Columnists From England

"British Jews aren't scared to talk to each other about the situation in Israel. We're becoming scared to talk at all."

"Earlier this week, male MPs struggled to say the same words in a debate about the so-called "tampon tax". This is the five per cent VAT rate that stubbornly remains on all period products – ineligible for zero rating because the European Commission deems tampons (oops, I mentioned them again) "non-essential" items. Try to telling that to any woman. Female MPs and campaigners have been fighting for years to remove this ludicrous levy. If nappies for children, maternity pads for new mothers and incontinence aids are all exempt, why does Brussels have a peculiar problem with blood?"

"I can see why so many politicians are in for a shock when they come on Barnett's show. The cool ease with which she can segue from convivial to confrontational is quite unnerving."

"Nearly 10 years ago, my father went to prison. I had just turned 23 and was heading home after a long day at work when my then boyfriend, now husband, rang me and delivered the news. I had known my dad was in trouble, but he kept his business life so separate, I didn’t even know he was going to court the day he ended up being imprisoned for living off immoral earnings."

"In the secular world, common sense must be the order of the day. It isn't reasonable not to have women occupying the same roles as men and vice versa. But in a religious sphere, where faith is the binding force of a group of people, rationale has less sway or place. If you started applying logic to the beliefs held in most faiths, things would start to fall apart pretty quickly at the seams."

"I personally found the first few months of motherhood discombobulating, knackering, joyous, emotional, frustrating and quite frankly odd."

"[Barnett suffered a herniated disc four months after giving birth] I'd had a c-section and two and a half years of IVF and heavy steroids. I wasn't physically good going into the pregnancy or coming out of it. It was an unholy situation and one day I picked up my daughter and it went. It was agony trying to breastfeed, do the school run with my older son, hold my baby daughter through gritted teeth and put the car seat in. So I've also been doing months of physio, exercise and Pilates."

"My grandmother escaped the Nazis from Wiener Neustadt in Austria and found sanctuary as a housemaid in this country. My husband's grandmother survived unspeakable torture in Auschwitz. In Europe. A two-hour flight from here. I've been. He won't. He can't bear to. Our grandmothers, who read us bedtime stories safe in our beds in this country, this happened to them – people I met and loved. Only two weeks ago, I opened Twitter on my phone and saw "Jewish privilege" trending. Do you know how that feels? Do you how frightening that is? I have had my fair share of abuse online, much of it sexist or politically charged. But the one form of hate that always stops me in my tracks and makes me feel angry and sad and burned? Antisemitism."

"[On suffering from endometriosis] My body's been such an instrument of torture."

"EB: You're holding your manifesto, you're flicking through it, you've got an iPad there, you’ve had a phone call while we're in here and you don't know how much it's going to cost? Jeremy Corbyn: Can we come back to that in a moment? EB: What, when you've looked it up?! My point is it's quite troubling, this is a policy you're launching today Mr Corbyn and you don't know how much it's going to cost. It hardly inspires the voters."

"Not being able to reconcile my secular views with my religious ones is something I too, find hard to explain. Predominantly I struggle to feel comfortable with female rabbis because the Judaism that feels authentic to me is the Orthodox branch, which does everything it can to conserve and not change. And that's what it comes down to: what part of your religion feels authentic to you – which is very hard to alter when it's been presented to you in a certain way since birth."

"[S]ince the start of the latest conflict between Hamas and Israel, protesters marching in anti-Israel demonstrations have regularly held up anti-Semitic slogans, shouting for Jews to be gassed, invoking the Holocaust's chambers of doom. The situation in Britain hasn't been much better [than in France or Germany]. Last week's major pro-Palestine rally, which stopped London's traffic, was littered with placards comparing Israel's – and Jews' – actions to the Nazis ("Well done Israel – Hitler would be proud", read one such sign, accompanied by a swastika). This casual interchange of "Israel" for "Jews" is not just ignorant but often terrifying, especially when linked to references to past atrocities. Indeed, what other group of people get the worst experience in their – or anyone's – history launched at them like a hand grenade?"

"[The experience of a 24 year old sister of a friend] Just after finishing her master’s in economics, she started her first job at a City firm, full of ambition. But then she noticed something. There were no female board members – and all the way through the company there were far fewer women overall. Rosie invited a large cross section of her female colleagues out to lunch at a local deli and pushed them on the matter. The response? Blank faces all round. None of them had “ever noticed” anything. An awkward silence ensued. Rosie, not wanting to go overboard, dropped the issue. But, right at the end of the meal, the most senior woman present suddenly piped up. "I do sometimes wonder why all of the women who work here are so beautiful," she said. No one knew how respond to another difficult truth: it seemed that looks had played a part in the men's hiring decisions. Rosie, bruised and bemused by the experience, has just let matters lie. She has rent to pay."

"During that first meeting it became clear that this wasn't a party with a long shelf life. In fact the WEP aimed to influence the political debate and then die a dignified and valiant death – gender equality accomplished. Fast forward seven months and the party has officially launched."

"I know how to read Hebrew, but I've still got no idea what it means. I recognise certain tunes, but have no clue as to the order of the service. And while it would be easy to blame my seating arrangement, I'd still have very little idea of what was going on if my gender permitted me a ring side pew. So I have flip-flopped my way to a few Reform services. And while hearing more passages read in English and regular page number announcements are a comfort, I find myself feeling similarly isolated there. Reform Judaism's ways feel foreign because they lack the familiar rhythms of the Orthodox Judaism I grew up with. However, in Orthodox services I feel increasingly like an illiterate and ill-educated fool, suffering imposter syndrome."

"Anger at my father and the mess he had got himself into. Anger at the situation and anger that something I had no control over was threatening to control me. When your life implodes, either by your own doing or someone else’s, everything slows down. And I found myself presented at a young age with a stark choice: do I let myself be destroyed by a suffocating shame?"

"I've long thought that monarchy allows us to imagine our kingdom – our national story – as more interesting and singular than it is. Monarchy is attractive but necrotic: it looks backwards by nature. If there was an opportunity for dynamic monarchy – the Norman lawmakers, perhaps, or the Tudor propagandists – we haven't taken it. The instruments of monarchy are imperial, and in daylight they look increasingly odd and piteous. It's a truism of addiction – and many are addicted to monarchy – that the larger your fantasy life, the smaller your real one."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"[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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

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

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

"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."

"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."

"Hollywood is greedy and prone to self-mythologising to conceal that simple greed: the very faults that [[Citizen Kane|[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|[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."

"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?"

"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."

"[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."

"I met [[Liz Truss|[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."

"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."

"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."

"'Oh Jeremy Corbyn' refers, of course, to the Glastonbury chanting in 2017. Nostalgia has its uses, but when it serves only to highlight your utter irrelevance six years on, it's not so great an idea. All those three words serve to illustrate is how far the world has left the cult behind. In 2023, far from singing along, Glastonbury has pulled the film. Those poor Corbynites; they don’t even have a field in Somerset any more."

"The Big Lie is not the first big lie to come from the Corbynites and it won’t be the last. On social media, #ItWasAScam is the hashtag that usefully links them together. I’ve long been intrigued by one of defining characteristics of the Corbybnites, which is often thought too rude to state plainly. They are, like their leader, very stupid. Nothing better illustrates this than a film intended to show how Labour’s antisemitism scandal wasn’t real, which deals obsessively with how Jews control British politics. See what I mean?"

"The Big Lie was first used by Hitler in Mein Kampf, to describe what he called the use by Jews of a lie so huge that no one would believe someone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously". He was referring to what he said was Jews blaming German general Erich Ludendorff for defeat in World War One - a lie designed to remove "the weapon of moral right from the only adversary dangerous enough to be likely to succeed in bringing the betrayers of the Fatherland [the Jews] to Justice." The phrase was subsequently widely used to describe the Nazis' propaganda technique to poison Germany against "international Jewry", the real holders of power in the world. In other words, the title 'The Big Lie' reminds people that the Corbynites share with the Nazis an obsession with Jews."

"[Stuart] Jeffries is genuinely criticising a documentary about a massacre on the grounds that including the victims' stories means the film is slanted towards sympathy with the victims. It isn’t so much immoral as amoral – unable to deal with evil as evil, always seeking to relativise, and thus diminish, it."

"Still more insidious is the hidden bias of the BBC. Most of it is subtle, and all the more dangerous for that. Take the use of the word terrorist. Both the US state department and the UK government, along with the rest of the EU, classify Hamas and Islamic Jihad as "terrorist organisations". Even Palestinians have used the term "terror" to describe attacks on Israeli civilians: on the BBC World Service on December 4 2001, Jibril Rajoub, head of the Palestinian Authority security service, referred to the attacks in Jerusalem and Haifa as "terror attacks"; on Newsnight the same day, Nabil Abourdeneh, an adviser to Yasser Arafat, referred to Palestinian militants as "terrorist groups". But not the BBC's correspondents themselves. When they refer to Hamas and Islamic Jihad they call them not "terrorists" but "militants", "hard liners" and "radicals"."

"People expect to be able to use wi-fi on a train in the same way they would use a toilet."

"One young man summed things up towards the desperate, tired end. "Is there any policy you can offer me that would positively impact my life?" he whinnied. The sense of hurt entitlement and rage: me, me, me. Is Sunak a political vending machine? That's where politics is now: give me what I demand at all times."

"Why does Stanley Johnson even want a knighthood? ... Scan his CV and you will see how incredibly easy life has been for him. He comes from a generation of men for whom jobs, wives, money and houses fell like confetti — knighthoods grew on trees. You can still see the sheer power of this system in, say, the behaviour of Fiona Bruce on Question Time on Thursday, when she rushed to defend Stanley against accusations he'd abused his first wife: friends of his said it was a "one-off", she claimed. "He hit me many times, over many years," is in fact what Charlotte Johnson said not long before she died in 2021."

"You look at the litany of moaning and showboating — never more on display than last week at the empty fawnathon over poor Volodymyr Zelensky — and think: MPs are so out of touch with what ordinary people want, they’ll be giving themselves medals next. And that, as it happens, is exactly what some MPs are proposing. To say I howled when I read the recommendations in a new report about "supporting MPs at their point of departure from elected office" is to understate how horrifying and revealing it was."

"I must say, as an avowed lifelong anti-monarchist myself, I find it tiresome when I am lumped in with speaking-clock part-timers like [[Steve Coogan|[Steve] Coogan]], Jeremy "Donkey Jacket@ Corbyn and the muppets from Republic, whose idea of a protest is off-the-peg Just Stop Oil-style stunting. They just don’t get it. If you truly want to get rid of the monarchy, it is a full-time job."

"Why can't women just love having babies? Is it too laughable, parochial, bourgeois not to obsess over your career? If there is one thing I wish had been different at my hard, driven, academic school, it's that no one, not a single teacher, said to me: "Look, by the way, there's this thing that might happen in the middle of your life and it's going to be amazing. Make space for it, because it’s going to be a lot, lot better than getting 87 per cent in Latin." But no one ever did."

"Cusk herself seems extraordinary — a brittle little dominatrix and peerless narcissist who exploits her husband and her marriage with relish. She tramples anyone close to her, especially [second husband [[w:Adrian Clarke (photographer)|Adrian] Clarke]], whom she has forced to give up his job in order to look after the kids."