Anti-semitism is racism. We need to acknowledge that.

If you think this isn’t the case, it’s worth checking out #antisemitictweets. The depth, variety and just sheer number of hate tweets about Jews is simply breathtaking. And most of them mention money; and, if challenged, almost all of the tweeters convey the same sense of: what? What’s the problem? This attitude is not confined to hate tweeters, silly old football chairmen and the right wing. One of the driving forces of the Y-word campaign was an attempt to query why the word was not in the same arena of unacceptability as the N-word and the P-word. A friend of mine, very much on the left of frame politically, said to me: “But it’s not as bad as the N-word.” I said: “Why?” He said: “Because Jews are rich.” It’s perhaps not worth starting to unpack how much is wrong with that idea (not least the implication that black people cannot possibly be rich). But it points to a key problem as regards the wider apprehension of antisemitism, which is that the left – which, in the end, is where anti-racist ideas start and trickle down even to people like Dave Whelan and Mario Balotelli – has always been a little bit ambiguous about Jews (an ambiguity that has clearly become even more ambiguous since Israel was deemed the nutcase pariah state du jour).

Jews are, after all, the only entity, in terms of the racist stereotype that operates on two levels, low and high status – that can be imagined as vermin but also as moneyed and secretly in control. The moneyed and in-control thing undoubtedly still has some traction on the left (see France), and it’s why Jews, at best, might not be considered to be really in need of the protections that anti-racism offers, and at worst might be the enemy.