Tanya Gold Quotes

[T]his is the manifesto of Sunset Boulevard and all its awful children. The female star, with her autonomous gifts, is just too threatening to be admired. She must, instead, be pitied, and turned into a cautionary tale for girls: her success is itself a failure, because it is the root of her tragedy. In lesser hands than Wilder's, the message is a call for women to stay mundane: from cinema's most self-hating, and desolate, franchise.

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.

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.

[In the book under review] When left-wing activists — Momentum, for instance? — organise, it is righteous, but when "Zionists" organise, it is sinister.

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.

Celebrity involvement in politics is a wretched thing. It should be consigned to dust, especially post-Jimmy Savile – who spent many holidays at Chequers with Margaret Thatcher, during which he used to write "In case of national emergency, phone Jimmy Savile" on every notepad in the house, should you need a nightmarish image to chew on. Have our leaders not learned to hide from these terrible narcissists? Celebrity is trivial, and when it moves close to power, it trivialises that too. The gongs for light entertainment heroes, meanwhile, insult everybody: a gong for a laugh. Is leering on Strictly Come Dancing and clutching female contestants' arms really a public service meriting a knighthood?

I met [Liz] Truss at university, long before she entered real politics, and she mirrors and watches, as if trying to learn a new language. That is why she is stilted and ethereal: that is why she cannot speak easily or from the heart.

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.

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.

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.

[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.

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.

Truss did not fall: it is worse than that. Rather, and obediently, she shattered.

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

And so to the church's own holocaust – in Africa. Condoms can protect Africans from Aids. But who can protect them from Ratzinger? The Catholic church has long pursued a no-condoms policy.