Cancelling Jewish comedians is capitulation

Times

27-07-2025

The cost of bunking down in an Edinburgh August overtook our family resources a few years back, so not for me the exhilarating Fringe ordeal: six shows a day and falling asleep in the small hours with haggis-pizza in hair and keyboard. But exiled fans like to learn by proxy about occasional brilliance, embarrassing idiocies and streaks of perilous bravery. So far, though, the most downheartening news is about cowardice.
Two Jewish comedians were taken off the Fringe listings and told by the Whistlebinkies venue, at two weeks' notice, that they were not performing there. Apparently its staff might feel 'unsafe', though the risk of antisemitic demonstration was recognised and security discussed.
Seemingly there had been regular 'Free Palestine' graffiti left on toilet doors, needing to be cleaned. Obviously, it can't be worth standing by freedom and equality if it might cause inconvenience, can it?
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Neither show was about Gaza, Israel or war. Rachel Creeger's 'Ultimate Jewish Mother' is, she says, a 'warm hug' about all mums. Philip Simon was to host a 'Jew-o-Rama' of comedic talents (and it is worth remembering how much poorer all showbiz would be without the Jewish contribution, comic or otherwise).
His other show has been cancelled too. Creeger, incidentally, observed that she doesn't find 'Free Palestine' slogans a threat and mildly says, 'It's a common thing to see in places. It's people's political statement.' But as Simon says, 'We are cancelled and often silently boycotted. This would not happen to any other ethnic minority; there would be absolute outrage.'
Shocked and destabilised, both say it's hard to sleep, and not only because of the financial and professional blow. Simon notes a change in the past year: 'I think people have perhaps got braver in what they feel they can say.' Indeed: last year Jewish audience members were booed for objecting to a Reginald D Hunter joke, and this did not cause the rest of his audience to walk out in contempt. A similar insult from the stage to Jews in the audience at the Soho Theatre did at least get that perpetrator banned.
Routine antisemitism is getting easier, less shocking. Public entertainment is a canary in the cultural coalmine, but this is not just about fringe comedy. It is about the visible creep of raw, uncivilised, general contempt for Jews, notably in a generation too young either to feel disgraced by such attitudes or to bother studying the hideous complications of the Middle East.
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It is notably within higher education that this easy hate has increased four times faster than anywhere else: students and academics are more likely to commit verbal or physical attacks than the general populace.
It is about the easy fashionability of flinging on a keffiyeh to denote that you are one of the good guys, lining up unthinkingly with Hamas's clear mission to destroy the state of Israel and all Jews everywhere. It is in tearing down pictures of hostages, and the laughable idiocy of waving banners saying 'QUEERS FOR PALESTINE'. As if the priority of a Hamas-led regime would be to facilitate Pride marches and transgenderism, rather than execute the lot of them.
After the murders and kidnaps of October 7, attacks on Jews in the UK doubled extraordinarily fast: businesses and synagogues have been damaged, Jewish schoolchildren minding their own business have been threatened. Big organised demonstrations week after week are manipulated by leaders keener on ruckus than discussion.
Hysterical, deluded individualism erupts, as in that young Irishwoman all over social media screaming 'I am a Palestinian and I am being silenced', when neither is the case. Or the one who last week trashed a table outside Reuben's Café in Baker Street (she was, at least, arrested). When one of the kosher diners, Yael, protested that the group didn't support the Israeli government's action the woman 'said she didn't care and that I was Jewish, so that's all that mattered to her'.
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Britain cannot be complacent about this. Warped, childish and moronic though much of it is, antisemitism is too ancient and toxic a rash to be allowed even a millimetre's spread. It is enraging that our government should be contemplating some probably ill-written and illiberal blasphemy law against 'Islamophobia' rather than spending its energy instructing public forces to give no quarter to routine insults against British Jews.
One might even cynically point out one difference: extreme Islamist calls for sharia law are commonplace and shruggingly tolerated, while Judaism does not proselytise or demand public concessions but rather the opposite: traditionally resisting converts with care and questioning doubt. As the gentle rabbi Lord Sacks once said to me, 'Over centuries in many lands Jews have learnt to harmonise in a minor key', while the centuries-newer faith has yet to achieve that.
It is right — inevitable — to care about the people of Gaza. Inevitable to wince and weep at the immense scale of torment and starvation of its people, near-unbearable to hear daily about innocents caught between Hamas ruthlessness and Binyamin Netanyahu's remorselessness. It is increasingly hard to look away, and reasonable to beg western governments forcibly to relieve the suffering at any cost. Right also to insist, as many Israeli citizens do and its candid friends have done in these pages, that Israel must bend to mercy and reconciliation.
But it is not tolerable to convert your shock into cheap, enjoyable, hysterical hatred. No civilised democracy can delude itself that attacking Jews for Jewishness, or pigeon-heartedly discriminating, is forgivable. Or should go unpunished.