Anti-semitism and sexism alive and permanently hard-wired to recur

So this author is being interviewed by Seán Moncrieff, who interviews a lot of authors and causes me to buy a great many more books than I really should.

The book in question, on this occasion, is about anti-semitism. Hatred of the Jews, in other words. The author says it’s measurably and worryingly on the increase in Europe. Then Moncrieff asks the author — who is clearly Jewish — if he doesn’t in some way need anti-semitism, which to one extent, he logically does, since it’s given him his subject matter.

It would, let’s face it, be difficult to get a publisher interested in a book about cement if we lived in a cement-free world.

But, just as logically, the author takes a huge dose of exception to the question and it’s like the interview drives into a wall, the on-air collision is so surprising and so total.

Which is a pity, because it leaves unanswered the question as to why, for nigh on a couple of millennia, Europeans have repeatedly revived what seems to be a fundamental latent paranoia about Judaism in a cycle that seems to take about 40 years to complete.

The same myths surface to satisfy the haters each time. The Jews have all the money and are secretly behind everything, whether that’s business or politics or culture or economics. Moncrieff’s author pointed to evidence to disprove these claims, sounding baffled at having to, given the removal of Jews from so many areas throughout vast swatches of the European continent by the Holocaust.

Although we’ve had anti-semistim in the past in Ireland, notably taking the form of a mini-pogrom in Limerick in the early 20th century, it’s not, to my knowledge, a current reality, although that may result from the steady decline in the Jewish community in Ireland, due to emigration and “marrying out”.

I was, nonetheless, taken aback earlier this year, when we moved our business into what had once been the main Dublin synagogue, opposite the eye and ear hospital on leafy Adelaide Rd. The refurbished building, deconsecrated more than a decade ago, carries not a trace of its past, other than a distinctive exterior. It had also been renamed. We swiftly renamed it right back to The Old Synagogue, although two people raised the spectre of us losing business as a result.

When I mentioned these warnings in the office, older people looked shocked and younger people looked blank — they could make no sense of them at all and some of them had to Google anti-semitism to understand the term. If anti-semitism is hard-wired to recur after apparent elimination, so, too, does bias against women.

This one is odd and multi-faceted and separates women as much as it unites them.

Marian Finucane, for example, according to a weekend newspaper profile, is no part of the group currently devoted to getting more women in front of the camera or microphone. Me neither, from my much less relevant position, in my case the reason being that whenever I do guest lectures to third-level students on journalism or broadcasting courses, I’m surrounded afterwards by students, 80% of whom are female, and a scary proportion of that 80% of whom want to “get on television” whether as weather girls, lifestyle TV presenters, or participants in apprentice reality shows.

None of which roles are contempt-worthy, and the Met office women not only have a load of technical data in their heads but have to gesture confidently at maps that apparently aren’t there at all, really.

The point is not to rubbish any of the many roles on TV which require youth, looks, a stylist, cleavage or legs up to here.

It is to gently point out that women have no problem getting on TV if they are young, good-looking, have a stylist, cleavage, legs up to here or have no problem being pitted against other women and then being described as “manipulative” — that great male score-settler.

When I was an aspiring actress back in the day before we started calling both genders of stage performer “actor”, the battle was joined about gender equality. It was joined in legislative terms, so that it’s no longer possible to fire a woman because she’s a woman or because she’s got married or pregnant. It was joined in administrative terms, so that it’s no longer possible to tell a woman to get her husband’s written permission before she can take books out of her local library.

It was joined in political terms, so that women became ministers and party leaders.

It was joined in advertising terms, so that women couldn’t as a matter of course be portrayed as brain-dead dust-bashers. It was just great to be a businesswoman after that first battle was won, not least, let’s be painfully honest, because it was easier to be noticed/heard/taken seriously when one was the lone woman in one major meeting after another.

On the other hand, as the numbers began to even out, related advantages emerged. One of which was the sense that the equality issue had been put to bed and couldn’t surface again.

Admittedly, media was always most interested, when interviewing a female executive or entrepreneur, in her weight problems or guilt about leaving her children, than in the substantive issues about which male execs or entrepreneurs get asked, but, hey, let’s not get picky here.

I’ve always been ambivalent about positive discrimination. More power to Big Phil Hogan for insisting that every political party have a stated proportion of women candidates on its ticket for local elections.

This will undoubtedly even things up, gender-wise, around the table of your local county council. But that does tend to elevate being a county councillor above being a plumber or an electrician.

We don’t seem to care about evening things up, gender-wise, around the S-bend or the fuse box. The real problem is the unchallenged return of the kind of good old fashioned casual sexism actor Natascha McElhone nailed in a speech she gave a fortnight ago at a London conference.

McElhone’s examples are varied. There’s the script she was reading with interest, up to the point where a character was described thus: “Sophie enters frame and walks towards us, she is surprisingly attractive for such a powerful woman.”

There’s what was said to her eight-year- old son after his father’s death: “Look after your mum, you’ve got to be the man of the house now.”

Applying that damn-fool concept to a pre-teen is bad enough, but this kind of casual sexism applies with bells on at the other end of the age continuum, particularly in media, whence women disappear unless they’re film stars or clinging on by their fingernails in some other area of showbiz.

The ones who survive in media are either described as “sprightly” (if they’re approved of) or “feisty” if they’re regarded as an argumentative pain in the arse.

Men of advanced years are just men. Sometimes, they’ll be described as “veterans”. Mostly, though, they’re simply men.

But for women, it’s a case of being sprightly. Or feisty. Or a gone old girl.