YouSaid · the spoken record

David Baddiel

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78
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2023-04-03
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2023-04-03
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1
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  1. “The discrepancies of the actual analogy we can argue about. What I am very concerned about, and this is the whole point about Jews being allowed to have some place at the conversation, which they're often not allowed to have. Totally, is that the Holocaust is very important in the way that Jews understand how they perceived how they are vulnerable. I get that. So Jewish ownership of, it's the same thing about what I said to you earlier and what I often say to left-wing people when they try and tell me what isn't anti-Semitism.”

    2023-04-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 12: David Baddiel: God, Anti-Semitism and the Y-Word · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “No, I agree. Also, can I just say something else? I think Gary should be able to say what he likes. It's crazy that someone who is not a journalist and someone who is a private citizen and he works for the BBC, but that doesn't mean that he represents the BBC, is not allowed to basically say what he likes. The impartiality stuff is, I'm totally think he should be allowed to say what he likes. And the BBC just needs to sort out that. But that's different from the fact that particularly since social media, which in its binaries leads to extremities and one of those extremities is I'm going to compare the thing that I'm angry about to the Nazis. And the problem with that, if you're actually someone whose mother, she's not a mother's life was destroyed.”

    2023-04-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 12: David Baddiel: God, Anti-Semitism and the Y-Word · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Also, I'm very interested in specificity. That's what I'm interested in. I know that. I'm interested in intellectual and historical specificity, which is okay.”

    2023-04-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 12: David Baddiel: God, Anti-Semitism and the Y-Word · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “One of those issues is that there's a sort of what Deborah Lipschach calls soft core Holocaust denial. And part of that is a tendency to use the Holocaust as an analogy for all sorts of things that are not really comparable to the Holocaust. And the key element of that is that when Jews, as they often do, like slightly say, actually, this isn't really what it's like, it's not really comparable. What you get is huge blowback from the left, as if the Jews somehow own this and therefore are saying that you can't possibly go. And there are things, there are things. For example, the Uyghurs in China. They are Chinese citizens. They are being put in camps. They are being sterilized That is analogous. Okay. There are still differences, but it's okay. That's analogies.”

    2023-04-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 12: David Baddiel: God, Anti-Semitism and the Y-Word · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Part of the Jews don't count phenomenal, and the Jews don't count phenomenal is about how my thinking, particularly in progressive circles, that issues around anti-Semitism, around Jewish inclusion, Jewish representation are dialed down.”

    2023-04-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 12: David Baddiel: God, Anti-Semitism and the Y-Word · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Well, I'm not denying that she's othering the immigrants. She is othering, but I think the point is it's a complex point to do with what we presumably going to move on to, which is the Jews don't count phenomenon, which is part of...”

    2023-04-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 12: David Baddiel: God, Anti-Semitism and the Y-Word · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “I don't agree Well, I actually said this and I actually sent it to Gary. Which is if you want to make a 1930s analogy, there is one, and that is to talk about how the British press and indeed black shirts were in the 1930s towards Jewish immigrants fleeing from Germany. And they were using the language of...”

    2023-04-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 12: David Baddiel: God, Anti-Semitism and the Y-Word · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Every single German living in Britain, 99% of which are Jewish German refugees, including my grandfather, and in turn them on the art of man for two years.”

    2023-04-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 12: David Baddiel: God, Anti-Semitism and the Y-Word · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “And in his 40s, he never really spoke English. One thing she did really well, she had a very heavy. There's nothing you need to remember, is the British government, I've written a novel about this, my third novel is called The Secret Purposes, and it's about the internment of Jewish-German refugees on the art of man during the Second World War. That's what happened to my grandfather in 1940. And this is very interesting in terms of, I did mention Gary Lindaker before we got here, but in terms of the migrant hysteria now, there was migrant hysteria about Jewish immigrants in 1940. And what there was also was the British government was suppressing information about the Holocaust because they didn't want British people to think they were fighting war on behalf of the Jews. As a result, many people thought and egged on by the papers, especially the Daily Express, the Daily Mail, what are all these foreigners doing here? And of course, they were Jewish, German refugees, but they weren't really understood as such. Churchill, as a result in June 1940, he said this in collar the lot. And what he meant was we're going to arrest.”

    2023-04-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 12: David Baddiel: God, Anti-Semitism and the Y-Word · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Yeah, latterly, I did. I mean, it's quite hard for a young kid to take in when I was 11. I said to my grandma, did you have any brothers and sisters? And she said, you'll have to ask Mr. Hitler what happened to them, which was, I remember really weird at the time because all I really knew about Mr. Hitler was the guy in dad's army theme tune. But she meant that her brother had been killed. I later found out probably in the Warsaw ghetto, possibly Turasians, which is incredible. That's my great uncle, who I know his name. His name is Arno, but that's what they came from. They came from that level of trauma. He was in and out of mental hospitals, mainly Fulbourne in Cambridge for the rest of his life. He worked as a porter in a hotel in Cambridge, in the garden hotel.”

    2023-04-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 12: David Baddiel: God, Anti-Semitism and the Y-Word · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “I don't really know why we went to that school. Well, my younger brother didn't go to that school. My younger brother went to a school called Aylstone, and he once said to me to try and describe how hard Aylstone was, that another kid had burnt down the assembly hall and got suspended, which I think is kind of brilliant. So the schools were rough around there, but North London Jewish Day School was not because Jewish schools are not, which is not to say there wasn't difficulties. I remember there being people throwing stones and chanting outside the school because that's what it was like in the 1970s.”

    2023-04-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 12: David Baddiel: God, Anti-Semitism and the Y-Word · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Rough in Dollys Hill, where we lived. I went to an Orthodox Jewish primary school, the Northwest London Jewish Day School, and I went there despite the fact that we were not an Orthodox Jewish family. It's complicated. Basically, my mum's parents who were alive. So she'd got out with her parents. They lived in Cambridge in a one-bedroom flat for many years, but they still kept Jewish stuff going. But my dad couldn't be bothered with any of that. He used to call it Olly Wally-Bolly, prayers, whatever we used to do like Seda night passive. He would say, I'm sorry, I'm going to swear again, when can we get over the fucking Olly Woody Bolly and just eats, right? But my mom kind of kept it going. But it wasn't really an orthodox house. However, the only school near us that a Jew would probably not get beaten up or at least have some trouble was that school. And it was an Orthodox school. So I went to school wearing a Yarmaker and sits it, which I sort of internal vest things, learning Hebrew, praying for every meal, etc.”

    2023-04-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 12: David Baddiel: God, Anti-Semitism and the Y-Word · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Looking at the diary of my mum, my dad didn't write diaries. He's a very unemotional man. But I think she did love him at the time. My mum never wouldn't have known her own mind. And also, my dad was quite handsome then, and he was an intellectual. He was doing chemistry. He got out of the sort of working class environment he lived in by doing a PhD in chemistry, Imperial College. And at the time, later on, he got made redundant and his life turned to shit. At that point, he would have seen quite a prospect. She was very pretty. What there wasn't, I think, was an intellectual connection between them at all. And what I think Alice was going to say, which I think is true, is that when my mum was disappointed in the mid-70s with her life and her marriage, this guy appeared and it was a version of the life that she might have had if the Nazis had never appeared. Because if the Nazis never appeared, she would have probably married some kind of Austrian prince in her mind. And although he was not an Austrian prince, he was a golfing memorabilia salesman. That's the best that...”

    2023-04-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 12: David Baddiel: God, Anti-Semitism and the Y-Word · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Well, I think lots of people got married in the late 50s and 60s because that was the way they had sex, wasn't it? Like there wasn't much choice.”

    2023-04-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 12: David Baddiel: God, Anti-Semitism and the Y-Word · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “I think in her eyes, yes, if you saw pictures of him now, you'd think he looked a bit like Roger Whittaker. He had a kind of polo neck, he smoked a pipe, he had a beard, and he was a member of various golf clubs, which in 1973, to a Jew, would have felt glamorous because it was still restricted at that time.”

    2023-04-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 12: David Baddiel: God, Anti-Semitism and the Y-Word · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Yeah, so the key thing is that this guy name him, his name is David White, and he may still be alive, and I think he lives in Slovenia. He was a golfing memorabilia guy, collector of golfing memorabilia, and literally, we loved football in our house. I grew up a house with my dad. He was Welsh and working class with three sons. And we loved football. That was the only sport ever mentioned in our house. My mom, not very bothered with football, but not very bothered with any sport one day becomes obsessed with golf, starts a golf memorabilia business called golf.”

    2023-04-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 12: David Baddiel: God, Anti-Semitism and the Y-Word · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Lots and lots of deco pits we playing golf. She wrote eight books about coffee table books called things like The Source Book of Golf, Golf the Golden Years, Out on the Lynx, which had a stall in the Grey's Antique Market down the rest of the published books. Yeah, publish, yeah. I think of the Golden Years sold about 100,000 copies, but she did a very shit deal for it and didn't get any money.”

    2023-04-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 12: David Baddiel: God, Anti-Semitism and the Y-Word · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Yes, my Collected golf memorabilia in a very extreme way. She turned her whole lives over to golfing memorabilia, so you couldn't exist in our house without seeing somewhere a statue of Litrevino.”

    2023-04-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 12: David Baddiel: God, Anti-Semitism and the Y-Word · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “I did a one-room show in the West End, one woman show. It wasn't a way One Women because it was made up my mum, although people seemed to think it was made about my dad.”

    2023-04-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 12: David Baddiel: God, Anti-Semitism and the Y-Word · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Well, luckily, my mum was dead. Luckily, sounds weird in that particular case. And my father had dementia by that time. But I would say that show, if we're going to talk about that show, was a huge act of laughter.”

    2023-04-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 12: David Baddiel: God, Anti-Semitism and the Y-Word · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Really wealthy, as far as I can make out. I mean, I think they had servants and stuff, and they had a big society wedding, my grandparents, but then from 1933 onwards, that obviously all went. And by 1939, they had nothing. And my grandfather had been in a concentration camp. We'd been in Dachau after Kristallnacht, and he was forced to clean up the rubble of his synagogue with a number of other Jews and sent to a concentration camp. They lost everything else they had, getting him out of that camp, bribing people to get him out of that camp. And then with literally three weeks to go before the war broke out, they just managed to get into this country. The wider family were killed.”

    2023-04-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 12: David Baddiel: God, Anti-Semitism and the Y-Word · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Yeah, sorry about that. And it's hideous now. Sorry for any Koenigsberg Kaliningradians, which it's called now listening, but it's kind of the arse end of the old Soviet Union now. But they were industrialists.”

    2023-04-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 12: David Baddiel: God, Anti-Semitism and the Y-Word · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Well, yeah, I've been there. And now it is in Russia. The full Second World War, it had been a university town, as you say, where Kant came from and very beautiful. And then it was bombed to FARC during the Second World War. And the Russian word.”

    2023-04-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 12: David Baddiel: God, Anti-Semitism and the Y-Word · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “I don't know I mean, I think it's simpler for us all if we call it Kant. Otherwise, I feel we're calling the person who wrote Critique of Pure Reason a Kant, and that's who wants to do that.”

    2023-04-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 12: David Baddiel: God, Anti-Semitism and the Y-Word · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Parents were originally before Hitler came to power, or my grandfather was an industrialist, quite a wealthy industrialist in a place called K ⁇ nigs”

    2023-04-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 12: David Baddiel: God, Anti-Semitism and the Y-Word · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Okay, my mum, who's referred to in the book that you just read, was a refugee from Nazi Germany. She was born in Nazi Germany in March 1939. There's some confusion about that when I did, who do you think you are? Her papers were very confusing because I think some of them were forged in order to get her out of Germany. But they got out at the last minute there.”

    2023-04-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 12: David Baddiel: God, Anti-Semitism and the Y-Word · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Don't exist, but we've created God. The book is very, very clear. I would love God to exist as a buffer to that nothingness and oblivion and pointlessness and to give meaning and purpose to our lives and to outsmart death. And that's what the God desire is. So as an atheist book, which it is, it's fundamentally an atheist book. It's different from most atheist books in that it's not about was there something before the Big Bang or how can we exist without a moral compass that God and all of those normal things that discuss in atheist books? It's not about that. It's about what I feel is at heart of why God exists because it's a given to me that he doesn't, which is that we are frightened and desperate and in need of comfort.”

    2023-04-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 12: David Baddiel: God, Anti-Semitism and the Y-Word · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Well, the answer to both those questions, why are we here and what's it all about is there is no reason we're not here for any reason. It's not about anything. And as a result, we have created God, along with various other narratives.”

    2023-04-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 12: David Baddiel: God, Anti-Semitism and the Y-Word · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source