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Author and comedian David Baddiel has been speaking to Sophy Ridge on Holocaust Memorial Day about antisemitism.

He says antisemitism comes not just from “the far-right” but from those who would think of themselves as anti-racist.

“It’s about how the people who would consider themselves to be most concerned about discrimination, about racism, about many, many different types of marginalisation, don’t apply that when it comes to antisemitism.

“They don’t just – they just don’t apply the same language.”

He says he believes it is because Jews are “the only minority who are associated with power and wealth”.

“Despite the fact that Jewish history is a huge cyclical loop of disempowerment, the lingering sense that Jews are essentially invulnerable, that there is a lack of vulnerability, that they don’t quite qualify as to fit into the class of victim means that you get this constant issue,” he says.

“And of course, that is made much more complex by what’s happening at the moment.”

Conflating the Middle East conflict with Jews everywhere is wrong

He says he thinks events in the Middle East being conflated with ideas about Jews elsewhere “is wrong”.

“The idea that Jews have to answer for Jews around the world, have to answer for or are considered complicit in things that happen miles and miles away, is again something that is fairly unique to Jews,” he says.

Speaking about your experience as a Jew makes people furious

The author adds he will “get loads and loads of people shouting at me on social media” when this interview is put there, which he accepts and over time has become “less and less interested in taking part in the noise and circus of social media”.

“But that seems specific to me about antisemitism as a type of racism, which is that speaking about your experience of it involves people getting furious about it,” he adds.

Jews are a glitch in the binary view of the world

Baddiel says the way people are asked to imagine the world is now sometimes very binary – victimisers or victimised, oppressed and oppressors.

“Jews are a kind of glitch in that binary, right? Because some Jews are powerful, but Jews also have this incredibly long history of, as I say, of disempowerment, of racism and discrimination against them, which means you can’t think about the world in those easy ways.

“The easiest thing to do, therefore, is to dismiss antisemitism as a real issue, to say it’s not real.”