Tanya Gold Quotes

I now know my generation of Jews is the luckiest in modern history. I never saw antisemitism in my youth. I know that others did. OK, a boy at my school shouted, "Jew" at me once, but I knew it was lust. Likewise, a boy at my college – a devout Christian – also shouted "Jew" at me once, but I think his DNA test would come up 25 per cent Ashkenazi Jewish at least, and we both knew it.

Holocaust Memorial Day is 24 hours of shame, but not in the way you think. It was designed to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust, and it falls on the day that Auschwitz-Birkenau was liberated by Soviet forces: January 27, in 1945. This is tragedy enough for the Jewish people, you might think, but HMD — I don't mind giving it an acronym, it deserves one — has changed. It is now an annual festival for the abuse of living Jewish people and the denial of our loss, and we brace ourselves for the memory of the past, and the cruelty of the present. This was the worst year yet.

When I was young, being female was not something to enjoy, but to navigate carefully: there was always a terrible jeopardy in it. When I look back on the mild workplace assaults and the insinuations — so long ago I feel they were directed at a different woman — what strikes me most is how little they had to do with sex. I don't think men who harass women at work want sex: at least not principally. It is a function of inadequacy and the dominion that masks it: putting you on your knees, where you belong.

Enter the contemptible George Galloway. After Liverpool won the Champions League on Saturday, the former Labour and Respect MP tweeted his congratulations to the winning team ... then traduced Tottenham Hotspur fans, many of whom are Jewish, by writing: "No #Israël flags on the Cup!" He meant: no sticky Jewish fingers on British football.

I read social media all week, and it is a maelstrom. One man says he laughed on a visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Another says the Final Solution wasn't final enough. Yet another says the world is run "mostly" for the benefit of Jews. I'm called a genocidaire, immune to non-Jewish suffering. I present my credentials – a Liberal Zionist, in favour of two states – which are dismissed, since, to some, all Zionists exist in a state of pre-murder. The most sympathetic people are religious Christians, which initially confuses me: I am contrite, and grateful to them. I am not grateful for "allies" who use Jews to pursue their vendetta against Muslims – and if you mention European anti-Semitism, they insult you and withdraw, for you have disappointed them.

Notting Hill is two cities with two kinds of stories, the dreamlike and the deadly. One Notting Hill contains residents who paid more capital gains tax than three major British cities in 2020; in the other, looms Grenfell Tower, swaddled in rippling tarpaulin. These two depend on each other, because you only need a dreamworld if reality is unjust. Nowhere else in London is so polarised, or practices self-worship like this.

[At Gold's third visit to Russell Brand's Trews Musings event] There is a deep vein of savagery inside Brand, something completely animalistic, but its twin is there too: something much softer, and terribly vulnerable. Watching these Brands fight it out is, in totality, his allure. His cult is based on the premise that individualism is destroying us. But he cannot shrug off his own ego. It is a very noisy dichotomy.
At the end, he loiters. He has long, slow closed-eye hugs with men and women; the air is damp with lust masquerading as political intent. The Trews is not a political experience, not at all. Brand has founded a small religion, and it will not outlive him. He is an addict populating a space vacated by conventional politics; he is a symptom of the very ennui he hates. And he couldn’t swing an election.

Then Jackie Walker of Momentum said, "Anti-Semitism is no more special than any other form of racism." There was an ovation. I think it was the line they had been waiting for.
What did I hear in that small sentence? Perhaps I am oversensitive. My mother is a historian of the Holocaust. She has traveled around Europe since the Eighties, teaching people how to teach the Holocaust in the countries where it took place. I can tell you, without recourse to any reference book, that there isn't a favorable mention of Jews in European literature until Gotthold Lessing's The Jews, in 1749. I can tell you that when Edward I expelled the Jews from En­gland in 1290, a ship captain, having taken their money for passage, dumped some on a sandbank, and left them to die. I did not hear a passing remark. I heard a deep rebuke from Walker that spoke of general, and eternal, Jewish immorality: that Jewish concern for Jewish safety and for the memory of Jewish dead is something tainted.

I am afraid now, though it is hard to write about fear because fear is formless and because it offends my pride. I have heard the silence of my non-Jewish friends with horror because they, apparently progressives, should know better. I can't write more, for maybe one day I may want to speak to them again.

Still, on he goes, glibly, hearing nothing he does not want to hear, and seeing nothing he does not want to see: a god in tiny rooms.

In his actions on child abuse and Aids, Joseph Ratzinger has colluded in the protection of paedophiles and the deaths of millions of Africans. As Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (Pope John Paul II's chief enforcer), it was Ratzinger's job to investigate the child abuse scandal that plagued the Catholic church for decades. And how did he do it? In May 2001 he wrote a confidential letter to Catholic bishops, ordering them not to notify the police – or anyone else – about the allegations, on pain of excommunication. He referred to a previous (confidential) Vatican document that ordered that investigations should be handled "in the most secretive way . . . restrained by a perpetual silence". Excommunication is a joke to me, perhaps to you, but to a Catholic it means exclusion and perhaps hellfire – for trying to protect a child. Well, God is love.

It's a truism that every wretch in the village is a king on the day of the pogrom because he is not a Jew. And here is his book.

[T]he Corbynites, who live on fantasies and conspiracies, can convince themselves of anything except their complicity in their own failure.

His conclusion is darkly hilarious. Corbynism failed because he was not brave enough to defy the cabal: the people needed more antisemitism, and Corbyn denied them.

Hollywood is greedy and prone to self-mythologising to conceal that simple greed: the very faults that [Citizen] Kane satirized. The town's treatment of Kane, the definitive account of American desire and corruption on film, is as ludicrous – and sensitive – now as then.
Mank, David Fincher's fictionalised account of the creation of Kane, is up for 10 Academy Awards this weekend. If it equals, or even surpasses, its creation myth, it will be a bleak joke: one that both [Orson] Welles and [Herman J. Mankiewicz] would get or, if they had the chance, would have written themselves. (Welles died in 1985; Mank in 1953.) It is, consciously or not – and I would guess not - theft masquerading as tribute and that is the only profound truth it tells. This is a bad habit in Hollywood, and one to which it is increasingly addicted.