Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet or computer – no Kindle device required. Learn more
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
Audible sample Sample
Jews Don’t Count: A Times Book of the Year 2021 Hardcover – 7 Sept. 2021
Amazon Price | New from | Used from |
Kindle Edition
"Please retry" | — | — |
Audible Audiobooks, Unabridged
"Please retry" |
£0.00
| Free with your Audible trial |
- Kindle Edition
£0.00 This title and over 1 million more are available with Kindle Unlimited £3.99 to buy -
Audiobook
£0.00 Free with your Audible trial - Hardcover
£12.50 - Paperback
£7.15
Explore your book, then jump right back to where you left off with Page Flip.
View high quality images that let you zoom in to take a closer look.
Enjoy features only possible in digital – start reading right away, carry your library with you, adjust the font, create shareable notes and highlights, and more.
Discover additional details about the events, people, and places in your book, with Wikipedia integration.
North American Edition of the UK Bestseller
How identity politics failed one particular identity.
‘a must read and if you think YOU don’t need to read it, that’s just the clue to know you do.’ SARAH SILVERMAN
‘This is a brave and necessary book.’ JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
‘a masterpiece.’
STEPHEN FRY
Jews Don’t Count is a book for people who consider themselves on the right side of history. People fighting the good fight against homophobia, disablism, transphobia and, particularly, racism. People, possibly, like you.
It is the comedian and writer David Baddiel’s contention that one type of racism has been left out of this fight. In his unique combination of close reasoning, polemic, personal experience and jokes, Baddiel argues that those who think of themselves as on the right side of history have often ignored the history of anti-Semitism. He outlines why and how, in a time of intensely heightened awareness of minorities, Jews don’t count as a real minority: and why they should.
- Print length144 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherTLS Books
- Publication date7 Sept. 2021
- Dimensions13.5 x 1.8 x 20.4 cm
- ISBN-100008490759
- ISBN-13978-0008490751
Customers who viewed this item also viewed
- Jews are the only objects of racism who are imagined – by the racists – as both low and high status. Jews are stereotyped, by the racists, in all the same ways that other minorities are – as lying, thieving, dirty, vile, stinking – but also as moneyed, privileged, powerful and secretly in control of the world. Jews are somehow both sub-human and humanity’s secret masters.Highlighted by 576 Kindle readers
- It doesn’t matter how rich you are, because the racists will smash in the door of your big house that they know you don’t deserve anyway and only own because you’re Jews.Highlighted by 352 Kindle readers
- But to these ears, the reflex need always to follow the phrase anti-Semitism with ‘and all types of racism’ is the left’s All Lives Matter.Highlighted by 237 Kindle readers
Product description
Review
‘Jews Don’t Count is a supreme piece of reasoning and passionate, yet controlled, argument. From his first sentence, the energy, force and conviction of Baddiel’s writing and thinking will transfix you…as readable as an airport thriller…a masterpiece.’
STEPHEN FRY
‘I don’t think I have ever been so grateful to anyone for writing a book. Baddiel’s Jews Don’t Count is incisive, urgent, surprisingly funny and short. It’s also a beautiful piece of publishing. It needs to be read’
JAY RAYNER
‘Brilliant, furious, uncomfortable, funny. Essential reading.’
SIMON MAYO
‘I'm about a quarter of the way into this thus far and it's very well argued and written. It's a book you know the author HAD to write, and those are the best books’
JON RONSON
‘I only big up work I really believe is good and this is extra-ordinarily good. And important’
JONATHAN ROSS
‘This is brilliant – funny and furious, mostly at the same time’
MARINA HYDE
‘A convincing and devastating charge sheet’ Dominic Lawson, Sunday Times
‘It is so gripping – I read it in a single sitting’ Stephen Bush, The Times
‘A fascinating book, I urge you to read it’ Piers Morgan
‘I really think it’s a great book … the real triumph is its tone, its straightforwardness, and its spectacular tact and wit’ Adam Phillips, author of Monogamy
‘this short and powerful book shows, with remarkable humanity and humour, that no contemporary conversation about racism is complete without confronting antisemitism. An essential read – and a compulsory one too, if I had my way.’ Sathnam Sanghera
‘Funny, complex and intellectually satisfying – a really good piece of work’ Frankie Boyle
‘Just so brilliantly argued and written, I was completely swept along’ Hadley Freeman
‘David Baddiel is a brilliant thinker and writer. Even when I disagree with him – especially when I disagree with him – I feel profound gratitude for his intellectual and moral clarity. This is a brave and necessary book.’ Jonathan Safran Foer
Book Description
A Times Book of the Year 2021
About the Author
David Baddiel was born in 1964 in Troy, New York, but grew up and lives in London. He is a comedian, television writer, columnist and author of four novels, of which the most recent is The Death of Eli Gold.
Product details
- Publisher : TLS Books (7 Sept. 2021)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 144 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0008490759
- ISBN-13 : 978-0008490751
- Dimensions : 13.5 x 1.8 x 20.4 cm
- Customer reviews:
About the author
Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings, help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyses reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonReviewed in the United Kingdom on 12 March 2021
-
Top reviews
Top reviews from United Kingdom
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
Baddiel makes a convincing argument that on all sides of the political spectrum there is an extraordinary capacity even of people who are generally strongly and genuinely opposed to racism to fail to consider Jewish people, or to forget about, fail to notice, or downplay racism against Jews in a way that they would never do about almost any other form of racism.
In some ways it is more alarming that this blind spot applies not just to downright Anti-Semites but to people who had no intention of being racist. Individuals who will instantly apologise and make an effort to adjust their behavior if anyone calls them on it - which strongly suggests that nobody ever has.
He quotes the Guardian's Hadley Freeman: "Would addressing bigotry against any other minority be seen by the self-described anti-racist left as an unfortunate distraction, or is it just Anti-Semitism?"
Baddiel is a football fan and writes about the experiences he and his brother had of racism on the terraces. Not all that long ago racist chanting and abuse was completely endemic throughout football. The problem hasn't been completely stamped out but enormous efforts to reduce it have been made.
Except, he argues, for Anti-Semitic abuse. I do not claim to know a lot about football, and I do not know first hand how widespread is Baddiel's experience that officials and fans tolerate abusive comments against Jews which they would never tolerate against any other minority, But I know enough to take David Baddiel's points seriously, because I do know there is at least some truth in what he writes about the club which a member of my immediate family supports - Spurs (Tottenham Hotspur Football Club.)
Spurs is based in a part of North London which has a significant Jewish population and has come to be seen by rival fans as a "Jewish" club, even though it isn't. That includes some people referring to the club and it's supporters by a word beginning with "Y" which is an insulting name for Jewish people - and which I am not going to write here, any more than I would write the equivalent insulting word for a black person beginning with "N."
Baddiel argues that there has been more tolerance of this - and indeed failure on the part of people who would not deliberately support any kind of racism to spot the problem - than there would be for other forms of racism. It may be an education issue; it may be that, because the word does not provoke the level of response that most other such words do; not everyone even knows that it is a racial slur.
The club itself is sufficiently bothered by this that quite recently - to be precise, in December 2020 which is between the date Baddiel submitted the last parts of the book to his publishers and the date it was published - Spurs adopted the IHRA definition of Anti-Semitism to reinforce its commitment that "The Club has a zero tolerance approach to anti-Semitism as well as any other form of discrimination."
It is quite extraordinary that prejudice against the race who were the main victims of the worst act of genocide in history should be the very same prejudice that many people apparently forget to consider when talking about racism. Yet this book makes a strong case that this is exactly what happens.
The title of David Baddiel's book was perfectly illustrated by a barrage of tweets the very weekend I was writing this review from Labour MPs and activists about their new Scottish leader.
The day before I posted this Anas Sarwar was elected as the new leader of the Scottish Labour party.
Perfectly OK for Labour supporters or anyone else to welcome his election. But extraordinary, and just plain wrong, for Labour MPs and activists from the party's Deputy Leader Angela Rayner down to describe him as
"the first ever ethnic minority leader of a political party anywhere in the UK."
Nonsense.
The first ever ethnic minority leader of a political party anywhere in the UK took office a hundred and fifty three years before when Benjamin Disraeli became Prime Minister and leader of his party.
Some people argued that he doesn't count as a Jew or as a member of an ethnic minority because he converted to the Church of England. That is silly. Disraeli didn't stop being the target of Anti-Semitism, didn't stop being proud of his Jewish heritage and didn't stop describing himself and being described by others as a Jew when he joined the Anglican church.
Once he was on the receiving end of an insult in the House of Commons from the leader of the Irish nationalists which included mention of his Jewish ancestry, and he replied
"Yes, I am a Jew,"
and added that his ancestors "were priests in the temple of Solomon."
I can think of at least three other people from ethnic minorities who became leaders of UK political parties. The second leader of a political party from an Ethnic minority was Herbert Samuel, ninety years ago. A third was Michael Howard.
Anas Sarwar isn't even the first national leader of the Labour party for the UK or one of the four nations who was a member of an ethnic minority - Ed Miliband beat him to that distinction in 2010.
Disraeli, Samuel, Howard, Miliband, all ignored by Angela Rayner and others. Now what do the four leaders these people were leaving out today have in common?
You guessed it: they were all Jewish. It's as if the people tweeting this weekend were using the title of David Baddiel's book: "Jews don't count" as an axiom where being a member of an ethnic minority is concerned.
Perhaps the saddest part of the book is the very last page. He refers to the fact that as a young person growing up, Baddiel greatly enjoyed the "Citizen Smith" comedy TV show about a young would-be revolutionary, "Wolfie Smith" played by Robert Lindsay. Wolfie Smith was, for him, a hero.
The day after the Equalities and human rights commission - an official body set up and operating under laws which the last Labour government itself had put onto the statue book, published a damning report into the failure of the Labour party to deal with Anti-Semitism, Robert Lindsey tweeted in defence of the party leader on whose watch that failure had occurred.
Baddiel concludes his book as follows:
"So obviously I know that was an actor playing a part. I know that was fifty years ago. But still, on realising that for Wolfie Smith, Jews don't count, a tiny part of me died."