Julie Burchill‘s latest column at Spiked:
As a lifelong cheerleader for the Jewish people, these recent months have been bittersweet for me; a highly unusual example of not wanting to be proved right. I resigned from the Guardian a whopping 15 years ago in protest over what I perceived as its slimy anti-Semitism – and, it must be admitted, the offer of three times the wages from The Times. I often wonder how the left-wing Jewish half-wits who slammed me then feel now that they’ve been well and truly trashed by the bullies they sucked up to.
The current spate of Jew-baiting is interesting in that it’s like a Lord Of the Flies of the Woke; raised on tofu and now high on the taste of blood, the snowflakes have finally found a minority group it’s fine to demonise, and my gosh, doesn’t that Two Minute Twitter Hate feel good! (The meekness of the diaspora Jews makes them honorary women in the eyes of the left – then the toughness of the Israelis sends the brosocialists into a maelstrom of cognitive dissonance a gogo.) But I’m hoping my Jewish chums and I can put the unpleasantness out of our minds for a few tuneful hours when Trevor Nunn’s revival of Fiddler On The Roof opens in December, just in time for Hanukkah.
This heart-warming story follows the fortunes of a Jewish milkman living in a Russian village with his wife and five daughters as he fights to hold on to his dignity among growing anti-Semitism – what a relief that times have changed! In the spirit of keeping an open mind, I’m going to apply the popular PC theory of extreme type-casting to my appreciation of the new Fiddler, and sincerely trust that JEWS ONLY will be cast in the main roles – I don’t mind if Gentiles play such minor roles as Russian Official and Priest. After all, the singer Sierra Boggess, after being judged too pallid for the role of West Side Story’s Puerto Rican heroine Maria in the BBC Proms production, recanted in a positively Orwellian fashion after social-media monstering. As did Scarlett Johansson recently after being being bullied out of a putative role as a cross-dresser. Women, eh? Even the divas among us are so used to saying sorry that it’s a wonder we ever got the vote – imagine the Suffragettes today, going around apologising to racehorses for being insufficiently sensitive to their shared cultural oppression!
