Why Call Someone A Jew Just Because He Is?
What should we call House of Commons Speaker John Bercow? I only ask because of the recent frenzy following his controversial speech in the House of Commons deriding President Trump. Bercow objected to The Don addressing MPs and Peers in Westminster Hall when he arrives on his controversial State visit, due to concerns about the President’s perceived racist and sexist attitudes.
Though many have praised the Speaker’s unconventional honesty, media commentators and politicians have gone to town, variously describing Bercow as a ‘hypocrite’, ‘sanctimonious’, ‘small-minded’ and even a ‘pipsqueak’.
But there was a profile of him in the online Independent that revealed something no other mainstream media organisation felt the need to. Uniquely, the newspaper called him the ‘son of a Jewish taxi driver’. Not just a taxi driver but a Jewish one.
If the article had gone on to discuss Bercow’s views about Israel, his synagogue attendance or even affection for pork and shellfish products, then at least the Jew-reference would have been relevant. But it didn’t.
The writer of the piece, Rachael Burnett of the Press Association, and the Editor of the digital paper, Christian Broughton, obviously felt that that was an important layer of description that the piece benefited from. Despite my tweeted-prods to them over the past few days, they still refuse to say why ‘the son of a Jewish taxi driver’ phrase was such an essential part of the profile.
Simon Walters did the same thing in the Mail on Sunday over the weekend when profiling Brexit Minister David Davies. Describing (or perhaps explaining) his unconventional background, he wrote that Davis’s mother was a single parent when she gave birth and then married someone who is ‘Polish and Jewish’.
I don’t think for a second that there is any kind of prejudice at play here. It’s just lazy, unthinking journalism. After all, do you ever read pieces that describe so-and-so as the son of a Roman Catholic accountant, or the daughter of a Church of England plumber?
However, what the Indy’s Bercow piece does in particular (deliberately or not) is single out a minority, in the same way that Idris Elba might be if he were to be called an actor of black parents rather than just an actor, or Mishal Hussein as the Today programme’s Muslim presenter. Why would one call them black or Muslim if it doesn’t identify what they do? If such descriptions explained something about their careers — ie Edra becoming the first black Bond or Hussein allegedly angering interviewee Aung San Suu Kyi due to her Muslim beliefs — then, yes, absolutely essential.
But to label a person a Jew just because he is, seems to me a very worrying thing to do in today’s febrile, often hostile media landscape.
I once debated the subject with City journalist Jim Armitage after he made a passing reference to Sir Trevor Chinn as a ‘Jewish philanthropist’ in the Evening Standard newspaper.
I asked him: ‘Jim, if someone was a Catholic philanthropist or a Muslim one, would you still use religion to describe them. And if so why?’
At first, he didn’t have a clue what I was talking about but, prodded further, he replied: ‘Oh yes, fair point, actually. Don’t know why I put that in, think I just lifted it from his biog. Nothing meant by it.’
Of course there was nothing meant by it. Nothing ever is. File it under ‘Unthinking Wikipedia plagiarism’. Or is ‘son of a Jew/Muslim/Afro-Caribbean’ shorthand for something else? Immigrant, culture, community…difference. And if it is shorthand then of course the word has ‘meaning’.
It means not one of us.
Words have an incredible, unseen power. Indeed, on the BBC radio’s Sunday Broadcasting House programme, political editor John Pienaar, while dampening suggestions that Speaker Bercow could be ousted, said that he needed to ‘choose his words more carefully’.
Those of us in the communications industry especially understand the great responsibility we have over the use of words. So call Bercow a sanctimonious pipsqueak if you must but leave his religion out of it.
It’s a descriptive label that I thought we’d been rid of many decades ago.
