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

* I don’t wish to let light in on magic here, but while redrafting this book, my editor wrote in the margin, ‘Are we calling the previous example a slip?’ I thought about this for some time. I see that her point is that calling the sentence in the MOI memo a slip seems to minimise something potentially horrific, but at some level it’s the mot juste. In fact, it’s sort of the mot juste for what I perceive as the problem that this whole book is wrestling with, which is a set of unconscious assumptions about and attitudes towards Jews that slip out and often, most significantly, slip in as well.