Hadley Freeman Quotes

I suppose I should be pleased to hear someone tell me how adorable they think Jewish people are and how cute they find Yiddish phrases, what with rising antisemitic attacks and what have you. But proving that you really can't please a Jew (it's part of our innate Jewness – chicken soup, good at jokes and irritating belligerence, oy vey!), I'm not. Instead, it makes me want to throw dreidels at the person's head. (Jews and their toys! Adorable!) There is something about someone fetishising me as part of a homogenous mass of their own reductive fashioning that makes me come over a bit broigus. (Look it up, philosemites – you love this stuff!).
So I have found it to be a good rule of thumb that anyone who identifies as a philosemite is to be treated with the same amused contempt as anyone who says they love "the African people". Julie Burchill has probably been the most egregious example in Britain for some time, writing newspaper columns with her customary delicacy about her abject admiration of “the Jewish people”. (Are we chosen? Are we intelligent? Are we stoical? Why, I think we are.)

[Tony] Slattery pretty much vanished from public life in the late 90s, and while 20 years will change anyone, he looks at least a decade older than his 59 years, and close to unrecognisable from his Whose Line days. Where once he was energetic and prickly, occasionally accused of grating self-satisfaction and gratuitous cruelty (he once said Jeremy Beadle should be "clubbed to death"), the man I meet today is like a lost, anxious teddy bear. Heavy-set and visibly nervous, he is still hyper-eloquent, with that familiar melodious voice, but the syllables sometimes stumble on his tongue. It is noon and there is a faint smell of alcohol about him, although he promises he hasn’t drunk anything today. "I made a special effort for you," he says with a sweet smile. As we walk through the office, I notice that he is limping.
"I’ve got to get my leg sorted," he says, rolling up his trousers. His leg is purpled with vivid rashes and lesions. "It's some kind of cirrhosis," he says, unconcernedly. Whatever Slattery took out of life when he tore through the 90s British entertainment scene, life has since reclaimed its debt tenfold.

An eating disorder is a mental illness. It is characterised by the sufferer's belief that they are too fat, that to survive on 500 calories a day is the norm, that doctors are trying to make them fat, that weighing more than seven stone is obese and unacceptable. So far, so paranoid.
Yet the current culture of skinniness legitimises the anorexic's beliefs. That is where the danger lies. Once a person becomes severely anorexic, they are usually too locked into their own little world to care if Jennifer Aniston is now a size six, or to read about Jodie Kidd's protruding hip bones. But when they try to recover, it is very difficult to shake off these old beliefs when every other magazine cover seems to validate them.

What a strange, Alice-through-the-looking-glass time it is to be a liberal American Jew in Britain. When I was growing up in New York, it was a given that one supported Israel. Israel, like America, was a country made from desperate immigrants. It was where my great-grandmother lived after seeing two of her sons go to the concentration camps, and where the memorial for my great-uncle Jakob, who was murdered in Auschwitz, was erected. Israel was the Holocaust's happy ending, and you only have to look at Hollywood to know how much America loves simple happy endings. Israel = good, Israel’s enemies = evil antisemites. But to be honest, I always resented this. I dislike being told what to think, or people making lazy assumptions about where my loyalties should lie.

[On a meeting discussing an editorial stating feminists had the right to query gender self-identification.] I was defending the editorial and various people, whom I considered friends, were being quite personally abusive and saying it was transphobic, like people saying a gay teacher shouldn't teach children.

Here's an alternative: maybe adults could be actual adults for a minute. Instead of teaching children non-existent safe ways to strangle themselves and others, they could teach them not to do it, just as we teach them not to play with matches. Despite being frequently mentioned alongside "light spanking" and similar, choking causes brain damage and kills. It’s not like pulling someone's hair; it's like playing Russian roulette. And, of course, it is overwhelmingly women who are being strangled: the same study that found 58 per cent of female students had been choked said only 26 per cent of male ones had.

First, it is important to remember we are dealing with interactions on social media here, a medium that is to "calm" and "thoughtfulness" what the Daily Mail is to reasoned political debate.

Perhaps the irony of his situation hasn't hit Harry yet. The royals exist to distract and to be discussed, and in fleeing the palace his livelihood now depends on him doing both for ever. Harry has never been more royal than he has been since leaving the royal family. He could have made an attempt at a vaguely normal life and got a job, as Princess Anne and Princess Margaret's children did. But you don't get a massive house in Santa Barbara with normal.
So here he is, like so many before him, raiding the Windsor jewels for millions. One day maybe he’ll see it.

I can take that – what I don’t understand is why upper management is scared to deal with that. It’s not just The Guardian. This has happened at a lot of progressive places, this feeling of fear that we can’t stand up against some of the claims that gender activists make.

It was odd coming to Poland just months after President Duda signed a law making it illegal to suggest the country was in any way complicit with the Holocaust, despite its long history of antisemitism and survivors’ testimonies about Poles handing Jews over to the Nazis. At Auschwitz, the signs stress German responsibility and Polish victimhood. There is even a gift shop, in case a trip to Auschwitz should make you desirous of buying some "I heart Poland" merchandise. My father and I then visited his mother's home town, 18km away. Around the corner from the house in which she grew up was fresh graffiti: "Anty Jude." Not even having Auschwitz down the road made that person rethink their antisemitism.

Jews are not Israel (something liberal Jews have been saying for years) but nobody – not a London theatre, not even Steven Spielberg – has the right to tell them what to think about it, or to ask them to prove their good Jewish credentials by either supporting or condemning it. Watch yourself, Europe. Some of your roots are showing.

In 1937 the Peel commission said the argument between Jews and Arabs was "right against right". Israelis and the Palestinians are right against right, because both sides have a historical claim to the land — but Netanyahu and Hamas are wrong against wrong. That is how I see the conflict, and it astonishes me that so many supposedly intelligent people insist instead on childish binaries, in which one side is all bad and the other wholly good. Binaries that are — OK, I'll say it — steeped in antisemitism.

Not all celebrities who disappear retire into gated-community comfort in Surrey and, contrary to the lie we are sold, fame is no cushion against falling between the cracks. Slattery is charming company – sweet, solicitous, his brain somehow still sharp despite his best efforts to blunt the thoughts that tormented him. He gave up the coke around the millennium when his beloved mother found some in his flat and he was mortified into abstinence. He couldn’t afford it now anyway. When I ask what his plans are this week, he says: "Buy some food, because we've run out. But we're waiting for money to come in from jobs and that often takes a while. So just make it to the weekend." It is very hard to not measure the distance between what is, what was and what should have been. He does still drink and, yes, he knows it would be better if he stopped completely, but he doesn't think he has the strength to do that. I tell him I am worried that performing will make him drink more. "I've been quite strict with myself so far," he says. "But there have been times when I've thought: 'I can't go on stage, I need that half bottle of vodka right now.' I’m getting better, but there's still some way to go."

I know some people think I'm on the wrong side of history because I believe my gender is a feeling and my biology is a fact. This is known as a gender-critical belief and it is protected under the Equality Act. Nonetheless, I've lost at least a dozen friends over this – mainly from the US, but also in the UK, friends who have told me my beliefs are transphobic, even when I tell them that I support everyone's right to live the way they want. It's always heartbreaking, but also bewildering. Most of us are in the same political tribe, so when did differences of opinion become so unacceptable to so many liberals and lefties? Many of my friends supported Jeremy Corbyn, and even though I found his frequent proximity to antisemites truly upsetting, I didn't drop them from my life. I'm old enough to know there's a difference between denouncing bigotry and demanding everyone march in lockstep with you. If you're more interested in performing your own purity than understanding people's plurality, you're not looking at progress, you're looking into a mirror.

There is a sense in which Hadley Freeman's Good Girls has been written by two authors: the anorexic teenager she once was and the recovered 44-year-old journalist with three children she now is.