Stewart Lee mocks a Jewish MP’s name for sounding too foreign in the right-on Observer
After all the clever wit aimed at racists and Daily Mail readers, stand-up comic Stewart Lee, self-effacing star of the BBC’s Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle, used his Observer column to take the piss out of someone for having a funny Jewish name. Lee never mentioned Tom Tugendhat’s Jewish heritage in his column, the one entitled “Now Boris Johnson is talking through his Tugendhat”. But what he did say about the Tory MP was enough for the Jewish Chronicle’s editor Steven Pollard to write beneath the headline “My father changed his name because of people like Stewart Lee. Nothing changes”:
Seventy years ago my dad needed to change his weird foreign name to avoid the sly glances of bigots. Stewart Lee is that bigot – a man who thinks the best response to a foreign sounding Jewish name is to ridicule it in a national newspaper
Might be worthwhile to see what Lee wrote before we brand him an anti-Semite or make him Labour Party leader:
Stay alert! Many names – Fisher, Cook, Smith – derive from ancient trades. But “Tugendhat” is just different words put together, like Waspcupfinger, or Appendixhospitalwool, or Abortionmaqaquesymptom. This former intelligence officer is the nephew of a real man called Baron Tugendhat. Baron Tugendhat is not a character from a 19th-century German children’s book about a baron with a weird hat, the end of which gets tugged.
It’s a weak joke. But the mention of solid English names to mock Tugendhat makes it all it bit stinky for Mr Lee, which is a name not derived from Levison, Levi nor Levine (I’ve checked). He wants us compare and contrast those ancient yeoman of olde England with the weirdo foreigner. In 2012 then Labour leader Ed Miliband championed his family’s immigrant roots by telling conference in Manchester: “My family hasn’t sat under the same oak tree for the last 500 years.” Fisher, Cook. Smith. They have. You can understand them. Their roots run deep and true.
Tom Tugendhat was unimpressed by Lee’s snipe. He retweeted the following by Jonathan Greenblatt:
If you see anti-Semitism, brace yourself for what Lee went on to say:
Peasants! Get back to work! Over the top, boys! Gas! Gas! For God’s sake, gas!
No. No! His analogy is for WW1, not the later conflict WW2. The gas Lee mentions is mustard, which killed Smith, Fisher and Cook in the trenches. It’s not Zyklon B gas, which murdered Levy, Cohen and Zitter in the Nazi death camps.
The anti-Semites didn’t murder Benhamu because he fled Spain’s Inquisition a few hundred years ago, eventually becoming Benham so that my mother’s family would stand a better chance of dodging Jew haters and finding work in London. And the bastards didn’t get Zaransky either, which became Sorene at the will of a boarder guard when my great-grandfather wisely listened to a premonition he had about a looming pogrom and fled Poland, arriving in Leeds having survived on a diet of dumb luck and pig will.
Sorene is still a bit unusual, of course, and when a French teacher at school used to pronounce it ‘sirène’, like siren, and go ‘mee-maaa-meeeee-maaaaaaah when he wanted me to respond and get a cheap laugh from his tame class pets, I never thought him an anti-Semite, just a condescending twat – which brings us to Lee.