and all my friends werejewish. and looked like a religiousjew, but didn t believe a word of it? i didn t not believe a word of it, because i was a kid, so i don t think i thought about it then. but all my friends were jewish. the culture was veryjewish. my grandparents were holocaust survivors, and they would come and, you know, do all passover and hanukkah and all that kind of stuff. so, it was veryjewish. and in fact, one of the things in the book, cause the book has had an interesting impact, which is like, it s sort of really targeted towards progressives who i feel have missed outjews as one of their identity politics concerns, but. sorry to interrupt, because we don t have that much time. but it came out at a very important time in the uk when the labour party led at the time byjeremy corbyn was being accused of completely failing to address anti semitic elements within it. and i wonder if it s led you to fall out of love with sort of the labour party and left of centre politics
a lot of journalists or whatever. and the old media does a thing of picking up on what s said on twitter and using it to say, oh, this is happening, or this outrage or whatever. and so, what you get is driving the temperature of discourse up happens via social media. but even as you re talking and very passionate and engaged, describing to me how twitter works and why it matters, i m thinking to myself, you re a really creative guy. you ve got lots going on in your life. you write children s books. you write other serious books. we ll talk about this one later. you know, you write jokes for a living. you re a comedian and a tv personality and all sorts of other things. why do you feel it s a good investment of your time to be almost literally 24/7 on social media? cause i follow you. thank you. you re on it, in that case. well, i am on it. why are you on it? but if you look, i m not on it anywhere near as much as you. well, there s two things about it. to be honest with you, there s
of journalists or whatever. and the old media does a thing of picking up on what s said on twitter and using it to say, oh, this is happening, or this outrage or whatever. and so, what you get is, driving the temperature of discourse up happens via social media. but even as you re talking and very passionate and engaged, describing to me how twitter works and why it matters, i m thinking to myself, you re a really creative guy. you ve got lots going on in your life. you write children s books. you write other serious books. we ll talk about this one later. you know, you write jokes for a living. you re a comedian and a tv personality and all sorts of other things. why do you feel it s a good investment of your time to be almost literally 24 7 on social media? cos i follow you. thank you. you re on it, in that case. well, i am on it. why are you on it? but if you look, i m not on it anywhere near as much as you. well, there s two things about it. to be honest with you, there s also a
what went wrong? you know, was there no filter, either from yourself or from the producers, the commissioners, the people who were responsible for that show? i think at the time it was, you know, a wrong thing that was going on in comedy in general, which was not enough attention being paid to the whole notion of performing in blackface. so, a lot of comedians did it, and that s no excuse. and the problem with you asking me about that is i m already hearing people on social media saying, 0h, here s david baddiel trying to absolve himself. i m not trying to absolve myself. but to answer your question, there was a culture of that feeling like it was ok when it wasn t. yeah, it sjust again in the show that i ve just watched, you talk about empathy and humanity in comedy. and jason lee, the footballer who used to play for nottingham forest, who was the subject of that particular sketch, which was repeated, i think, over weeks,
of the holocaust. could you tell thatjoke in the same way, and for it to work in the same context and with the same tone, if you weren t jewish? i personally think i would have no problem in hearing that joke from a non jew. i think it has more emotional resonance from ajew, and i myself, you may know this about me, my mum is a holocaust, well, not exactly a survivor. she was a refugee from nazism. my grandfather was actually in dachau. so, i think it has more resonance for me, and i tell it with more passion, but thejoke has no meanness of spirit, no evil, no approval of the holocaust in it, so therefore anyone can tell it. who decides in your long experience of comedy, cos you ve been doing it for three decades or more, who are the arbiters who decide when a line is crossed? is itjust a sort of collective crowd wisdom? or, you know. how do we then.? i think that changes, doesn t it? and at the moment, there is an issue with the fact that, because we have social media, and social medi