Judge Rinder: Using ‘they’ as catch-all term for Jews is deeply disturbing
Judge Rinder has revealed he’s “very, very worried” about the language to describe Jewish people increasingly being used in “so-called polite company”.
The criminal barrister and television star took issue with the word “they” being applied as a catch-all term for Jews, saying the terminology was “deeply disturbing”.
Rinder, 46, warned the use of “they” could be the “slow, dark, slippery slide into what can be depravity”.
Rinder urged people to call out any Islamophobia or anti-Semitism they heard and stop “letting things slide”.
Asked if he felt frightened or antagonised as a Jewish man in London, he told the Off Air podcast: “I haven’t personally…I grew up in a racially and ethnically and class-blended community and being Jewish was a rather lovely cultural aspect of my life.
“Despite being the grandson of a Holocaust survivor, so deeply aware of anti-Semitism in the most extreme form imaginable, I never felt ever existentially threatened or different.
“It was a celebratory aspect of my identity, never a fearful one.
“But the truth is that I now have people I know and love who are fearful of walking in the streets with a star of David on.”
He added that when people want to “discuss [Israel] issue in a way that’s nuanced” they feel “very fearful” of doing so.
Rinder added: “I want to be very clear about this I do not mean defending…the actions of the Netanyahu government, but want to be able to communicate and share why Israel as a state is sacred to Jewish people.
“250,000 of us in a nation of in excess of 60 million.”
“They feel excluded and dehumanised from that conversation. That’s the first time that I’ve ever experienced that, being a Jew in this country,” he said.
The barrister said it was the first time he had heard language with negative connotations to describe Jews being openly used by people across the political spectrum which has disturbed him.
He said: “I’ve been at dinner parties or events where things that are said, both on the left and the right, but I have to say it’s been more present for reasons which I suppose are just basically social where I’m more likely to hang out on the left, casually, loosely, that are deeply disturbing.
“Jews being described as ‘they’, the influence ‘they’ have on the media, the disproportionate power ‘they’ have over the professions and so on and so forth.
“You can hear that now in so-called polite company.
“You shut your eyes and you imagine…that’s the starting point for all of the horrors that ensue.”
The power to stop hate
Rinder said that rather than visiting Auschwitz, people must make an effort to understand how things unfolded before the Holocaust.
He continued: “This is the most advanced Western liberal democracy of its time, the absolute apotheosis of Western civilisation, Germany. And what did you need? Well, you need people to feel aggrieved by a treaty, catastrophic economic events, and the wrong person in the right place at the wrong time to identify others.
“And then this conversation starts, well, you know, they, the ‘they’, ‘they’ are very powerful, you know, disproportionate impact.
“All the things that you’ve begun to creep into, like a malignant force branded on the tongue in conversations that exist now in ways and spaces that would have been intolerable when I was young. And I’m very, very worried about that.”
“The power to stop hate really does start and end with you,” he added.