Rivkah Brown: "Relentlessly irrefutable," said the Times. "Viewers were left in tears," the Mail announced. "A doc so shocking it sounds like a siren" was the Guardian's verdict.
A glittering stream of reviews has rolled in for Channel 4's Jews Don't Count, cementing its presenter David Baddiel's place in the pantheon of antisemitism pop scholarship – his book of the same name is already canon, having been published only last year. But watching the documentary, I found myself returning to one particular scene in which Baddiel interviews his niece Dionna. Dionna is a Black Jew.
"It's interesting for me as a biracial person," she tells her uncle. "I can't hide the fact that I'm Black; my Dad can hide the fact that he's Jewish. In America, if my Mom gets stopped by the cops in her car, I'm a little more worried than I am if my Dad [does]."
What follows is a spectacularly awkward exchange. Instead of accepting what his niece is telling him, what she knows from her own experience to be true – that anti-Blackness and antisemitism have very different material consequences in modern-day America – Baddiel refutes Dionna's implication that Jews like him benefit from racial passing. "Actually," he tells her, "a lot of Jews had to change their names, in showbiz but also just in life, to get jobs early on. There are whole websites now dedicated to […] unearthing Jews, right? Because the racists think, 'Yeah, Jews are passing, and we need to stop them passing. Do you see what I'm saying?'" Visibly stunned, Dionna says something about how "hateful" people can be, and the interview ends abruptly. One wonders whether she might have been a little affronted by the comparison. | |
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