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Opinion

The target audience for Jews Don’t Count is anyone but Jews

That’s one reason why my Channel 4 film was packed with famous names — if you’re trying to persuade people to start to care about something, it helps to have Ross from Friends

November 21, 2022 22:14
Medium 73707 1 David Baddiel Jews Don-t Count-1 1
3 min read

My book, Jews Don’t Count, is a personal polemic. It includes a lot of what is now called my “lived experience” — in simpler terms, stories from my life, examples of how this one minority doesn’t seem to be considered, by the people who care most about minorities, quite a proper one.

When it came to making a documentary on the same subject, which went out on Channel 4 on Monday, that meant an opportunity presented itself to bring on board other voices, and other stories. Which is why if you watched it, you will have heard David Schwimmer, Sarah Silverman, Stephen Fry, Miriam Margoyles, Rachel Riley, Neil Gaiman and others talk, in ways you might not usually hear, about Jews being, to quote the director Patrick Marber “an unprotected species”, and how vulnerable that makes them feel.

One criticism that I’ve heard is that the film spends a lot of time arguing that Jews are not the privileged, rich stereotype which seems to disqualify them from vulnerable minority status, and yet here I am on screen with a lot of privileged, rich Jews.