On Monday night, Jews will gather outside the London Palladium to protest a performance by veteran rock star Roger Waters. The Campaign Against Antisemitism is calling on the theatre and its owner, Andrew Lloyd Webber, to deny Waters use of the venue. That is, to cancel him. I don’t share this aim.
Not because I doubt that Waters is – to quote Polly Samson, wife and lyricist of Waters’ former Pink Floyd bandmate David Gilmour – “antisemitic to [his] rotten core”. I think exactly that. Rather, because I also think there should be a very high bar to cancel any artistic or cultural event, even by people who turn my stomach.
What I find more dispiriting than Waters himself is the likelihood that those Jews will be out there on their own. Few allies will rally to their aid, and almost none from those circles that would ordinarily react to the faintest whiff of racism as if summoned by bat-signal. Uniquely among bigots, antisemites are routinely tolerated or even celebrated by our artistic and cultural establishments.
Waters is a poster boy for a contemporary form of antisemitism that poisons and corrodes Jewish life in Britain, under the dubious cover of a monomaniacal loathing for Israel – of which Jewish-majority state its rabid existential enemies piously cast themselves as “critics”. Manifesting as a political ideology, this antisemitism fig-leafs its Jew-hate with the euphemism “Zionists”. Scratch the surface and you’ll find the same hoary prejudices that long predate Israel’s founding.
Waters delights in its principal sport, Holocaust inversion: equating Jews with Nazis, likening casualties of the Israel-Palestine conflict to Anne Frank, putting the Star of David on an inflatable pig, dressing up as a stormtrooper onstage (you should see the ideas he wanted to do). He turns out – imagine our surprise – to have been an old-school Jew-baiter all along. The kind who sneers at “f***ing Jews” and angrily spurns “Jew food”. Exposed, he does not deny this, but retorts that he was just being “mouthy” and “irreverent”. Like most modern-day racists, Waters believes nothing’s racist until he says it is.
So if we can’t – indeed, shouldn’t – cancel Waters, what should we do? The critical fraternity, and some of its editors, could start by treating Waters’ antisemitic attitudes the way we would their equivalents. By all means give his show a good write-up if it merits one. I did just that, some years ago. But knowing what we do now, contextualise it as you would the work of any other inflammatory and repugnant crank.
Morrissey rightly gets no soft soap for his fascist-friendly provocations. Yet in June, one left-wing newspaper’s gig review described Waters as delivering a “powerful, humanist spectacular” that possessed “moral authority” once he dispensed with antisemitic “flourishes” that were merely “clumsy and misguided”. Anyone who can picture such simpering apologism making it through to publication were Waters’ targets, say, black, or transgender, must have a livelier imagination than I do.
As David Baddiel notes in his book of that title, “Jews don’t count.” We are neither a prestigous nor a fashionable cause. Your peers will not applaud you for defending us. Quite the opposite. The Good People (as they by default think of themselves) who predominate in the arts are quick to condemn antisemitism in the abstract. But when it comes down to specific cases involving their political bedfellows, they are just as quick to look away or make excuses for it. To the Good People, those antisemites may be vulgar and embarrassing – they will insist on saying the quiet parts out loud – but remain fundamentally on the side of right.
Jew-baiting is chiefly the preserve of left-leaning artists of late, but not exclusively. The Roald Dahl Museum (founded 2001) only this year belatedly put up a plaque acknowledging the author’s outspoken antisemitism. Which seems the correct approach.
I don’t think any artist, whatever their faults, should be cancelled, their qualities ignored, their work sidelined. Just that antisemitic tropes must be recognised in the same way as any others. I hold no brief for censorship. The issue is consistency. Whatever the standards of the day are, apply them equally.
As to the question of whether we should separate the artist from the art, I think it’s misplaced. It’s more an individual matter of whether one can. It’s easier when you’re not the target yourself. But if I stopped enjoying things because their creators had funny ideas about Jews, I’d need to bin half of my favourites – including, thanks to Waters, much of Pink Floyd’s music, although his dreadful solo records would present no such dilemma.
For a Jew like me, Waters and his kind are just a wearing everyday fact: not a bug, but a feature. What is harder to take is how many such people (see, for instance, Ken Loach or Alice Walker) are lauded as exemplary progressives by self-professed anti-racists.
Our cultural institutions and practitioners consistently exhibit what I call Jewblindness: a wilful inability to see antisemitism, to smell it, when it stands, stinking, right in front of their noses. J’accuse, all right, but not just Roger Waters. J’accuse the whole damn lot of you.
