Top 15 Hadley Freeman Quotes

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.

Anorexics tend to be unreliable witnesses when in the grip of the illness and, at times, there is an oddity about this book, a curious sense of separation between the suffering younger self and the aloof older self, but Freeman is a brave, illuminating and meticulous reporter and uses her experience wisely.

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.

House of Glass begins in 1901 in a shtetl in Poland, and ends in 1999 in Paris, London and New York. It tells of Alex and his siblings, Jacques, Henri and Sala, Freeman's adored grandmother, with whom she spent a lot of time in her native US. Jacques died in Auschwitz, but Freeman saw Alex a fair few times before his death in 1999, and met other members of the family at a one-off reunion in Deauville in 1983, when she was five. Her book, she insists, is a family story, just with a number of unusual real events, such as when, in the late 1970s, Henri and his wife, Sonia, were neighbours of the Ayatollah Khomeini in Neauphle-le-Château.

How very dare this documentary trick us by showing Hamas as murderous terrorists and Israeli citizens as relatable human beings?

I joined the JC a year and a half ago as a monthly columnist because I strongly want there to be a mainstream national Jewish newspaper in this country that represents the plurality of views of Jews in this country.
Most British Jews believe in a Jewish home state, we believe in a two-state solution and we hope for peace in the Middle East. And what it felt like increasingly was the Jewish Chronicle was representing a more ideological rather than strictly journalistic point of view and was becoming far more right-wing and in-step with Netanyahu which I would think that most British Jews are not.

[Donald] Sutherland was a real man. I don’t mean that in the salacious sense (well, not only in that way). I mean he was part of that great generation of 1970s actors that emerged when Hollywood studios finally realised women didn't only want to watch pretty boys like Robert Redford and Warren Beatty. Glorious joli laid — handsome ugly — actors became the defining look of that decade: Sutherland, Elliott Gould, Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino, Richard Pryor, Gene Hackman, Jack Nicholson. Men who were masculine, but not necessarily macho. ... (The fact that the rubric for what constitutes beauty for actresses was and remains far narrower than it is for actors is a subject for another day.) These men looked intelligent and they looked filthy, a previously untapped combination in American cinema.

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.

[T]he main complaint in this piece seems to be that [J.K.] Rowling does not write nice ladylike novels about nice ladylike things.

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.

On Monday I went to the Jewish Vigil for Israel opposite Downing Street. It was nice, but it was also strange, because everyone I could see there was clearly Jewish: the men wore kippahs and tallits, and everybody knew the words to Hatikvah, Israel's national anthem. Across town a pro-Palestinian rally was happening. I looked at the photos in the papers in the next day and was struck by what a mixed crowd it was. Young Muslims, older white people, everyone marching together in defence of — what? Pogroms? Meanwhile, the Jews just had themselves. Now we know.

Palestinians cannot live as subjugated citizens, and what is happening in Gaza now is an overwhelming tragedy.

But it turns out many who march for a free Palestine believe, as Hamas believes, that Israel shouldn't exist at all. They see Israelis as "colonisers and settlers". But do you know why they had to settle there? Because they had nowhere to go after the Holocaust achieved what centuries of persecution had failed to do and wiped out most of Europe's Jews. Many, like my Polish family, couldn't go back to their home country because there were still — even after the fall of Nazism — Jew-hatred and pogroms there. So they went to Israel. This is the context: the Jews are there because they needed somewhere safe to live, and now their grandchildren are being killed for 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.

[On a decision Freeman made in her 30s] I just thought: "I’m not going to be scared to say things anymore. I can see all [these things I want to talk about] in front of me. I don't live in Stalinist Russia, I don't live in Nazi Germany. I'm going to write about them... It's been interesting watching who tries to shut it down.