I'm reading the baddiel book and

As a flaming homosexual, I had hoped he would have talked to the other minorities whom he alleges don't face these things.

I dont think... Or at least I sincerely hope, that what he says here isn't actually true

This is the primary piece on the Jason Lee photo.

I can't decide whether David here claims to support that BLM had prominence over Jewish movements at that time or not. Like is the, fairly commonly reiterated, fact of jesus being a jew in judea, an elision that is emblematic of the progressive blind-spot?

Quick pause for a drink.

Over all, this is very much a "vibes I get from twitter" book, with previous twitter threads expanded upon.

Which, I am reliably informed, basically the most common form of twitter celebrity publishing.

I think my review would be that this book should have got an editor, kindly asking David to get in touch with organisations of minorities he is talking about to discuss his theses. (and possibly binning it there cos it all comes across as unresearched, factually incorrect vibes)

This feels a little bit... Off. Like it's a perfect springboard to mention with regards to race and racism that the common familiarity is no coincidence and is a way to make a good point. Instead it is 'he isn't Muslim, he is jewish' even though no one actually said otherwise

Why does it "trample over his jewishness"

So this is what Stephen Bush and others got mad about, which to them was a definition of white privelege. Which it obviously isn't, and I don't even think it was intended to be. It is also ridiculous.

I think both Bush and Baddiel kind of missed that these concepts are largely about systemic issues (that can surface individually but *do not have to*) and not the interpersonal. At least for Baddiel it is definitely because of a small window of Twitter into this side activism.

I've heard this before, but it's good to see so clearly printed as a position.

It was David who widened the experience to be the same as Diane's, tagging her in, not Diane unprompted.

I don't have an comment on intracommunity issue. Obviously David Baddiel is not responsible for the actions of Israel personally.

I do know that many left wing Jews would take issue with being characterised as that.

This book outspokenly focuses on "progressives" (which includes David Cameron), but I don't know if Tory Lord Macmillan's Information Ministry or the rightwing Barre is now a part of that

This historical dip into the prewar England and 80s France... Feels like it would have benefitted from either a more holistic look, or some connective tissue between Lord Macmillan and modern progressives.

Also, Baddiel talks about the concept of the "sacred circle" echoing David Hirsh's "Community of good", a supposed moral theory of Corbynism in which there is a black and white oppressor - oppressed dynamic. Except here the sacred circle is coming from a 1940's Tory?

So I come to end of the book, its only 127 pages with footnotes counted as 1 page for footnotes. I want to highlight a couple of things, that appear to be used as refrains / bookends.

Firstly the concept of the "sacred circle" (pages 18-19, 94, 113)

This supposed moral framework of oppressed - oppressor of progressives, where Jewish people fall outside of this "sacred circle" due to their (conditional) whiteness.

This is asserted about the labour party, then given historical background as something that played in the mind of the tory Lord Macmillan in 1940 and then in the postscript the reason why Kaufman wrote a non-Jewish identifying character who feels conflicted about his identity.

If anything I would call this the thesis of the book, that this "sacred circle" exists for progressives and causes antisemitism both overt and more "elision", "erasure", etc.

The direct evidence and discussion for it is weak (a speech by Dawn Butler not mentioning Jews while listing all manner of other groups, a Tory Lord's pamphlet in 1940 and a David's own reading of Kaufman's Antkind), but it is a book about the subtle and implicit so no worries

It echoes, but does not cite Hirsh's paper on "Community of good" which makes a similar claim, with more force and focus.

The other bookend is... Ash Sarkar ( @AyoCaesar) (pages 26, 110, coda 119 - 120) which is a reading of her comments about Jewish people not experiencing material dispossession as "Jews are materially better off" and "it always comes down to money".

Bonus round: weird things to say about trans people

I honestly think this book could have greatly benefitted from David engaging with prior literature: he is starting from, what is now liberal cultural mantra as unmoored from the arguments, a concept of privelege, identifying a real complication

That complication is conditional whiteness, for which he makes up the term "Schrodinger's White". A number of Jewish people and people from other minorities have long tackled with this. There is lots of history to this.

It would also help if he engaged with the communities he throws out comparisons to, instead of relying on his perception of twitter volume.

Salvageable, 4/10