Emma Barnett Quotes

Anger at my father and the mess he had got himself into. Anger at the situation and anger that something I had no control over was threatening to control me. When your life implodes, either by your own doing or someone else’s, everything slows down. And I found myself presented at a young age with a stark choice: do I let myself be destroyed by a suffocating shame?

[On suffering from endometriosis] My body's been such an instrument of torture.

My experience of periods is extreme because of my endometriosis. But while most women don't have a specific condition, they still often feel grim at that time of the month, require painkillers, need to access the loo more often and may suffer headaches, backache, sweatier brows and the squits.

British Jews aren't scared to talk to each other about the situation in Israel. We're becoming scared to talk at all.

The bogus presumptions about menstruating women are tragically not confined to the history books — namely that we are weak, dirty, unhinged, less than and just different. At the heart of this lingering stigma is the idea that we are unequal to our male counterparts. Women then ingest these views and appropriate them as our own, inflicting wounds on ourselves and other women — and girls — around us. And by keeping periods unmentionable, women become unwitting accomplices in perpetuating these myths.

Not being able to reconcile my secular views with my religious ones is something I too, find hard to explain. Predominantly I struggle to feel comfortable with female rabbis because the Judaism that feels authentic to me is the Orthodox branch, which does everything it can to conserve and not change.
And that's what it comes down to: what part of your religion feels authentic to you – which is very hard to alter when it's been presented to you in a certain way since birth.

During the recent Tory leadership election, one of Boris Johnson’s emissaries struggled to defend his candidate’s erroneous claim about free trade under Gatt 24. After Barnett had conclusively exposed Johnson’s falsehood, he stuttered: "I don't believe he is incorrect." With deadpan scorn, she flashed back: "Because you don't believe facts?" To David Bull, a newly elected Brexit Party MEP who had complained on Twitter about his scandalous discovery that the journey to Strasbourg was quite long, she asked: "Did you not look up how you might get to the European parliament?" "Weirdly," he admitted, "it did not really cross my mind."

[S]ince the start of the latest conflict between Hamas and Israel, protesters marching in anti-Israel demonstrations have regularly held up anti-Semitic slogans, shouting for Jews to be gassed, invoking the Holocaust's chambers of doom. The situation in Britain hasn't been much better [than in France or Germany]. Last week's major pro-Palestine rally, which stopped London's traffic, was littered with placards comparing Israel's – and Jews' – actions to the Nazis ("Well done Israel – Hitler would be proud", read one such sign, accompanied by a swastika). This casual interchange of "Israel" for "Jews" is not just ignorant but often terrifying, especially when linked to references to past atrocities. Indeed, what other group of people get the worst experience in their – or anyone's – history launched at them like a hand grenade?

[On her tolerance level] I'm OK with sexism, I'm OK with "you look shit", I'm quite good at laughing at the misogynistic stuff. [But she is upset by] the anti-semitic stuff. Because I really don't want that to be a thing in the country I live in — or anywhere.