The Epshteen Epeeshode.

I’ve been getting stuck into @baddiel’s great ‘Jews Don’t Count’. It articulates so much better what so many of us have been saying for so long.

But to be chutzpahdik, I want to elaborate on one of the moments he draws out: Jeremy Corbyn’s pronunciation

of the sex-criminal Jeffrey Epstein as ‘Epshteen’ during one of the 2019 General Election debates. As he tweeted at the time, Baddiel rightly says that ‘Every Jew noticed that’. Had it been anyone else at any other time, Jews would’ve joked about it. Arched a knowing eyebrow as

well, for sure. But the essential response would have been to take the p!55 out of each other, mocking our mutual faux paranoia at a Jewish name being returned to its foreign origins. But coming from *him*, after over four years of his antisemitism enablement, was jarring. Like

hearing an archaic turn of phrase out of a modern mouth.

Jews joke about our surnames a lot. Hell, most of us have only had ours for two or three generations, the originals forced into anglicisation out of fear of antisemitism or by lazy immigration officials hastily

filling out a form. Of my four grandparents, only one had a family name at birth with any heritage. The other three were Fox (obvs), Smith and Miller. We can be sure that *their* grandparents weren’t called that.

The way Jewish names reflect our story of exile and assimilation

is both touching and hilarious. Indeed, the funniest Jewish film, starring one of the funniest ever Jews, has a great running joke about it. In Young Frankenstein, Gene Wilder’s title character insists it be pronounced Fronk-on-shteen. The joke being he would rather deal with the

prejudice of a Jewish-sounding name than the associations of his family’s reputation, reversing the assimilationist pressures. So when Baddiel points out the Jewish reaction to “Epshteen”, it’s a simple footnote to our culture and experience. To the Labour Party of December 2019,

however, it was at least an episode. For all the reasons now well and, indeed, legally documented. It was Labour who painted an antisemitism taint on “Epshteen”. Not Jews.

Look at it this way, what if the criminal under discussion in that part of the Prime Ministerial

debate had been black, and Boris Johnson had given their name a Caribbean or, say, Nigerian, pronunciation? What if they had been of South Asian origin, and Johnson had imitated an Indian accent? Or East Asian, and he’d emphasised certain phonemic tones?

What’s the very best conclusion we would rightly have drawn about Johnson from that?

A ‘progressive’ politician yiddishising a Jew’s name, though? That didn’t count.