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Speaker 2: As we come margin Martin and the Beauty of the
Speaker 2: Day a million dark in kegeens one thousand mil last
Speaker 2: grade are bridden by the Beauty is Sun Sun Disclosers
Speaker 2: and the Ableses Roses.
Speaker 1: All right, Hi everyone, I'm here with Michael Richmond, author
Speaker 1: of the book Fractured, and we're here to discuss David
Speaker 1: Badile's Jews Don't Count. And yeah, I don't know if Michael,
Speaker 1: if you wanted to introduce yourself at all, anything beyond
Speaker 1: beyond that, I.
Speaker 3: Guess it's probably useful to say that we're both Jewish,
Speaker 3: and that's partly why we're interested in this book. And
Speaker 3: I've kind of done some writing around sort of anti
Speaker 3: Semitism and philo Semitism in recent years. And yeah, I
Speaker 3: think we were both just kind of sufficiently, you know,
Speaker 3: we recognized that the book came out a few years
Speaker 3: ago now, but we're kind of sufficiently annoyed by it
Speaker 3: that we we've finally managed to get together to talk
Speaker 3: about it.
Speaker 1: It is quite an annoying book.
Speaker 3: I mean, he just annoyingness as a man just jumps
Speaker 3: off the page.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I did say in the lead up to this
Speaker 1: that I wanted to try and be even handed, but
Speaker 1: we've jumped straight into just how annoying he is. But
Speaker 1: before we get onto how annoying is, can we maybe
Speaker 1: I don't know if you want to say something maybe
Speaker 1: anything that you think about the book that might be positive,
Speaker 1: or anything good that you can say about the book.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's tough because I think, like I think what's
Speaker 3: most damaging about the book is that it's kind of
Speaker 3: become this this kind of go to book for a
Speaker 3: particular kind of reaction to like recent debates around phanti
Speaker 3: Semitism and Jewishness. And in that sense, I think probably
Speaker 3: quite a lot of people have read it and thought, right,
Speaker 3: this is the right opinion to have, And in that
Speaker 3: sense it's really damaging because a lot of the people
Speaker 3: that have read it aren't people who have engaged in
Speaker 3: any way in any of these debates and are just thinking,
Speaker 3: all right, here, this is a kind of stupid man's
Speaker 3: intellectual who kind of comes out with this kind of
Speaker 3: take that's quite high profile, and people can just kind
Speaker 3: of swallow it whole and kind of take it on
Speaker 3: as their kind of answer to what's been what's been
Speaker 3: happening with recent debates. And so, you know, having said that,
Speaker 3: like if you actually read it, you know, from our
Speaker 3: point of view, in terms of like knowing a bit
Speaker 3: more like having lived some of these kind of debates
Speaker 3: in these kind of really kind of annoying, trying kind
Speaker 3: of times, we might be able to experience some of
Speaker 3: the book as being like, okay, yeah, like anti Semitism
Speaker 3: is a problem, and like Jewish culture and Jewish history
Speaker 3: aren't that well known in Britain. You know, there's those
Speaker 3: kind of small aspects of the points that he's making
Speaker 3: are valid, and therefore it just seems like even more
Speaker 3: of a kind of missed opportunit. You need to like
Speaker 3: speak about them in a more like historicized and kind
Speaker 3: of contextualized way rather than this kind of like really
Speaker 3: quite reactionary kind of polemic that he that he kind
Speaker 3: of used it for. I don't know how even handed
Speaker 3: that was. I know that I'm supposed to be even handed.
Speaker 1: Yeah, just what I did want to say that was
Speaker 1: so from that was the good bit that you can
Speaker 1: say about about the book. And from here it's all downhill.
Speaker 1: So it's a really damaging book. That's the positive. That's
Speaker 1: the positive statement.
Speaker 3: About what do you think do you think my being
Speaker 3: unre well.
Speaker 1: No, you're I mean, I think you're right basically. But
Speaker 1: the topic, the topic that he's he's brought up is
Speaker 1: a really interesting one. You know, the issue of, you know,
Speaker 1: there's an issue of jewishness in its relationship to whiteness,
Speaker 1: the issue of you know, anti semitism and its relationship
Speaker 1: to to other forms of racism. You know, these are
Speaker 1: kind of interesting topics for discussion.
Speaker 3: They are really importanttant question, but.
Speaker 1: He does he does approach them in perhaps the stupidest
Speaker 1: way imaginable. I was I was talking to someone about
Speaker 1: it yesterday and uh, and we were saying, like it's
Speaker 1: the equivalent of someone, you know, someone who wants to write,
Speaker 1: you know, about what the weather's been like this week
Speaker 1: and what the weather's going to be like next week
Speaker 1: and just looking out their window and that being the
Speaker 1: extent of what they talk about, you know what I mean.
Speaker 1: It's just so kind of like so, oh right, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's it. That's so what I can immediately see here.
Speaker 1: That's that. I don't think I need to go any
Speaker 1: deeper into that. So basically the short version is that
Speaker 1: there's there's not much good about this book. I mean,
Speaker 1: I think, you know, the style of it, it's this
Speaker 1: kind of like this long form s say essentially, which
Speaker 1: I think, what is it?
Speaker 3: What is it? It's not it's not clear what it is.
Speaker 3: It's almost like a kind of like what's it called?
Speaker 3: In in like shape, it's like a soliloquy. It's like
Speaker 3: a just like there's one long soliloquy. But it's like
Speaker 3: the kind of feeling of it is just that it's
Speaker 3: like wow, like that's the kind of tone like everyone
Speaker 3: should think the same things as me, and everyone should
Speaker 3: stop being mean to me. On Twitter, like this is
Speaker 3: the kind of.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think, I think, I think that's it.
Speaker 1: I think because that's you know, because it's got the
Speaker 1: sort of the the sort of the long form essay
Speaker 1: style of you know, you can imagine like Camu, like
Speaker 1: you know when he writes The Rebel, you know what
Speaker 1: I mean, or like you know, one of all Well's
Speaker 1: long form essays or James Baldwin or something like that.
Speaker 1: But then the thing is is that it's just so daft.
Speaker 1: It's like there's no there's no intellectual heft to it
Speaker 1: at all. There's no I can't I think there's hardly
Speaker 1: any reference to any other book on the topic or I.
Speaker 3: I would like to talk to you about referencing. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I've done some very important research. Right while I was
Speaker 3: reading the book, I counted that he references thirty tweets
Speaker 3: in the book, right, And he doesn't just reference tweets,
Speaker 3: he reproduces them with the image from Twitter of the
Speaker 3: tweets right. Out of the thirty tweets, nine of them
Speaker 3: are his own tweets, right, So basically the whole book
Speaker 3: is just him doing a self retweet of his own
Speaker 3: kind of really bad opinions and bad tweets, and I
Speaker 3: kind of thought about I thought about this kind of
Speaker 3: like phenomenon of like referencing yourself, and it reminded me
Speaker 3: of when I did a Capital reading group, like and
Speaker 3: I just and I realized that basically, this man, I've
Speaker 3: never seen a Jew reference himself so much since I
Speaker 3: read Capital Volume one like this, this, this is Carl
Speaker 3: Mark's levels of like I'm I'm right, read my previous work.
Speaker 3: I mean, he even like, yeah, quotes one of his
Speaker 3: novels at length as if that's like that.
Speaker 1: Was actually one bit where I was like, oh, well,
Speaker 1: you know what that's this is an interesting this is
Speaker 1: potentially interesting point. What's what's this book that he's And
Speaker 1: then I went back and read read the paragraph again.
Speaker 1: It was like, I know, he's just talking about one
Speaker 1: of his own novels. This is not it's not research.
Speaker 1: It's not researching like there's he's just constantly been like
Speaker 1: oh yeah, this is all you see this all on
Speaker 1: social media. I see many posts these days. It's like
Speaker 1: that's not, that's not research, that's not it's just like
Speaker 1: I've seen tweets. It's not you know, that's not that's not.
Speaker 3: That's kind of like I think indicative of like his
Speaker 3: overall focus of the book, which is he doesn't go
Speaker 3: into great detail about why he's focusing on what is
Speaker 3: basically this kind of very indeterminate blob that he calls progressives,
Speaker 3: which is just like everything from like liberals, like centrist conservatives,
Speaker 3: to like all different types of British institutions to well.
Speaker 1: As well as we'll get on as we'll get onto
Speaker 1: this later. But you know, one of the examples he
Speaker 1: gives is actually not of a liberal or he is
Speaker 1: actually of a Nazi collaborator. But somehow this has pinned somehow,
Speaker 1: this has pinned on the on the left in some way.
Speaker 1: But yeah, I mean I think this is that's really
Speaker 1: kind of key. And I think part of part of
Speaker 1: this issue is that there is no intellectual or methodological.
Speaker 3: Rigor to it.
Speaker 1: And it's and and yeah, like you say, like you know,
Speaker 1: he's quoting his own tweets, he's quoting his own novels,
Speaker 1: and like there's.
Speaker 3: This from his own life. Yeah for the guy, because
Speaker 3: a lot of the time he's quoting things that have
Speaker 3: happened where his friends have been racist. It's like, all right, mate,
Speaker 3: if your friends are being racist, to you, that's not
Speaker 3: like some representative of like the left or like progressive.
Speaker 3: That means that you should have choose better friends.
Speaker 1: You've got racist friends. And but there's this I mean
Speaker 1: like as I was reading it, like there were I
Speaker 1: got that. There's that line from Uh, there's a British
Speaker 1: sitcom called Garth Marengi's Dark Place where the main character
Speaker 1: is this author, Garth Marengi, and he says he says
Speaker 1: the line, I'm actually one of the few authors who's
Speaker 1: written more books than they've read. And as I was
Speaker 1: reading this book, I was like, this is this is
Speaker 1: Garth Morengi. You know what I mean?
Speaker 3: This is it.
Speaker 1: It's like there's no no desire to look into anything
Speaker 1: beyond Yeah, like you say, his own tweets, his own books,
Speaker 1: and like, yeah, his his interactions with you know.
Speaker 3: We probably know how many books he's written because he
Speaker 3: probably references all of them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I still cut you off there, but I
Speaker 1: think you know, you talk about this this kind of
Speaker 1: indeterminate blob that he's kind of aiming his his ayre towards.
Speaker 1: This comes to basically the central claim of his of
Speaker 1: his of his book, which is basically that that anti
Speaker 1: Semitism is not taken as seriously as other as other
Speaker 1: forms of racism, So for me, you know, I mean,
Speaker 1: I think immediately on the face of it, anyone who's
Speaker 1: faced any other form of racism apart from anti semitism
Speaker 1: would probably raise their eyebrow at that idea, that suggestion.
Speaker 1: But actually, like you say, he's limiting or he's claiming
Speaker 1: to limit his discussion to just those on the left,
Speaker 1: which he you know, he describes in this really really vague,
Speaker 1: indeterminate way. I don't know if you want to say
Speaker 1: a bit more about that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, it's it's really quite facile, like the
Speaker 3: way that he does it, Like when he describes like
Speaker 3: the left, it's almost like, you know, what was that
Speaker 3: There was like a TV show in the eighties that
Speaker 3: became this kind of like reference point for like kind
Speaker 3: of fish left wing where the guy wears the beret and.
Speaker 1: He's called like wof Citizens Smith. Yeah, something like that.
Speaker 3: It's that kind of like it's a kind of liberal
Speaker 3: way of talking about leftist politics. It's like not understanding
Speaker 3: any part of any of the ideas or history of
Speaker 3: the left, but it's kind of like he describes the
Speaker 3: left as being fighty. You know that it's like the
Speaker 3: left like it's supposed to care about injustice, but it
Speaker 3: doesn't when it comes to Jews. And there's this thing
Speaker 3: that he calls like the sacred circle, which is like
Speaker 3: these are the kind of like prioritized or oppressed groups
Speaker 3: that are included in the people that the left fights for.
Speaker 3: So then you know, the left is like not anyone
Speaker 3: who's from those groups. It's just like I guess, you know,
Speaker 3: white indeterminate white people on the left who care about
Speaker 3: certain minorities but don't care about Jews. And his kind
Speaker 3: of analysis of like left anti semitism, which you know,
Speaker 3: we'll probably discuss it more, but like you know, throughout
Speaker 3: these years, last few years, there's been a lot of
Speaker 3: discussion about anti semitism on the left, you know, and
Speaker 3: it's kind of an exhausted topic. It's like you'd have
Speaker 3: to like wade through this whole kind of like morass
Speaker 3: of like bad faith to have any kind of like
Speaker 3: useful conversation on it. But it's like it's something that
Speaker 3: has a history that exists. There are like histories of
Speaker 3: exclusion and of conspiracy type racism on the left towards Jews,
Speaker 3: but like his kind of presentation of it, it's just
Speaker 3: completely like puerile. It's just like the left doesn't care
Speaker 3: about Jews because they think that Jews are all powerful
Speaker 3: and are all kind of capitalists and bloody, bloody blah.
Speaker 3: And it's like there's no engagement whatsoever with like any
Speaker 3: kind of history, any kind of like the thought of
Speaker 3: like Jewish left, this Jewish Marxist, Jewish anarchists, struggles over
Speaker 3: the centuries of like working class Jewish culture. There's none
Speaker 3: of that. It's just it's just this kind of like
Speaker 3: one line thing of like this is why, this is why,
Speaker 3: this is why Jews don't count for the left, and it's.
Speaker 1: Just like, yeah, well this is this is actually what's funny.
Speaker 1: Towards towards the end of the book, he goes the
Speaker 1: response to Corbyn's labor mobilized British Jews for the first
Speaker 1: time in history or something like that, and you're just like,
Speaker 1: are you out of your mind? Like you know what
Speaker 1: I mean, Like, you know, Jews in Britain, but not
Speaker 1: just in Britain, you know, Jews in general, you know,
Speaker 1: the diaspora are some of the most mobilized politically mobilized people,
Speaker 1: you know. Ever, like you know, it's just it's crazy,
Speaker 1: like you know, you're talking, you know, in Britain. You
Speaker 1: just need to go to like you know to talk
Speaker 1: about I don't know, you know, the old like you know,
Speaker 1: communists in East London. You know, they used to describe
Speaker 1: like East London as a little Moscow, you know, because
Speaker 1: it was so mobilized with the old kind of Jewish
Speaker 1: trade unions.
Speaker 3: And like, you know, there's a reason there's a reason
Speaker 3: why the British ruling class talked about kind of anarchism
Speaker 3: and terrorism. Like the reason why they racialized it is Jews.
Speaker 3: It's not just because of their racism. It's because there
Speaker 3: was loads of Jewish anarchists.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, Jewish Bolshevism and like yeah, you know, it's
Speaker 1: like it was just crazy to like it was what
Speaker 1: do you mean like that you know in twenty whatever,
Speaker 1: twenty seventeen or that that was the first time that
Speaker 1: Jews had ever mobile is like Cable Street, you know,
Speaker 1: like the forty three group. There's so many things that
Speaker 1: like so many times that Jews have organized politically and
Speaker 1: he just doesn't mention it. It just has And again
Speaker 1: it's its first.
Speaker 3: Jewish trade union was founded in London in like the
Speaker 3: eighteen seventies or something like, You've got massive history of
Speaker 3: like Taylor strikes and solidarity and within those workers struggles
Speaker 3: in the in the East. Then like it's I mean,
Speaker 3: do you know what it reminds me of, Like when
Speaker 3: he says, like for the first time, it's just like
Speaker 3: this kind of classic ahistorical void of liberalism. It just
Speaker 3: it reminds me of like, you know, when there were
Speaker 3: there were kind of the kind of pro eu marches
Speaker 3: that would happen around around kind of the Brexit time
Speaker 3: have you'd have like like painfully middle class people kind
Speaker 3: of holding up signs along the lines of like why
Speaker 3: did you make me come out here and leave my house?
Speaker 3: Like or like not usually the type to do this
Speaker 3: kind of person. It's like this doesn't speak to like
Speaker 3: the actual history of like Jewish struggle or Jews involved
Speaker 3: in struggle in Britain. This speaks to like the deal
Speaker 3: and lots of other Jews in the current period being
Speaker 3: demobilized or being kind of like you know, suddenly deciding
Speaker 3: oh we're going to be we're going to have to
Speaker 3: like do protest things. So you had like you had
Speaker 3: that absolutely bizarre kind of protest in like whenever it
Speaker 3: was twenty eighteen or twenty nineteen, when you had like
Speaker 3: you know, the Board of Deputies and various other like
Speaker 3: kind of Jewish leadership organizations having like a kind of
Speaker 3: sort of supposedly a protest. But it was like, how
Speaker 3: do you have a protest if the entire kind of
Speaker 3: state is on your side? Like everyone's all these Tory politicians,
Speaker 3: all the government ministers are all there like with their
Speaker 3: like plat like kind of perfectly kind of like laminated signs. Yeah,
Speaker 3: like this, and it's just like that's that's what it
Speaker 3: reminded me of. It's like, this is a kind of
Speaker 3: this is the first time that we're doing this because
Speaker 3: I have no idea what history is.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, absolutely, and yeah, and I think like, you know,
Speaker 1: so as part of as part of his kind of
Speaker 1: his this claim that he's making about an anti Semitism
Speaker 1: not being taken as seriously as other forms of racism
Speaker 1: and specifically on the left, you know, he says in
Speaker 1: this one part of the book at the beginning, he
Speaker 1: says that what he's trying to do is and so
Speaker 1: this is just to quote him that he's trying to
Speaker 1: pinpoint something key about modern anti Semitism, which is the
Speaker 1: left confusion over it. And so, you know, I read
Speaker 1: that and I was like, Okay, you know, does that
Speaker 1: does that make it because he's making it more precise,
Speaker 1: He's he's maybe being a bit more precise about what
Speaker 1: he's talking about. So does that does that make it
Speaker 1: kind of better or sharper this now insight? And I
Speaker 1: was like, no, actually, that makes it even stupider because
Speaker 1: it's just like, you know, I was like, there, it's like,
Speaker 1: you know, so wait, so you're telling me that the key,
Speaker 1: the key to modern anti semitism, you know, the crucial
Speaker 1: thing to anti semitism today is the left confusion over it.
Speaker 1: And you're just like, well, you know, at the moment,
Speaker 1: we have like you know, political discourses around kind of
Speaker 1: cultural Marxism and great replacement theory and saw us you know,
Speaker 1: saw us money, and like, you know, have the far
Speaker 1: right kind of spreading this, uh, these kind of anti
Speaker 1: semitic these anti Semitic conspiracy theories, all the while kind
Speaker 1: of still supporting Israel obviously, and and then so there's
Speaker 1: that and that that sort of seems quite signific dificant
Speaker 1: in terms of modern anti Semitism. But then also, you know,
Speaker 1: so this book is published in twenty twenty one, and
Speaker 1: you know, at that point, you know, the Tories had
Speaker 1: been in government for over a decade, the far right
Speaker 1: were on the right art well, and still are on
Speaker 1: the rise everywhere, you know what I mean. It's and
Speaker 1: and so I'm kind of, you know, I'm just there.
Speaker 1: I was thinking, like, I'm not sure that in that
Speaker 1: context the left is key to anything, you know what
Speaker 1: I mean?
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