Anti-semitism

Wednesday

Maureen Lipman

I refuse to be cancelled

I have been opening a play. It is called Allegra and is about a woman who is relentlessly happy. This is not typecasting. ‘Why do we actors have so much self-esteem and so little self-respect?’ demanded Edmund Kean in the eponymous play Kean,which I last saw in 1990. Funny, I never forgot that line. I’d been bobbing along merrily in rehearsals, learning, improving, rejecting and rejoicing. Now, suddenly, it was a technical rehearsal in a real theatre, the Brighton Royal, and there was a microphone taped under my wig, battery packs belted to my underwear – real orchestrations, quick-change shoes. My ancient make-up sticks must be laid out and lip and tongue exercises from my Lamda days, 60-odd years ago, must be performed.

Wednesday

The Spectator

Letters: it’s hard to undo dumbing down

Tales from the City Sir: Simon Jenkins’s article on Liverpool Street Station (‘Horror storeys’, 9 May) is inaccurate, and an insult to every councillor on the City of London planning committee, whose professionalism I defend. Saying the committee was ‘clearly going to approve’ the application amounts to an allegation of predetermination. That is a serious charge against every councillor present. It is also untrue: 22 members heard the case and three voted against. Sir Simon writes that ‘both schemes were presented to a packed City planning committee’. This is also untrue. There was one planning application before the committee that day.

Wednesday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Golders Green attacked, borrowing costs soar and rat virus hits cruise ship 

Home Two Jewish men aged 76 and 34 were stabbed in Golders Green, north London. Essa Suleiman, 45, a British man born in Somalia, was charged with their attempted murder and, earlier on the same day, that of Ishmail Hussein (whom he had known for about 20 years) in Southwark. The Golders Green attack was declared a terrorist incident. Sir Mark Rowley, the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, condemned Zack Polanski, the leader of the Green party, for reposting a message on X accusing the police of ‘repeatedly and violently kicking a mentally ill man in the head when he was already incapacitated by Taser’; Mr Polanski apologised.

The Spectator

Anti-Semitism is a virus – and it’s spreading

To eradicate a virus, one needs precision. The origin of the threat needs to be identified, as do the circumstances of its incubation and spread, and the vulnerability of specific hosts. The wrong response risks making things worse. Anti-Semitism is a virus, and, as the late Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks explained, one that mutates over time. Originally, it was a religious prejudice; post-Enlightenment, it developed into a racial hatred, fuelled by a twisted version of social Darwinism. It was thought that after the unique evil of the Holocaust, the single greatest crime in history, when man became wolf unto man, the virus had at last been defeated. But in our own time a new variant has emerged.

Charles Moore

Keir Starmer is downplaying the Islamist threat to Jews

At Tuesday’s anti-Semitism ‘summit’ in Downing Street, Sir Keir Starmer achieved a personal first. He used the word ‘Islamists’. But in order to utter a word he had previously avoided in relation to the subject, Sir Keir had to approach it crabwise. Instead of identifying Islamists as the main ideological and physical threat to British Jews, he said: ‘We’re clear-eyed about the fact that anti-Semitism does not have one source alone: Islamists, far-left, far-right extremism, all target Jewish communities.’ Islamists were thus inserted into the conversation but also downplayed. It is obsolete not to recognise that the far right in Britain – for the moment at least – more or less leave Jews alone.

Douglas Murray

The obvious truth about anti-Semitism

There are many ways to do nothing. One is to sit on your hands; another is to call for ‘a conversation’. I have noticed quite a lot of calls for ‘a conversation’ since the stabbing of two Jewish men in Golders Green last week. Some politicians and pundits have even been bold enough to call for a ‘national conversation’. This is when you can tell people are pulling out the big guns. One reason I say it is also a variant on doing nothing is because this has happened so many times before. I remember Theresa May standing near the site of the London Bridge attacks in 2017, surrounded by various leaders, insisting that we need to tackle ‘extremism’. The results were a real stunner – even for connoisseurs of inertia.

Wednesday

Paul Levy

The doyen of the France’s culinary scene is unmasked

For some reason it took nearly a decade for the news of a revolution in the restaurants of France to reach the British media. The Americans were much quicker off the mark. In March 1972, Raymond Sokolov reported in the New York Times that a chef near Lyon named Paul Bocuse, along with several of his colleagues, including Michel Guérard and Alain Senderens, were serving their customers ‘a radical simplification of the grand cuisine of the 19th century, the heavy, formal style of cooking codified by Escoffier’. Luke Barr, whose latest book is a compelling history of this culinary earthquake, last wrote about the crook, embezzler and fraudster who curiously remains the patron saint of professional cooks in Ritz & Escoffier (2018).

Wednesday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Olly Robbins is sacked, inflation rises and the Strait of Hormuz is (briefly) opened 

Home Sir Keir Starmer tried to explain himself to parliament after Sir Olly Robbins was sacked as permanent under-secretary of state at the Foreign Office, its chief civil servant. Sir Keir complained that as Prime Minister he had not been told that Lord Mandelson had failed to satisfy UK Security Vetting when he took up his post as ambassador to Washington. Sir Keir said that he had not been told before 14 April. In the Commons he said: ‘I did not mislead the House.’ Even before Lord Mandelson’s appointment, the Cabinet Office had compiled a due diligence report, given to the Prime Minister, which cited concerns about the peer’s ties to China and Russia. Zarah Sultana, the Your Party MP, had to leave the Commons chamber after saying: ‘The Prime Minister is a bare-faced liar.

Tuesday

Ariane Bankes

Why one of Renoir’s most celebrated paintings languished unloved

Shimmering off the cover of The Renoir Girls are sisters Alice (aged four) and Elisabeth Cahen d’Anvers (six), portrayed in all the promise and innocence of a pampered childhood by Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Aged 40, Renoir was then the coming portrait painter for the gratin of Paris, as he struggled to make ends meet with smart commissions from wealthy sponsors – a network of Catholic and Jewish banking families that included the Ephrussis (memorialised by Edmund de Waal in The Hare with Amber Eyes), Camondos, Rothschilds and Cahen d’Anvers.

Lee Langley

A dying fall: The Last Movement, by Robert Seethaler, reviewed

Robert Seethaler is known for celebrating the unsung: commonplace characters – peasants, labourers or shop assistants – who draw us into their quiet lives. But the protagonist in The Last Movement is a celebrated historical figure: Gustav Mahler. For those in search of biographical information, as W.H. Auden put it, a shilling life will give you all the facts. Today we’d go online. How will Seethaler, a distinguished miniaturist, deal with an icon? We meet the composer in 1911 aboard the SS Amerika on his final journey across the Atlantic, homebound and dying. A respectful ship’s boy brings him a tray of tea as he sits on the sundeck, wrapped in a blanket, contemplating the ocean and his turbulent life.

Wednesday

Rod Liddle

The real reason the left hates Israel

‘Listen to what the man on the left of the camera has to say about Israel, the man who is addressed as Nick,’ a radical Corbynista friend suggested to me the other day in a social media message designed to change my mind about the Middle East. It’s part of a sustained campaign on his part which dates back at least ten years and is usually conducted with good grace, if never accord. So I listened to what this chap Nick had to say, with growing hilarity. Not because of what he said – which was what you might expect from a rank anti-Semite, but because of who he was. For it was none other than Nick Griffin, the former leader of the British National party.

Wednesday

Alice Jolly

Fractured loyalties: The Tribe, by Michael Arditti, reviewed

Michael Arditti’s impressive and immersive family saga begins in Salonica (now Thessaloniki) in 1911 and follows the fortunes of the wealthy, powerful Carrache family who are part of the Sephardic Jewish community. They have lived in the city for two centuries and employ more than 1,000 people. The father of the family, Jacob, is ‘a well-known liberal’ who ‘would never compel his children to do anything against their will’; but he is outraged by his daughter Esther’s flirtations with socialism. So what will happen when he discovers his son Leon’s relationship with a nightclub singer? He also worries about his other three children: Ruben is reckless, Bella is artistic and Irène is overlooked.

Susie Mesure

The world destroyed by madness: Howl, by Howard Jacobson, reviewed

Rarely has such a short title worked harder than Howl, which Howard Jacobson takes from Allen Ginsberg’s incantatory 1955 poem. ‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,’ Ginsberg wrote, a line that both prefaces Jacobson’s novel and sums up the author’s own angry anguish at the current madness in the corner of the Middle East that both Israelis and Palestinians call home. Make no mistake: Ginsberg’s poem puts the howl into Howard, who has written a characteristically crisp and deeply personal response to Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack – the massacre in the Negev Desert.

Victor Sebestyen

Caught between Hitler and Bomber Command – the Berliners’ cruel predicament

Can you be a true, thoroughgoing patriot and still want your country to lose in a war? It’s a dilemma that faced countless thoughtful people in the past century who lived under totalitarian regimes, and I know is torturing many Russians today. It’s the stark question at the centre of Ian Buruma’s subtly nuanced and beautifully written book about the lives of Berliners in the second world war as their city was being destroyed by a combination of aerial bombardment and the manic cruelty of their own leaders.

Tuesday

Ian Thomson

Forgetting was the best defence for the Kindertransport refugees

Michael Moritz, one of Silicon Valley’s most successful venture capitalists, really has got it in for Donald Trump. America is currently in a ‘dark age’ of authoritarian governance, he claims, which spurns legality and liberal do-gooders everywhere. As a lifelong Democrat, Moritz was appalled when, in 2017, Trump failed to denounce the alt-right protestors who chanted ‘Jews will not replace us!’ at a torchlit rally in Virginia. Understandably, Moritz is alarmed by the tide of anti-Semitism today. His Jewish parents narrowly escaped death in Hitler’s Germany when they came to the UK on the Kindertransport. The 71-year-old Moritz now asks the question: how long before the iron-studded jackboot returns to Europe?

Tuesday

Simon Ings

The turbulent life of the Marquis de Morès – the 19th-century aristocrat turned populist thug

The Marquis de Morès (1858-96) was a man of many abilities, but balancing a chequebook was not one of them. Bested (savaged, frankly) by the Chicago meat-packing lobby and frustrated in his attempt to build a railroad across Indochina, the soldier, duelist and self-styled ‘economist’ returned to his native France in 1886, caused havoc and invented fascism (if we allow the Italian historian Sergio Luzzatto to have his way) – only to meet his nemesis much closer to home.

Wednesday

The Spectator

Our duty to British Jews

Are Jews safe in Britain? To even have to ask the question is extraordinary. But a recent survey has found that half of British Jews feel they do not have a long-term future in the UK and 61 per cent have considered leaving. Those figures are shocking, but not surprising. Since 7 October 2023, anti-Semitism in Britain has reached record levels. Violence against British Jews is more common than at any time since their readmission in the 1650s. The survey was conducted between the Heaton Park synagogue terrorist attack in October and the sentencing of Walid Saadaoui and Amar Hussein in December for plotting to open fire on a march against anti-Semitism.

Monday

Lionel Shriver

‘Islamist’ is a dishonest confection

Convicted last month of plotting what could have proved the worst terrorist attack in British history, Walid Saadaoui had hoped to murder at least 50 people in Prestwich, because ‘Prestwich is full of Jews’. He was caught purchasing four AK-47s, two handguns and 1,200 rounds of ammunition. For Saadaoui’s fires of righteousness on social media had earlier drawn the eye of British law enforcement. ‘Avenge your religion Oh Muslims in Europe,’ he posted. ‘I pray to you not to catch me until I break my thirst with Jews, Christians and their proxies’ blood.’ Thus Saadaoui instructed an undercover officer: ‘Grab a Jewish person and slaughter him and remove his head, rub blood on my body, throw it away. That is the least we can do.

Thursday

Douglas Murray

The increasing fear felt by Britain’s Jews

If you walked down the Strand in London on Tuesday this week you would have been greeted by hundreds of people outside King’s College London. The gathering was organised by students from KCL, the London School of Economics and University College London. They chanted ‘Intifada, intifada’ and ‘Long live the intifada’. They had chosen the day well – Tuesday was the second anniversary of the 7 October massacre, in which some 1,200 Israelis were killed and hundreds more taken hostage. Tuesday’s hate-fest was not, of course, an unusual event. The first demonstrations in support of the 7 October massacre of Jews took place in west London on the day of the massacre itself. And the protests have not stopped since. In fact, they have only swelled in number.

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

The problem with psychiatrists? They’re all depressed

Edinburgh seems underpopulated this year. The whisky bars are half full and the throngs of tourists who usually crowd the roadways haven’t materialised. There’s a sharp chill in the air too. Anoraks and hats are worn all day, and anyone eating outdoors in the evening is dressed for base camp. Perhaps tourists don’t want to travel because they’re too depressed. That’s the specialism of Dr Benji Waterhouse, an NHS shrink, who writes and performs comedy about his patients. Dr Benji is an attractive presence on stage with his crumpled Oxfam clothes and his dreamy, half-shaven look. He could be the guy who tunes up U2’s guitars. His act is very funny and it contains some amazing revelations.