*So as a Jew, I'm supposed to just "let it go" when people make remarks about my looks and my religious practises? If someone calls me a slur, I'm supposed to not see them as the "bad guy" because it might upset them.
No thank you.*
Trouble is, what we've got in the censored second edition - and I will say 'censored', because self-censorship is still censorship - is, in my opinion, worse. And it would have been even worse if the publisher's had decided to pre-censor the book.
Because we've gone from a book where a typically British modern anti-Semitism (A's appearance is what I think of as Jewish and they have a name I think of as Jewish - so A must be Jewish, even if they say they're not) is, by inference, linked to the pogroms ...
... to a now-censored book where (to use David Baddiel's phrase) 'Jews don't count'. There's no longer any blatant anti-Semitism, but there's also no connection with the pogroms caused by anti-Semitism. Oh, yeah, they're mentioned - but safely. Pogroms are safely in the past. Daniel Deronda, Oliver Twist, people don't want to remember what they escaped from, or even that they may have a heritage that made them a target, that forced their grandparents and great-grandparents to move to this country. How sad.
But this now has nothing to do with Clanchy's nice middle class readership, because that readership now never has to confront the notion that when Clanchy said 'Ashkenazi nose' - they knew exactly what she meant. They never have the chance to pick up the inference that this kind of casual racism connects directly to the pogroms. The inference that it's still there. That if you look visibly Jewish, you will still get racism directed at you. Often by very 'nice' middle-class people.
And the people who are impacted by this racism no longer have the chance to discuss it with the people doing the impacting. Move along, people, nothing to see here, anti-Semitism doesn't exist in modern Britain. We've removed the nasty words, and now the actual racism against Jews that creates the nasty words is ... invisible. Nobody has to be offended now. Nobody has to cope with the language, and nobody has to recognise themselves (in Clanchy's book) as someone who would say (or think, more likely) a racist trope against Jews.
Congratulations. We've taken someone's real, raw racism that they're struggling with - and made it nice. Not just 'nice' - invisible.
But that's censorship. We don't censor the 'nice', or the stuff we agree with. We censor the offensive, we censor the stuff we disagree with. We censor the stuff that makes us uncomfortable.
There has never been a more appropriate book to be given the Orwell Prize.