Hadley Freeman Quotes

How much of one's ancestral identity must one give up to live in the modern world?

There's clearly some bias on my part. I'm drawn to Jewish comedy because it's part of my cultural shared language, which is a fancy way of saying that it feels familiar: the neuroticism, the self-deprecation, the self-aware hyper-verbosity. These are all family traits, because they're Jewish traits.
But why *are* so many Jews comedians, given how relatively few of us there are? I’ve collected theories over the years.
The most common one, inevitably, is that comedy is the natural response to all those centuries of persecution, which I guess is possible, although I don't remember hearing about too many comedy clubs in Auschwitz.
Another popular one is that because Jews study the Talmud for meaning, we are used to looking at things from a different perspective, which is the most important quality to a comedian.
I personally suspect it has something to do with our natural lack of athleticism: if you can't be fast in the playground, you'd better be funny. Hey, no one ever saw Mel Brooks jogging, right?
And what has brought more joy to people’s lives, Blazing Saddles or running? We naturally brilliant Jews know the answer to that one.

[Letter to Katharine Viner, editor in chief of The Guardian, on the transgender debate.] It is astonishing that the progressive media has handed such an own goal to the right, closing its eyes to concerns about the safeguarding out of fear that to do otherwise would lead to accusations of bigotry.

I certainly feel no anger or animosity towards trans people [...] The only feeling I have towards them is compassion. Not to the point where I’m willing to give up all of women’s sex-based rights, no. But I do know I can only imagine the trauma and pain they have endured in their lives.

[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.

I felt so hated for saying things — things that are scientifically, biologically and factually true — and so unsupported by people who I know secretly agree with me but are too scared to say so out loud.

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.

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.

Obviously there have been some men in this argument who have lost work — most obviously Graham Linehan [...] But the vast, vast majority are women. It’s the women journalists who write about this who get singled out, whether it's myself or Sonia Sodha or Catherine Bennett or Helen Lewis. There are men who write about this — James Kirkup, David Aaronovitch, Matthew d'Ancona — but they've had nothing like the abuse that Julie Bindel has had or Suzanne Moore has had. It's totally a gendered thing. Which just goes to show that some people really do know what a woman is.

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.)

You have said that both sides in the gender debate are equally passionate — but only one side demands censorship. It seems to me that at The Guardian that side has won.

I understand it's a subject that gets very heated. I've tried to be very calm and measured and look at both sides of it. And what you get from the other side, if you’re just trying to defend what is literally the law in this country, is to be told you're killing children, you're a bigot – this very violent way of talking.

This week George Galloway took to his video blog, the apparently unironically named Good Night with George Galloway, to defend Assange.

[On Jeremy Corbyn's leadership of the Labour Party.] Honestly, what a dumpster fire that whole period was, to the point that it’s almost hard to remember what actually happened. But just off the top of my head, here is a list of things I remember lefty non-Jews saying to me back then:
1. "I don’t think you should write about antisemitism because you obviously feel very passionately about it."
2. "What, exactly, are Jews afraid of here? It’s not like Corbyn is going to bring back pogroms."
3. "Jews have always voted right so of course, they don’t like Corbyn."
4. "It’s not that I don’t believe that you think he’s antisemitic. It’s just I think you’re being manipulated by bad-faith actors. So let me explain why you’re wrong ..."
5. "Come on, you don’t really think he really hates Jews."
All of the above were said to me by progressive people, people who would proudly describe themselves as anti-racism campaigners. And yet. When Jews expressed distress at, say, Corbyn describing Hamas as "friends", or attending a wreath-laying ceremony for the killers at the Munich Olympics, or bemoaning the lack of English irony among Zionists, we were fobbed off with snarky tweets and shrugged shoulders.
What we were seeing, they said, we were not actually seeing. You could not design an exercise more perfectly structured to cause madness. It was, to be blunt, gaslighting.
Anyway, that’s all in the past now, right? Well it is for me, because I’m walking away. A lot of illusions were broken, and I lost a lot of respect for a lot of people I thought I knew, but it turned out I didn’t. Not really. Not at all. So I have left the garden. And it feels bloody great.

Intriguingly, some of the most passionate arguments I've had about this have not been with trans people, but with liberal men. I surely speak for all of us ladies when I say I love nothing more than when a man explains to me, at some length, what a woman now is. I only have 40 years' experience but, as we all know, experience is old hat now. There is something, shall we say, revealing about the way these "woke bros" take such glee in calling women (older ones, especially) who talk about their rights and bodies "terfs" – trans-exclusionary radical feminists – and insist they shut up or risk ostracism.
Women have had to fight so hard for a place at the table, for the right to define themselves, for spaces where they feel safe. Any man who sneers at them now for worrying about the shifting paradigms, offering only meaningless platitudes or accusations of bigotry, is showing his male privilege.
There is understandable concern about being on the wrong side of history. But I'll tell you what has never put anyone on the right side of history: shouting women down.