Hadley Freeman Quotes

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.

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.

[Management at The Guardian on why women should not write about gender.] because it gets too much of a kickback on social media [and] it should be done by the male specialist reporters, such as health reporters.

Taran-tara! A book is being published this month, and it has already attracted the kind of publicity that would make a JK Rowling novel look unheralded. Admittedly, the author is very prolific, having written more than 80 books, which have sold more than 10 million copies. And yet you’ve never heard of him, which is precisely why he’s getting so much attention.
That goes against the grain not just of the modern publishing industry, where only writers who already get media coverage get more media coverage, but of this particular author's entire career. Because this book, you see, is called Confessions of a Ghostwriter, and it was written by a chap called Andrew Crofts, who has built a career on writing books for people more famous than himself.

Arguments about gender are now so vicious that most high-profile people would rather eat their hair than speak out. But sport, it turns out, is a more clear-cut issue to some than, say, prisons – where various groups have argued over whether trans women should be housed with female inmates.
The current ideology is that gender identity is at least as important, if not more so, than biological sex. That is why an LGBT sports group like Athlete Ally can dismiss Navratilova's arguments about male skeletal advantages with a simple "trans women are women". The International Olympic Committee allows trans women to compete if they have been reducing their testosterone for 12 months; but, increasingly, female athletes are saying that testosterone is not the only advantage. Boys start growing bigger bones, muscles and greater heart capacity from puberty, and no gender switch will undo that. One can firmly defend a person's right to live in the gender identity of their choosing yet also look at photos of trans women athletes such as Gabrielle Ludwig, Natalie van Gogh and [Rachel] McKinnon standing alongside their strikingly smaller female team-mates, and think Navratilova’s arguments are worth investigating instead of dismissing with cries of bigotry.

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.

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.

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.

Next time Hadley Freeman comes to one of our parties she should relax, loosen up, have a glass of champagne and be sure to stay the whole night and really, truly … enjoy herself.

Before Israel was founded, Jews were "rootless cosmopolitans"; now they're "settler colonialists". Antisemites sneer that Jews went "like sheep to the slaughter" in the Holocaust. But when they fight back against terrorists, they are too elite, domineering and sure of themselves. The prospect of a ground invasion in Gaza fills every Jew I know with dread. More deaths there, more antisemitism here. Even when we "win", we lose.

I see left-wing feminist writers being funnelled towards right-wing publications, simply because left-wing ones are too anxious to stay on The Right Side of History to publish them. This makes it easier for the left-wing bullies to discredit them, but it does not make what they’re saying any less true.

[On the change in atmosphere at The Guardian around 2015.] There did suddenly become this atmosphere of real fear at the paper.

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

Few things drive the British press quite so demented as the thought of a pregnant woman with a choice.