Mick Hartley

Brendan O'Neill in the Spectator:

Is the Edinburgh Fringe a Judenfrei zone now? With just a week to go before the Fringe kicks off, Jewish comedians are being unceremoniously cancelled. One venue has allegedly cited ‘safety concerns’ from staff, saying the extra muscle to deal with the threats to Jewish acts made them feel more unsafe. So instead of protecting Jews, you ditch them? What a shameful capitulation to the anti-Semitic mob.

Numerous Jewish-themed comedy shows have been binned at the Whistlebinkies venue in the city. Rachel Creeger, Britain’s only practising Orthodox Jewish comedian, has been told her show Ultimate Jewish Mother is no longer going ahead. Jew-O-Rama was next for the chop. That’s a comedy night that features a ‘rolling line-up of Jewish and Jew-ish comedians’. It’s been running at the Fringe for nine years. Not anymore. Seems funny Jews aren’t allowed in 2025.

And now the host of Jew-O-Rama, Philip Simon, says his one-man show ‘Shall I Compare Thee in a Funny Way?’ has been cancelled at the Banshee Labyrinth venue. ‘I am still processing the concept that in 2025 I can be cancelled just for being Jewish’, says Mr Simon. We should all be processing that. We should all be asking how it is possible that at a comedy festival in the 21st century, Jews are being booted off stage.

The reasons given by the venues for their blitzing of the Jewish acts are ridiculous. They say it is not because the comedians are Jewish – I guess it is entirely coincidental that every one of the gagged comics is a Jew.

There's a name for that.

Philip Simon says he was told that his one-man show was scrubbed because his views on ‘the humanitarian crisis in Palestine’ do not align with those of the venue. What are his scandalous views? Well, he calls himself ‘pro-Israel’ and he has pleaded for the release of the Israeli hostages. Wanting Jews to be freed from the violent clutches of a neo-fascist militia is a cancellable offence now, it seems.

There’s a neo-McCarthyite vibe to these venues’ erasure of Jews who fail to toe the ‘progressive’ line on the Israel-Hamas war.

Well yes – but it's surely worse than just neo-McCarthyite. Their views, like the safety concerns waffle, are not the real issue here. What matters is that they're Jews. 

Stephen Pollard, again in the Spectator, has more:

You don’t have to be a comedian or an expert in decoding sophistry to understand what’s going on here. You just have to have a basic knowledge of history, because it’s what has been going on for millennia. Jews have been banned for being Jews. Here we go again. They can dress it up in any drivel about health and safety they want, but when you translate ‘concerns over staff safety’ into reality it means, ‘Jews are banned unless they manage to sneak in because no one has realised they are Jews’….

It could hardly be more blatant: two Jews have been cancelled because they are Jewish. The rest is noise. The fact that neither Creeger nor Simon have expressed anything other than a desire for peace and freedom for the hostages is irrelevant, because one of the strongest lessons of Jewish history is that they come for the ‘good’ Jews too. It doesn’t matter if you think you’re behaving as they want you to behave: in their eyes, all that matters is that you’re a Jew.

Politicians are wont to repeat the phrase, ‘There is no place for antisemitism in [add the name of a city or country]’. In reality, however, in Britain in 2025 there is every place for antisemitism. Always and everywhere.