UK: Jews are the only entity that can be imagined as vermin but also as moneyed and secretly in control

At half-time at my standup gigs these days, I ask the audience to tweet me, and sometimes I read out these tweets in the second half, in the hope they might lead somewhere funny. On Monday, at Newcastle’s Theatre Royal, someone tweeted me – and I’m not going to name them, as I have no interest in bringing the Twitter pitchfork mobs down on anyone’s head – “Can you do something about the bar prices here being so antisemitic?”

I read this one out, even though I knew it wasn’t funny. I was interested in how someone who watched the first half of my show, which has got a fair bit in it about antisemitism, could still send me a clearly antisemitic tweet – could even include the word – and, crucially, not realise it. That tweet says: the drink prices here are too high; that will particularly upset Jews – won’t it? – because Jews love money. And the idea that Jews love money – that Jews are greedy, that Jews are misers – isn’t just a persistent myth: it’s one of the very few racist stereotypes that people will still offer up without realising that it is a racist stereotype. They just think it’s true. Isn’t it?

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Jews are, after all, the only entity, in terms of the racist stereotype that operates on two levels, low and high status – that can be imagined as vermin but also as moneyed and secretly in control. The moneyed and in-control thing undoubtedly still has some traction on the left (see France), and it’s why Jews, at best, might not be considered to be really in need of the protections that anti-racism offers, and at worst might be the enemy.

You can see this, I think, in the way Mackay, Whelan and Balotelli’s remarks are referred to in reportage as involving racism and antisemitism. What is that? Why are those two things separated? Antisemitism is racism. When I’ve said this before on Twitter, people get into a pedantic spin about whether or not Jews are a race or a religion, but that’s irrelevant: they are considered a race by racists. The Gestapo were very happy to murder Jewish atheists. Therefore antisemitism is racism, and the separation of it from racism in general can be considered a way of saying “obviously, though, not as
bad as racism towards black or Asian people: that’s clearly the top racism”.

More: The Guardian