The Jewish response
Posted: January 13, 2012 | Author: Adam Wagner | | Tags: human rights |4 Comments »
By Adam Wagner
I seem to have a lot of great conversations on Facebook these days. A recent one was about an article I linked to by Stephen Pollard, editor of the Jewish Chronicle, in the Daily Express: Human Rights Law is Undermining UK’s Democracy. One friend commented on my status, “it would be great to have a Jewish response“, to which another responded “what does it have to do with Jews and why does it require a “Jewish response?”.
What, and why, indeed? I have been mulling this over, but it was only when reading Keith Kahn-Harris’s excellent critique of the Jewish Chronicle under Pollard that I realised why Pollard’s Express article probably doesn’t need a “Jewish” response at all.
There are a number possible responses to the article, the most basic being how the article is from a journalistic standpoint.
Pollard may be, to borrow Kahn-Harris’s faint praise, a “gifted polemicist“ but as I have blogged before, like many in the press – both “tabloid” and “serious” – his arguments are often legally inaccurate or peddle inaccurate myths about human rights law. This article is no different.
Strangely, he choses to exhume a myth which the Home Secretary was ridiculed by practically everyone, including the Conservative Justice Secretary, for deploying at the Conservative Party Conference: “the gay Bolivian who was allowed to stay in Britain partly because he owned a cat with his partner”. Leaving aside the Express reader dog-whistle reference to the cat-owner’s sexuality, that decision did more to expose the sometime childlike misunderstanding of law by anti-human rights campaigners, than anything rotten about a judge’s immigration decision.
The article also refers to the Human Rights Act as a “cancer at the heart of British democracy“, and in response to the question of whether we should be sending people back to Somalia to put them at a real risk of torture, Pollard offers: “Poor dears“. This is hardly a serious response to the difficult and legitimate questions about the proper interpretation of private/family life rights by immigration tribunals which it poses.
So, taken from a standpoint of Pollard-as-journalist, the article is fairly poor, although not as poor as some others. But what about through the lens of Pollard-as-Jewish-Chronicle-editor? Well, if anyone was looking for evidence of the personality driving the Jewish Chronicle, the article is illustrative if unsurprising. A bit simplistic, reactionary, sometimes polemical; this is how I would describe the JC under Pollard. But does this add anything to an analysis of the article itself? Not really.
The Jewish response
What about a “Jewish” response? I think I know what my Facebook friend meant; an article which is effectively anti-human rights in a newspaper which is anti-immigration could generate a response couched in Jewish language and ethics. For we were strangers in a strange land, etc.
But for me, the stronger response is not through the parochial Jewish lens but through the more universal and, I would argue, effective language of democratic, liberal and rationalist values.
For nearly two years I have been running the UK Human Rights Blog. The blog aims to offer a non-ideological and legally accurate response to the often hysterical media coverage of human rights law. It has been a success: by the Blog’s second birthday in March this year it will have amassed over 1m hits and around 10,000 followers.
At no point, and I have edited or written almost 1,000 posts, have I felt inclined to include a “Jewish” response to a human rights issue. This is despite the fact that human rights law often involves ethical dilemmas which Jewish sages have had plenty to say about. In my view, a Jewish perspective adds little or nothing to a UK legal analysis, and therefore, deploying Occam’s Razor, it shouldn’t be there at all.
The obvious counter argument is that whilst a response based on Jewish ethics might not carry much (or any) weight in a UK court, there are plenty of other arenas, such as international human rights interventions or the operation of the Israeli state, where they might be important.
But I wonder if there is room within a “Jewish” perspective, which by definition privileges a particular ethic/racial/religious group, in analysis of human rights at all. This may not matter in respect of other issues such as environmentalism, but do Jewish history and ethics add enough value to counterbalance the skewed ethnic/cultural/religious baggage which tags along with them?
Lowest common denominator
This raises another important question. What is a “Jewish” response anyway? Surely there cannot realistically be a response to any issue which would please every or even the main Jewish communities in the UK; ranging as they do from religiously fundamentalist ultra orthodox to militantly secular.
One solution is to aggregate responses and reach a lowest common denominator. And this brings me back to the Jewish Chronicle, which I suggest is a good example of the problems of a certain kind of “Jewish response”. Harris-Kahn sums the newspaper up well:
The front pages are dominated by Israel, antisemitism and Islamism – important issues but not the only ones that impinge on British Jews. With some honourable exceptions… news of other Jewish communal issues is all too often relegated to short features and the community pages.
I agree. I find the JC fun to read and sometimes thought-provoking (full disclosure: I am one of the few subscribers under the age of 35), but Pollard-as-editor is too keen to spread paranoia and encourage a bunker mentality for the paper to be, on balance, a positive force in the community. The JC represents a community which I think many recognise – one which cares whether Helena Bonham-Carter is “Halachically Jewish” (code for “we claim her but she foolishly rejects her calling”) – but would prefer not to encourage.
Despite its flaws the Jewish Chronicle continues to sets the terms of the debate, and this needs to change. The small UK Jewish community probably cannot sustain another newspaper, but the internet provides the perfect opportunity, which is why sites such as Cartoon Kippah and Jewdas are potentially important, particularly if their reach expands beyond the left field.
In other words, however entertaining the JC is, it would be better if it weren’t the, or at least the main, Jewish response to all issues which British Jews face. Part of the reason Limmud, the biannual educational conference, is so successful as a cross-communal movement is that there is no editor; nobody decides what is in or what is out and therefore the terms of the debate are only limited by the breadth of the attendees’ views.
So, returning to my Facebook friend’s question, would it “ be great to have a Jewish response“? Not always, as in my view some topics don’t need it. As tempting as it is to ignore the aspects of a Jewish response which are not liberal or rationalist, it is not always possible to exclude them. As for the Jewish Chronicle, in the coming years it would be better for the UK Jewish community if there were other prominent Jewish responses too.
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Adam Wagner is a barrister practising in public, human rights and medical law. He edits the UK Human Rights Blog, and writes for guardian.co.uk. Twitter: adamwagner1