sometimes awkward, and often funny, conversations. (“What do you think of when you hear the word ‘Jew’?” he asks, in a stark piece to camera. “Let’s ask some Jews.”). He’s joined by prominent Jews from both sides of the Atlantic, including writers, scholars, and fellow comedians.
Along the way, he interrogates the film industry’s dodgy track record of ‘Jewface’, and he anticipates the counterpoints he’ll encounter - in an extended seegment devoted to ‘Whataboutism’. For example, he speaks to a number of his interviewees about Israel, and gets a different response from all of them. Baddiel has always maintained that it is racist to expect every Jew to feel responsible for the actions of Israel, and he engages in a vigorous exchange with Miriam Margolyes, who most definitely doesn’t share his view. The lively debate makes for excellent TV. Elsewhere, too, there’s a raw and important reckoning with Baddiel’s own infamous ‘90s skit on Fantasy Football League in which he impersonated Black footballer Jason Lee in blackface. Baddiel has previously apologised (though never directly to Lee), and he meets the footballer for their first conversation about it.
Baddiel was recently in Australia for the Sydney Jewish Writers Festival, and he spoke to SBS on the eve of its Australian television premiere.
When you wrote the book, did you have the idea that it might be a documentary?
No, I wrote the book in early 2021 and I always knew that this was a live issue, but I kind of thought that it was a live issue maybe within me, and for Jews. But in fact, the book spoke to a slightly wider set of people about how things were working out within the world of identity politics and progressive politics in general. And, you know, quite a few other minorities actually, have also spoken to me about how the book speaks to them. And so I guess as a bit of momentum happened with the book and people began talking about it - suddenly I was being asked to go and speak about it in Australia and America and elsewhere, I thought, ’Maybe this has hit a nerve’.
So then actually both the BBC and Channel Four were keen on doing a documentary, and Channel Four were just bit more persistent. Also they are a slightly more kind of radical channel and they have a reputation for doing stuff that's a bit edgy and whatever, and I felt they would allow it to be more true to the spirit of the book, and also stylistically, to be a bit unusual.
I had this thought that since this is a polemic, it's not a journey, doc, i.e. it is not like, ‘David goes and finds out something, mulls over it and then maybe comes back and says, well, maybe this’. No, I know more or less what I want to say here and I'm putting a point of view. Some people might disagree, but that's what it is. So therefore I need a format that can do that: I'm going to talk directly to camera and I'm going to tell it like it is the way that I have it. Sometimes you don't know how to do that in documentary. But I found this way of doing it with the director, James Routh, who is really good. And, I had to slightly fight to do the black and white thing, stark in the studio, where I just say 'This is what I think the modern form of anti-Semitism is', and then we can go and do more straightforward chats with people, more like a normal documentary. And they went with that, which I'm not sure the BBC would have done. So that was the gestation of it over maybe a couple of years. But to absolutely answer your question: I write children's books and I have written novels, and a lot of them I do think ‘They'll be good as a TV thing or a film’ or whatever. But I don't think I thought about Jews Don't Count because it was a piece of non-fiction thinking.
As you said, it's not a journey doc. It also doesn’t say: ‘This is how to make Jews count!’
That's it exactly. Actually that's a good point because quite often a response to the documentary, and when I do things like the Sydney Jewish Writers Festival, which is what I've been doing, a question will come up, which is, ‘How can we make this better?’ And I tend to say, ‘Yeah, I don't know, because my position is not one of social engineering'. You see what I mean? It's not a manifesto. It is an analysis: This is the situation: It seems that anti-Semitism and Jewish representation and Jewish inclusion in the conversation around identity politics is low in the mix here. Here are some examples of that. And here's why I think that happens. All I can say to fix it is: ‘Start that conversation’. I don't have 12 points as to how to turn back that situation, and I don't know if that would be the way forward for it anyway.
At the end of the documentary, I say, maybe the thought is shifting on this conversation, but the way it will shift, in my opinion, is not in the way that other types of social justice have happened, in very big and important and dramatic ways – such as the way the Black Lives Matter movement happened. That will never happen with this issue. But there is a small shift, in little ways, such as including Jews in diversity initiatives in Britain now. People who run them tend to phone me up and say, ‘Oh yeah, I read your book, and I realised we'd done like a week of diversity initiatives about race and ethnicity and we didn't include Jews. Do you want to talk to us for 2 hours’ or whatever?' That's what I mean.
There's just a given that anti-Semitism is historically one of the oldest forms of discrimination, it's almost like it has been forgotten along with that. That's it’s in the background somewhere. But that's not how Jews perceive it, certainly, with a rising tide of online and actual real-life attacks on Jews. So I think what it feels like to me is that Jewish people in general have a sense of, 'Yeah, this is going on and thank you for packaging it'. To non-Jewish kind of progressives, the people who I'm addressing, it's been for them---not all of them; some of them don't agree—,a kind of small eureka moment, if you know what I mean.
For example, one person wrote to me, and I think they did work in that space and said, ‘I now realise that anti-Semitism is the racism that sneaks past you’. And in a way that's good that the book is a tiny wake up call, a tiny alarm clock going off that says, ‘No, no, that's all still here’.
Yes. And back to what you were saying about the characteristics of Channel Four: at SBS we tend to be thought of the edgier public broadcaster here, too. So it's great that we've got the documentary, to have this challenging conversation about omission. To consider the notable absence of Jews in diversity conversations, and the importance of reciprocal allyship across the spectrum, I suppose.
Precisely. I should also mention that the book led to some quite famous people getting in touch with me in a way that I think were quite funny. So like, for example, I don't really look at Instagram messages, but I do occasionally. And so I'm flicking through it all, and I see a little head and I think, 'Isn't that Ross from Friends?' But it is, and it's David Schwimmer. He's just writing to me to say he's read my book and he's really enlivened and inspired by it and like, can we meet? Sarah Silverman, too, though she talked about it on her podcast, which has got like 12 million listeners or whatever. These are people who I didn't know before, reading the book and wanting to get involved and it was also part of what made the documentary happen straightforwardly. It's a more exciting prospect if you've got those people on. But there's a valid intellectual reason as well. They're interesting and clever people, but also I want this message to get out there. I think it is a difficult message to get out there because a lot of people, to be honest, just think like, ‘Jews? That's over there. That's not necessarily for me’. So by having Stephen Fry and Miriam Margolyes and David Schwimmer and Sarah Silverman and Neil Gaiman and whoever on the documentary, people think, ‘Oh, I'll watch that. I know those people’. And that was part of my thinking in those people to be involved.
And I have to single out the Miriam conversation. The way you two exchange opinions, have a robust discussion.
Yes!
And, you know, good points well made all round, really. It's a fascinating conversation and, I imagine, we see only a small amount of what went on. But let’s dig a little deeper into that moment in the film where you two really get into it.
Yeah, Miriam. It's really interesting, people's responses to that bit, because some people say to me, ‘Oh, you gave Miriam what for’. And then some people say, ‘Miriam gave you what for’. What they're slightly not understanding, maybe, is that I think that it's a to- and fro- and it's meant to be. It's not meant to be that either side wins that conversation because that's not what I'm interested in.
I'm interested in showing how complex that part of the conversation is, I mean, the whole thing is complex. But the Israel thing obviously is very complex. And my position on it is quite unusual. A friend of mine who saw the documentary whispered to me after the documentary, 'Oh, thank you for being the first Jewish person to come out publicly ---British Jewish person--- and say, ‘That place over there, it's a foreign country', and because that seems to be not much in the conversation. It's like either Jews are incredibly, connected to Israel or they feel incredibly betrayed by Israel or whatever. But because I want to talk about anti-Semitism, my main issue is, how do we talk about this centuries old thing that seems to be evolving into a new form, without necessarily having the whole thing reflexively brought down to what's happening in the Middle East? And I'm not saying that what's happening in the Middle East doesn't impinge on it, but it certainly isn’t the be all and end all. And that's what tends to happen.
Like instantly, when you talk about anti-Semitism. Someone will say, ‘What about Palestine?’ And I refuse that conversation. But that's interesting because Miriam can't do that, because Miriam feels very connected to Israel as she kind of admitted, and so therefore betrayed by the present government and all the rest of it. And that is not a conversation you're going to resolve. But you can air it, and you can feel how interesting it is and how complicated it is, but no one's going to ‘win’ it. And I'm not trying to.
Yes, it's not going to be solved with a cup of tea at Miriam Margolyes' house, that's for sure.
I mean, Miriam is lovely. And she's hilarious, so that's great. I think it’s very Jewish, really, that you can have that conversation, you can completely disagree. And then I still love her. And hopefully she still loves me. I don't know, you'd have to ask her that.
Across the film, you do pre-empt the comebacks in great ways. I mean, you're used to copping it from all angles on Twitter, so I suppose you know what you're going to get. But can you give me some more insight into how you structured the point/counterpoint conversation in the film?
Well, the book was helpful in that respect. So I had a map, which obviously changes, but I had a map based on the book of my argument. But you’re right, one of the things about this particular conversation, and I mean, not just this conversation, but: social media is very responsive about this. If you say anything controversial, you hear the comeback before you say it. That is complicated, I think, because it doesn't help self-expression, but you do. And with this one, I absolutely know what people are going to say. And sometimes I know what people are going to say, very minutely. So there’s the stuff about Israel, which you expect, but for example, it's the very brief moment where I'm talking to David Schwimmer, and we start talking about whether or not Jews are a race. Because some people will say, ‘well, Jews don't suffer racism because they're not a race’. And I say that's not important because whether we're a race or not, we have, over centuries, been racialised, been imagined as an inferior race in the past because of racism. And that's definitely one of many, many things that I'm playing Whac-A-Mole around. People will say, ‘What about this’ or ‘what about that?’
Obviously, that's one reason why Jason Lee in the film, although actually Jason Lee is in the film for a human reason for me. I just thought that I've said sorry before, and I want to choose this moment to say sorry, to him, in the documentary. And it just so happened that he'd just announced that he was doing a podcast. So, I decided to try and see him, and he wanted to see me, and do that. That's obviously the most uncomfortable conversation in the film, but I feel on a very human level, that it was good. It was good for me. It's good. And he's talked about it being helpful in terms of moving on.
One thing I would say about that, which I think is problematic, not in terms of the film, but in terms of the response to it: When the film aired in Britain, there was a lot of focus on that moment. And I was troubled by that, for a specific reason. I was glad I'd done it, of course, but what I didn't want was a position whereby a ‘Jews Don't Count’ thing was happening, where a film about anti-Semitism was being seen mainly about this other thing [reckoning with blackface]. And I thought that was happening, briefly. But, you know, you can't control how your film is received.
Picture Shows_Presenter David Baddiel with writer Neil Gaiman Credit: Alex Emanuel/Mindhouse Productions
Ah, that's a good point. I have to mention the conversation with your niece, Dionna Baddiel. She brings a personal layer of intersectionality to the whole thing. Her perspective is so interesting, how did you broach her being involved, did she take some coaxing to participate?
No, not at all [laughs]. My main worry with Dionna was that we would film her and then maybe not use her. And then as her uncle, I wouldn’t want to make that call, 'Sorry you're not in it’, because she was really keen to be in there. Actually, one of the things about Dionna is she's like 28 now and has spent most of her life never really thinking about her Jewish identity and has just started to think about it, but not because of the film. She just had started to do a DNA test and discovered that 50% of her DNA is Jewish and the rest is a mix of many different ethnicities. And she was really interested in that. Now she sends me lots of messages saying, ‘Oh, look, I found this relative, in Eastern Europe’, or whatever [laughs].
I felt for the conversation about ‘passing’, which is what's happening at that point in the film, it would be useful to speak to someone who I know really well and feel for. I'm very close to Dionna. And in terms of her vulnerability as a black person in America, she can talk to me about that in a way that obviously I can't speak of, and that will help me to get into my own head, how to talk about the fact that clearly someone who is visibly of a different minority, feels differently about that. And I felt that statement should be in the film.
And then, I complexify it by saying something which maybe she hasn't thought about, which is the fact that Jews can pass has often been held against them by racists who say ‘that means they're secretly amongst us. Secretly doing their terrible work. And that's why we have to give them armbands'.
Absolutely. We’ve mentioned some of the other people in the doc, but for those who hadn't originally contacted you: how did you go about approaching people and considering the lived experience that they can speak to, as a way to flesh out the thesis?
I think I tried to get a range of people. So, there's obviously some famous actors, but there's also writers like Howard Jacobson and Jonathan Safran Foer. There's Patrick Oliver, who's a director. And then there's Dara Horn, who's an American writer who wrote a book called ‘People Love Dead Jews’, which is kind of a companion piece to mine, which is specifically about the way that the culture kind of will give lip service reverence to things like the Holocaust whilst allowing all sorts of other anti-Semitism to permeate society. She's brilliant.
Wow. Great title, too.
Amazing title. I mean, really, they were just people who I like and think would be interesting and would make a good mix of people. I also wasn't keen on getting too many of the ‘expected’ people, if you see what I mean. The other thing is that people I'm not going to mention, who we didn't get, wanted to do the documentary but were slightly frightened of it. You know, there were a few people, very important British journalists, for example, TV journalists, who just said, ‘I think this will be difficult for me. I completely agree with you. But it might be compromising for me to talk about this publicly’, or whatever. And obviously I respected that. But it's interesting because, one of the things people sometimes say to me is, ‘This is very brave’. And I never think of myself as brave because I think I'm very… like, I just want to talk about stuff I want to talk about. And I kind of know it's going to lead to fierce pushback, but I talk about it anyway because I'm slightly incontinent about what I want to talk about! But I understand that for lots of people this is a conversation that is difficult, because at heart, a lot of progressive people— maybe the society in general— don’t quite accept that Jews are a minority. And so they are genuinely vulnerable because then when people talk about it, they're worried that they will be seen as whining, or complaining or it won't be a legitimate thing to talk about. And that has to be got over.
Stephen [Fry]'s very good on this. Stephen has only recently, partly because he liked my book, wanted to talk about his Jewishness. There’s that thing he says at the end about, ‘For some reason you think our pain is not a real pain’. And you know that that's very true about how a lot of Jews feel that when they speak out against anti-Semitism, that it won't be taken seriously.
Picture Shows_Presenter David Baddiel with American Actor David Schwimmer Credit: Alex Emanuel/Mindhouse Productions
Especially online, I’m sure. Look, I confess, even I've tapped out of Twitter since Elon Musk has taken it over. I won't call it X.
I've tapped out a lot too. I'm there, but I'm not like I was. I was really engaged and I would just deal with trolls. It's not like that for me anymore. I can't be doing that. It's obviously a mess. And also it's kind of just horrible on there. So I post things like, 'I'm in Sydney, come and see this event', but I don't hang around in that.
Fair. Why do that to yourself? Are you more active somewhere else now? Have you taken to Instagram, or Threads?
I'm more active on Instagram than I was. But I don't love Instagram either. The tragedy of Twitter becoming like it is—and I think it will die—is that for a comedian and for a user of words, it was the best platform because it wasn't mainly visual. It isn't mainly visual, and it allows for you to say something which can be really concise and funny and whatever. And then sometimes even the engagement could be that as well. It wouldn't just be trolls, it would be people saying funny things, or saying interesting things in response. You can actually have a conversation on that, and I miss that. You come together on Instagram because Instagram is intensely shallow and it’s mainly about, ‘look at the fabulous, food I've got'.
Yeah. Or my dog.
Or it's, ‘Here is this amazing sunset’. And it's like very, very fridge magnet, I think, on there. Yeah, but it's nicer and there's not as much hate and I can tell people what I'm doing. I don't know.
Before I let you go, I must confess, they’ve been doing repeats of your season of Taskmaster on TV here, and so I’ve been rewatching a lot of that at the same time as Jews Don’t Count.
[Laughs] Yeah, can I tell you something about that? Because people talk to me about it quite a lot here. I don't know whether people know this or don't know this, but the way I am on that show is entirely truthful, like I think sometimes people think. ‘Is David Baddiel choosing deliberately the most hat headed way of doing these tasks?’ No, I really did think when I'm supposed to lasso Alex Horne and I can't do it: ‘I'll tie some wooden spoons, surely that will give it enough weight to make the distance'. Greg says at one point, ‘When we give you a task, they're quite difficult. But you have the added difficulty of being David Baddiel’. He's absolutely right about that, because I think my brain doesn't think very straightforwardly in tasks. My wife said to me, ‘How can you be doing Taskmaster? You're the least practical person in the world’. And that found out to be correct.
