Jew Don't Count & Schrodinger's Whiteness

Schrodinger's Whiteness is only mentioned briefly in Jews Don't Count by David Baddiel (2021), but it does a lot of heavy lifting when it comes to explaining the marginalisation of Jewish people as a marginalised group - marginalisation squared, if we are continuing on the science-adjacent theme. The concept is that Jewish people are considered to be either white or not white, depending on the politics of those who are observing them. To white supremacists, such as Nazis, neo-Nazis, the alt-right, EDL, those kinds of pricks, Jewish people are absolutely not White. But, they can pass as White, which makes them extra scary to racists and requires them to be 'uncovered' with research into their family history, and no doubt DNA analysis if that is available. However, to people who see themselves as progressive, Jewish people have White privilege, and therefore the discrimination they face is not as serious or important as the discrimination faced by other minority or oppressed groups. British-Jewish people exist in a state of perpetual duality because of stereotypes that are forced upon them; White passing/not White, British/Jewish, privileged/oppressed, looking Jewish/hiding their Jewishness, pride/shame, being too Jewish/not being Jewish enough... Schrodinger's Whiteness encapsulates a lot about the specific kind of racism Jewish people face, which is the assumption that they have wealth, power and privilege, yet at the same time they are a minority facing discrimination, and to too many, are lesser beings. Therefore, they are trapped between the racists who want them dead, and the anti-racists who think the racists don't want them dead enough. Or not as much as other groups. Or that they can protect themselves with the money they somehow all have because it's notoriously easy for refugees to become rich?

This is an example of how and why identity politics so often falls short of delivering social justice; because it simply isn't intersectional enough. Modern identity politics often rely on people deciding on their own internal hierarchy of identity, instead of the messy amalgamation of identities we all inhabit. It means people feel they have to sacrifice other aspects of their identity to serve the cause of the one most important aspect, leading to comparisons of who is more oppressed, and whose oppression should be prioritised. It also, in this case, leads to serious misunderstandings about why some people have some form of privilege. Jewish people who are rich aren't rich because they are Jewish, often they are rich in spite of being Jewish. Being Jewish doesn't protect them from discrimination because Jewish people are powerful, being rich in a capitalist society protects them from some of the discrimination poorer Jewish people face. As Baddiel says, '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 are Jews.' (p27) We know this because it literally happened during a literal genocide that ended only 76 years ago, and because hate crimes against Jewish people are rising in frequency and severity. People are still dying because they are Jewish.

Similarly, it doesn't matter if you are an atheist, not a practising Jew, not even if you didn't know you were a bit Jewish - racism doesn't take your cultural ties, opinions, beliefs or how many greats there are between you and your Jewish family member into account. The idea that antisemitism isn't important because Jewish people can choose to pass as not Jewish missed the point entirely. One of the accidentally funny parts of Baddiel's book (amongst many deliberately funny parts) is where he is speaking about a lack of Jewish representation and a lack of concern for that lack of representation. He lists fellow comedians he knows to be Jewish but says that he is the only one who has made being Jewish a part of his public identity. With this, he completely misses out the self-described 'lapsed Jew' Andy Zaltzman, host of the satirical podcast The Bugel, the radio show The News Quiz, and whose comedy both on those shows and in his stand-up contain a lot of very funny jokes about being Jewish, including that his career is an argument against the stereotype that Jewish people run showbiz, because if they did he'd have been a lot more successful. It's either an accidental marginalisation to the power of three or an incredibly specific in-joke. Andy Zaltzman also used to co-host The Bugle with John Oliver, who became hugely successful on The Daily Show and Last Week Tonight, and who joked 'I'm not actually Jewish, I just like the look' playing off both the stereotype of how Jewish people look, and that people would assume both he and Andy were Jewish because Andy speaks about being Jewish in his comedy, but he is the one who 'looks Jewish'. Andy, however, is (again self-described) the most popular ginger Jewish comedian, adding a fourth dimension in the form of another kind of discrimination people don't take seriously, that against people with ginger hair - hear me out on this ok, you've read this far. 

People with ginger hair are genuinely discriminated against in Britain, with research by O'Regan (2014)  showing that they are less likely to be employed than other white people with blonde or brown hair, more likely to be bullied, suffer abuse and violent attacks and have historically been killed because of colonialism and the belief that their hair colour linked them to the devil. Women with ginger hair were regularly burnt at the stake, accused as witches, and are still seen as sexually deviant and hyper-sexualised, due to being seen as more 'savage', a trope that is used in all racist propaganda to justify the rape and sexual assault of minority or colonised women and girls. Any gender with red or ginger hair is seen as particularly hot-tempered, which is also a trope used against Black people to justify violence against them, as it positions them as inherently the aggressor. In the civil wars between England and Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, those with ginger hair were especially targeted by the English as their hair colour was said to prove that they were Celts and therefore a lesser race. It's been around 500 years since English, Welsh and Scottish people were at war, and nearly 300 years since the end of the witch trials, but hostilities between England, Northern Ireland and Ireland continue, and the discrimination against people with ginger hair continues, because it is a physical representation of a different ethnicity which was specifically regarded as being sub-human. Even though the people discriminating against people with ginger hair will often have no idea why they are doing it, and that it is linked to historic wars with Scottish, Welsh and Irish people, racism has a very, very long cultural memory, and the discrimination itself persists. This becomes more complex when having red or ginger hair is combined with other ethnic minorities in the UK, such as being Jewish or Black, as it further adds to the sense that people don't fully belong in any of their communities.

There is also something interesting about antisemitism being weaponised by the political right to expose the left's hypocrisy and derail conversations about the damage right-wing policies have done to other marginalised people. Alongside the discrimination Jewish people face from the left, from an absence of solidarity to active antisemitism, the centre-right has been able to call out the antisemitic racism on the left without losing too much of their right-wing support. I suspect this has something to do with the re-emergence of nationalism which is intrinsically tied to the second world war and the narrative that Great Britain was the Saviour of Europe and the Jews from the Evil German Nazis. The way English history is taught very deliberately skips over the genocides, atrocities, white supremacy and racism caused by English colonial powers throughout the Empire, the antisemitism that was rampant during the second world war and which continues to this day, and instead positions Great Britain, and mostly England, as the plucky underdog who used their superior skill and morals to save everyone - but they better be grateful. It just so happens that the left's dismissal of racism against Jewish people fits neatly into the new Nationalist narrative that benefits the centre-right. That's not to say that some of the people who are on the centre-right are lying when they say they are against antisemitism, but it is to say there is a specific context to how antisemitism can be used by the right against the left. And frankly, the main reason is that the left and progressive people allow it by not simply coming out immediately against antisemitism whenever it is found. The right wouldn't be able to weaponise antisemitism that didn't exist. Baddiel is making the argument that antisemitism is real, harmful, current and deserves the same concern and activist solidarity as other marginalised groups have recently experienced because progressives increasing recognise social justice happens for all of us or none of us. The purpose of intersectionality is to recognise when oppression is compounded by multiple discriminations, and work to level the playing field for everyone. Not only is it impossible to compare the effects of different discriminations to judge who has it worse, doing so is directly opposed to the concept of equality. Equality relies on the belief that every single human being has fundamental rights because they are human beings, and we have a collective responsibility to uphold those rights for everyone. That is what the Universal Declaration of Human Rights set out to achieve, created alongside the promise of 'never again.' Jewish people are still waiting for that promise to be fulfilled.  

Baddiel, David (2021) Jews Don't Count, Harper Collins Publishers

O' Regan, Kevin. (2014). "Red hair in popular culture and the relationship with anxiety and depression.". Available online at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/261861129_Red_hair_in_popular_culture_and_the_relationship_with_anxiety_and_depression