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 ris… - Hadley Freeman

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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.)

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About Hadley Freeman

Hadley Clare Freeman (born 15 May 1978) is an American British journalist based in London. Since 2022, Freeman has written columns and features for The Sunday Times and previously, from 2000, for The Guardian until her 2022 resignation from the newspaper. She has also contributed to The Jewish Chronicle.

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Alternative Names: Hadley Clare Freeman

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"Politicised", like its trendier, more modern version, "weaponised", is used by people as a means of discrediting an allegation or argument. When yet another school shooting happens in the US, Republicans dismiss anyone begging for more gun control by telling them they are "politicising a tragedy". Antisemitism, Jews were repeatedly told over the past five years, was being "weaponised" against the Labour party purely to destroy Britain's socialist future. And it is a flat-out certainty that this winter, when the effects of the coronavirus begin to bite again and people, shall we say, vent their displeasure at the government for not locking down cities sooner/failing to provide key workers with PPE/lying about the safety or otherwise of care homes, ministers will accuse them of "politicising" the virus. But just because it might be people who don't like [Julian] Assange, or guns, or the Labour party, or the Tory party who are making these points, it does not follow that the arguments are untrue. "Politicise" and "weaponise" does not mean an argument is invalid – it means someone else knows they can't argue against it.
Disagreements are styled in such a black-and-white fashion these days: I am good, therefore anyone questioning me is bad. Are people really this absolutist, or are they just disingenuously pretending to be so in order to avoid awkward questions? Maybe both. But there does seem to be a general fear of ambiguity, or just a resistance to acknowledge grey areas.

[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.

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.

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