E98: [TEASER] Radical Reads – ‘Jews Don’t Count’ by David Baddiel

Working Class History

Society & Culture, Education, History

5.0 • 813 Ratings

🗓️ 1 January 2025

⏱️ 22 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This is a teaser preview of one of our Radical Reads episodes, made exclusively for our supporters on patreon. You can listen to the full 85-minute episode without ads and support our work at https://www.patreon.com/posts/e97-radical-10-116392240

In this episode, we talk to Michael Richmond, a Jewish communist author and anti-racist activist, about David Baddiel's ridiculous book, Jews Don't Count. In this book, Baddiel claims that the key thing about contemporary antisemitism is the left's confusion over it, and how this confusion means that Jews are uniquely excluded from left-wing political discourse and activism.

We discuss (and make fun of) Baddiel's book for about an hour and a half covering every aspect of his shallow understanding of racism, whiteness, Jewishness and antisemitism, and why Baddiel should probably get new friends.

Listen to the full episode here:

E98: Radical Reads – ‘Jews Don’t Count’ by David Baddiel

More information:

Read Michael's excellent book (co-authored with Alex Charnley), Fractured: Race, Class, Gender and the Hatred of Identity Politics
A number of Michael's articles can be found here and here. Some which are particularly relevant to this discussion are:
Timeline of people's history stories about radical Jewish history
The webpage for this episode is available here: https://workingclasshistory.com/podcast/e98-radical-reads-jews-dont-count-by-david-baddiel/

Acknowledgements

Thanks to our patreon supporters for making this podcast possible. Special thanks to Jazz Hands, Jamison D. Saltsman, Fernando López Ojeda, Jeremy Cusimano, and Nick Williams.
The episode image of David Baddiel at Soho Theatre, 2020. Credit: Raph PH (with additional design by WCH). CC 2.0.
Edited by Jesse French
Our theme tune is Montaigne’s version of the classic labour movement anthem, ‘Bread and Roses’, performed by Montaigne and Nick Harriott, and mixed by Wave Racer. Download the song here, with all proceeds going to Medical Aid for Palestinians. More from Montaigne: website, Instagram, YouTube.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hi everyone. As you might know, we don't get any sort of funding from any wealthy benefactors, academic institutions, governments or political parties.
0:09.0	Our work is funded by you, our listeners and readers, on Patreon.
0:13.3	In return, our supporters on Patreon get access to exclusive content and benefits like ad-free episodes, bonus podcast episodes and two exclusive patron-only
0:22.9	podcast series, fireside chats and radical reads. So here's a little preview of our latest
0:29.1	patron-only episode. You can join us, help support our work and listen to the full episode today
0:34.6	at patreon.com slash working class history. Link in the show notes.
0:43.4	As we come marching marching in the beauty of the day, a million darkened in kitchens,
0:52.0	a thousand mill lofts gray are brightened by the beauties, sun and sun
0:57.4	discloses. And the people here are seeing bread and roses, bread and roses.
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2:01.8	keeping everything secure. All right. Hi, everyone. I'm here with Michael Richmond,
2:07.8	author of the book Fractured. And we're here to discuss David Badeel's Jews don't count.
2:14.7	And yeah, I don't know if Michael, if you wanted to introduce yourself at all,
2:19.6	anything beyond beyond that? I guess it's probably useful to say that we're both Jewish,
2:25.4	and that's partly why we're interested in this book. And I've kind of done some writing
2:32.9	around sort of anti-Semitism and philosemitism in recent years.
	...

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