How depressing when people over-identify with their ethnicity

I am a Jew. I live in a council estate in London where considerably more than half of my neighbours are Muslims. These people aren’t my friends, but we get along fine: I pick up their parcels; we coordinate complaints to the council about the strange, blue-tinged fluid that sometimes drips from everyone’s ceilings, as if someone in the penthouse had decided to fill their flat with jelly. Elsewhere, our distant cousins are doing terrible things to each other. It’s increasingly hard to imagine a world in which these distant cousins can live together, intermingled but mostly minding their own business – but that’s exactly what we do every day in London. Over the past six months I’ve started feeling extremely grateful for that.

Lately, though, I’ve been very grateful for something else too. I’m glad that I can live in peace with my Muslim neighbours without any of us being tempted to start a podcast about it.

David Baddiel and Baroness Sayeeda Warsi are not as strong as I am. Their podcast is called A Muslim & A Jew Go There, and it’s not very good. A typical exchange has Warsi saying ‘I see you, I hear you, I feel your pain,’ to which Baddiel replies: ‘Yes, that’s fantastic.’ The title of the thing sounds like Baddiel’s invention. He used to be a comedian, but these days he’s mostly just a professional Jew. (That’s his Twitter bio: ‘Jew’.) It’s always very sad when people over-identify with their ethnic identity; you get the sense they don’t think much of their other qualities. At some point, Baddiel must have looked over his life’s work and decided that what he really had to offer the world was his lack of a foreskin.