When ‘A Jew Said It’ Becomes Cover

Barnaby Marder’s recent SAASUK article, ‘They can’t be antisemitic, they’re Jewish!’, clears away a comforting confusion: ancestry does not guarantee anything about a person’s ideas, and it does not place their speech outside judgement. Jews can internalise antisemitic assumptions, repeat them, and, in some cases, build a public identity around them. Jews can also simply be wrong, in the ordinary way people are wrong.

That framing helps with a second pattern which sits slightly to the side of Barnaby’s piece. It shows up when non-Jews are criticised for the way they talk about Jews, Israel, or antisemitism, and respond by placing a Jewish voice in front of them like a shield. The medium varies, but the mechanics are familiar. A screenshot of an ‘as a Jew’ thread dropped into a quote-tweet storm. A short clip from a Jewish speaker circulating in WhatsApp groups as the final word. A campus meeting where one Jewish attendee is treated as representative, while other Jewish attendees are treated as partisan. A workplace Slack thread where someone links a Jewish source mainly to make further objection feel socially risky.

In the longer essay on my Substack, I describe this as a kind of certification behaviour. The Jewish voice is not being engaged as an argument, it is being used as a credential. Once the credential is on the table, the conversation often shifts away from the original question, which was usually concrete, a claim, a trope, a loaded insinuation about power, loyalty, money, control, dual allegiance, and towards a procedural fight about who gets to speak. That shift is attractive for obvious reasons. It is safer. It preserves status. It avoids the social cost of admitting a framing error. It also performs well on platforms that reward receipts over reasoning, because a screenshot is faster than a paragraph and easier to share than a careful distinction.

None of this requires treating Jewish dissenters as illegitimate. Jewish life contains serious disagreement on Israel, Zionism, religion, politics, tactics, language, and priorities. The trouble begins when outsiders treat that disagreement as a permission structure, selecting the Jews who grant cover and discarding the Jews who raise the cost of certain ways of speaking.

The full essay, with more detail on how this selection process works across platforms and institutions, is here: https://open.substack.com/pub/danjacobslondon/p/the-kosher-stamp-shopping-for-jewish. The open question is what happens when ‘listening to Jews’ becomes a reputational strategy rather than a commitment to hearing what a varied set of Jews are actually saying.