For a week now, I’ve been bombarded with variations on the same question: “So what do you think about that cartoon?” The cartoon in question being the depiction of the outgoing BBC chair, Richard Sharp, which appeared on these pages last Saturday in a drawing swiftly denounced as loaded with age-old antisemitic tropes and then removed from the Guardian website later that same day. I didn’t want to sound off about the work of my colleagues on Twitter or on the radio, but I also thought it was a fair question to ask. After all, when other progressive institutions have committed similar offences I have not exactly held back. So here, on the pages of the Guardian itself, is what I think.
When Labour was grappling with antisemitism in its ranks, I was careful to refer to not only the party but also “the wider left”. Few British Jews kidded ourselves that this was a problem confined to one political group. Rather, I and others argued that what had surfaced, admittedly in vivid form in Labour, was a cast of mind, a way of seeing Jews, that had long existed in corners of the left, with roots that went decades – if not centuries – deep, and which stretched far beyond these shores. That view of Jews drew, in turn, on cultural ideas almost as old as civilisation itself, embedded in the core texts and artworks of Christianity, as well as in the words of our canonical writers: Chaucer, Shakespeare and Dickens.
All this stuff informs how people see Jews, including even some of those who pride themselves on loathing racist prejudice. Which is why, although there was disappointment and hurt, there was no great surprise when, to pick just one example, the Royal Court theatre announced in 2021 a new play about a predatory, manipulative billionaire named … Hershel Fink. (We’ll come back to him later.) So long established are these lines of thought, no institution is immune. Not even the country’s finest liberal publications.
Nearly a fortnight ago, the Observer published a letter from the veteran Labour MP Diane Abbott. In it she rejected the view that Jewish, Irish or Traveller people suffered racism. “Prejudice”, of the kind endured by white people with red hair, sure. But actual racism? No, the only people who faced that were people of colour, whether in the Jim Crow American south or apartheid South Africa.
In making that argument, Abbott forgot the events of the middle of the 20th century, when 6 million Jews, along with as many as 500,000 European Roma people, were murdered because they were deemed racially inferior. If those slaughtered millions, killed on account of their race, don’t count as victims of racism, the word has no meaning.
To be clear, the offender here was Abbott, who apologised and withdrew her remarks. But the Observer – which did a public service in publishing the letter, thereby allowing readers to know what the MP really thinks – did not find an immediate way to signal that the argument Abbott had made was shocking. Instead, the impression formed that, initially at least, it had not quite seen the problem.
Then, egregiously, came last week’s cartoon, which showed Sharp as a hunched figure, with exaggerated nose and lips, carrying what looked to my eye like a box of gold coins – though the cartoonist says otherwise – and a playful rendering of the “vampire squid” that has become a shorthand for Sharp’s former employer, Goldman Sachs.
Dave Rich, of the Community Security Trust, elegantly explained the antisemitic resonances of the squid image – casting the bank as a creature of global reach, sucking the blood of humanity – and, lest anyone think it merely a legitimate critique of a capitalist institution, Rich rightly notes that such imagery tends to be directed only at banks with Jewish names: you rarely see anyone aim that kind of fire at HSBC or Royal Bank of Scotland. As one friend put it to me, last Saturday’s cartoon was “the full house of tropes”.
It can feel cathartic to hunt for an individual or individuals to blame, whether that be the artist, Martin Rowson, or Guardian editors who, oblivious to Sharp’s ethnicity and those assorted tropes, didn’t see what was wrong. In some circumstances, say when the offenders are seeking to govern the country, such individual accountability is crucial. The need for it becomes more intense if the offenders refuse to recognise the problem, to apologise or take action – and more intense still if the offenders, or their allies, insist those hurt are liars, falsely claiming or exaggerating antisemitism as part of a smear, or “scam”, in pursuit of some shadowy, malign purpose.
But the Guardian has not responded that way to the pain it caused with this cartoon. The contrast with Labour under its previous management is clear, which is why, incidentally, so many were distressed to read a line in a Guardian editorial in February that credited Jeremy Corbyn with “a formidable record fighting against racism”. Given that, as that same editorial properly noted, the Equalities and Human Rights Commission found that Corbyn’s Labour had broken the law by discriminating against Jews, that is a form of words that can only make sense if you take the Diane Abbott view of racism – namely, that antisemitism belongs in a lesser category.
Last week, the paper acted swiftly, removing the cartoon and apologising, as did Rowson himself. In that context, the more productive response is not to focus on individual culpability or even organisational processes, but rather on the culture from which each of these dispiriting episodes sprang. By “culture”, I mean the body of ideas and associations – Jews and money, Jews and power, Jews and ugliness – that are so deeply ingrained we barely notice they’re there.
Which brings us back to Hershel Fink. No one at the Royal Court was fired over that episode. Instead the entire institution submitted itself to a process of education and introspection that forced it to confront its own biases. That culminated in the commissioning of a play, by me as it happens, that gave the stage last autumn to the verbatim words of a dozen British Jews: Jews. In Their Own Words.
One of those 12 interviewees, whose childhood featured the scratching of a swastika into the family car, recalled the anti-racism instructor who told her, channelling Abbott: “You cannot be white and experience racism.” Another talked of an image shared on Facebook of a repulsive squid-like creature, marked with the star of David, clamped on to the face of the Statue of Liberty: just like that Goldman Sachs meme. So you can see why, for many Jews, the last fortnight felt wearily familiar.
Among those interviewees was Dave Rich, who offered what I still think is a generous, hopeful message, relevant to this moment and indeed this newspaper: “You might be leftwing,” he said, “you might be anti-racist, you might be all of these things – you’re still a product of your world and of your society. And it doesn’t make you a bad person to reproduce some of the ways of thinking, to have absorbed them … You’re susceptible to it because you’re human. Because you’ve grown up in this world. This is how society has taught you to think about Jews. So try and be aware of it. Try and understand it.”
It’s not so much to ask.
Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
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