Jews Don’t Count: A Times Book of the Year 2021

* Even people whose job it is to protect and educate the wider world about anti-Jewish racism are presently falling into these traps. Literally as I was writing this, I saw in the news that in Austria a non-Jewish woman had been assaulted on a train by three men for reading a book called The Jews in the Modern World. The police chose not to charge the men, claiming that her doing so at the current time was ‘provocative’. An academic called Daniel Landau, described in British newspapers as ‘an education expert commissioned by the government to create antisemitism awareness training for Austrian police’, went on Austrian TV and said: ‘It’s like telling a woman who has been raped “why did you dress so provocatively?” It must be made unmistakably clear that reading a book in this country does not constitute complicity.’ That second sentence is odd. It is a good analogy, from the point of view of improving progressive understanding of antisemitism, to compare the attackers’ defence to that of rapists who talk about women dressing provocatively. But the word complicity rings alarm bells. Complicit with what? Who? Jews? And if reading was a complicit act, and therefore made this woman complicit with Jews, would the attack therefore have some justification? Because reading could be seen as a complicit act: I might feel provoked if someone was reading Mein Kampf on the London Underground in front of me. But this woman was simply reading a book about Jews. If you extend the analogy, a woman who rapists suggest was dressing provocatively would never be accused, by progressives, or hopefully anyone, of being complicit with anything – because the complicity implied could only be with the bad imagination of the rapist. But there is a suggestion in Landau’s words that the bad imagination of the attackers on the train might have some validity if the woman involved was actually identifying with Jews by reading this book.