Tanya Gold

Tanya Gold (born 31 December 1973) is an English freelance journalist. In 2010, she won Feature Writer of the Year at the British Press Awards in 2009.

Quotes

2009–2019

• In his actions on child abuse and Aids, Joseph Ratzinger has colluded in the protection of paedophiles and the deaths of millions of Africans. As Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (Pope John Paul II's chief enforcer), it was Ratzinger's job to investigate the child abuse scandal that plagued the Catholic church for decades. And how did he do it? In May 2001 he wrote a confidential letter to Catholic bishops, ordering them not to notify the police – or anyone else – about the allegations, on pain of excommunication. He referred to a previous (confidential) Vatican document that ordered that investigations should be handled "in the most secretive way . . . restrained by a perpetual silence". Excommunication is a joke to me, perhaps to you, but to a Catholic it means exclusion and perhaps hellfire – for trying to protect a child. Well, God is love.
• And so to the church's own holocaust – in Africa. Condoms can protect Africans from Aids. But who can protect them from Ratzinger? The Catholic church has long pursued a no-condoms policy.
  • "Ignore the bells and the smells and the lovely Raphaels, the Pope's visit to Britain is nothing to celebrate", The Guardian (29 September 2009).
  • It had recently been announced Pope Benedict XVI (born Joseph Ratzinger) was to visit the United Kingdom in around a year's time; it wasn't clear in September 2009 if the pontiff was to make a pastoral or state visit. The State visit took place in September 2010.

• Celebrity involvement in politics is a wretched thing. It should be consigned to dust, especially post-Jimmy Savile – who spent many holidays at Chequers with Margaret Thatcher, during which he used to write "In case of national emergency, phone Jimmy Savile" on every notepad in the house, should you need a nightmarish image to chew on. Have our leaders not learned to hide from these terrible narcissists? Celebrity is trivial, and when it moves close to power, it trivialises that too. The gongs for light entertainment heroes, meanwhile, insult everybody: a gong for a laugh. Is leering on Strictly Come Dancing and clutching female contestants' arms really a public service meriting a knighthood?
  • "Celebrities trivialise politics – so why must politicians court them?", The Guardian (3 July 2014).
  • Strictly Come Dancing was co-hosted by Sir Bruce Forsyth from 2004 to 2014. He was knighted in 2011.

• [At Gold's third visit to Russell Brand's Trews Musings event] There is a deep vein of savagery inside Brand, something completely animalistic, but its twin is there too: something much softer, and terribly vulnerable. Watching these Brands fight it out is, in totality, his allure. His cult is based on the premise that individualism is destroying us. But he cannot shrug off his own ego. It is a very noisy dichotomy.
  At the end, he loiters. He has long, slow closed-eye hugs with men and women; the air is damp with lust masquerading as political intent. The Trews is not a political experience, not at all. Brand has founded a small religion, and it will not outlive him. He is an addict populating a space vacated by conventional politics; he is a symptom of the very ennui he hates. And he couldn’t swing an election.
  • "It’s all about the Brand", The Sunday Times (31 May 2015).
  • During the 2015 UK general election campaign, the Labour Party leader Ed Miliband was persuaded to appear on Brand's online TV show The Trews.

• Then Jackie Walker of Momentum said, "Anti-Semitism is no more special than any other form of racism." There was an ovation. I think it was the line they had been waiting for.
  What did I hear in that small sentence? Perhaps I am oversensitive. My mother is a historian of the Holocaust. She has traveled around Europe since the Eighties, teaching people how to teach the Holocaust in the countries where it took place. I can tell you, without recourse to any reference book, that there isn't a favorable mention of Jews in European literature until Gotthold Lessing's The Jews, in 1749. I can tell you that when Edward I expelled the Jews from En­gland in 1290, a ship captain, having taken their money for passage, dumped some on a sandbank, and left them to die. I did not hear a passing remark. I heard a deep rebuke from Walker that spoke of general, and eternal, Jewish immorality: that Jewish concern for Jewish safety and for the memory of Jewish dead is something tainted.
  • "Among Britain’s Anti-Semites: The Labour Party’s Moral Dilemma" Harper's (October 2018).

• Enter the contemptible George Galloway. After Liverpool won the Champions League on Saturday, the former Labour and Respect MP tweeted his congratulations to the winning team ... then traduced Tottenham Hotspur fans, many of whom are Jewish, by writing: "No #Israël flags on the Cup!" He meant: no sticky Jewish fingers on British football.
  • "How can Corbyn call Trump racist, while ignoring anti-Semitism?", The Telegraph (4 June 2019).
  • The ellipsis are in the original. A broadcaster as well as a politician, Galloway was sacked for his tweets. As his his former employer expressed it: "As a fair and balanced news provider, talkRADIO does not tolerate anti-Semitic views."

2021–2023

• Hollywood is greedy and prone to self-mythologising to conceal that simple greed: the very faults that [Citizen] Kane satirized. The town's treatment of Kane, the definitive account of American desire and corruption on film, is as ludicrous – and sensitive – now as then.
  Mank, David Fincher's fictionalised account of the creation of Kane, is up for 10 Academy Awards this weekend. If it equals, or even surpasses, its creation myth, it will be a bleak joke: one that both [Orson] Welles and [Herman J. Mankiewicz] would get or, if they had the chance, would have written themselves. (Welles died in 1985; Mank in 1953.) It is, consciously or not – and I would guess not - theft masquerading as tribute and that is the only profound truth it tells. This is a bad habit in Hollywood, and one to which it is increasingly addicted.
  • "The dull, dishonest Mank may win more Oscars than Citizen Kane – and that's a joke", The Telegraph (25 April 2021).
  • For the 14th Academy Awards, held on February 26, 1942, Citizen Kane was nominated for nine Oscars, only winning Best Original Screenplay. At the 93rd Academy Awards, Mank won two Oscars for Best Production Design and Best Cinematography.

• I met [Liz] Truss at university, long before she entered real politics, and she mirrors and watches, as if trying to learn a new language. That is why she is stilted and ethereal: that is why she cannot speak easily or from the heart.
• Truss did not fall: it is worse than that. Rather, and obediently, she shattered.
  • "Liz Truss’ empty ambition put her in power — and shattered her", Politico (21 October 2022)

• [T]he Corbynites, who live on fantasies and conspiracies, can convince themselves of anything except their complicity in their own failure.
  • "Wish a final farewell to Jeremy Corbyn, the god of tiny rooms" The Jewish Chronicle (4 April 2023).

• Still, on he goes, glibly, hearing nothing he does not want to hear, and seeing nothing he does not want to see: a god in tiny rooms.
  • "Wish a final farewell to Jeremy Corbyn, the god of tiny rooms" The Jewish Chronicle (4 April 2023).

• I am afraid now, though it is hard to write about fear because fear is formless and because it offends my pride. I have heard the silence of my non-Jewish friends with horror because they, apparently progressives, should know better. I can't write more, for maybe one day I may want to speak to them again.
• I read social media all week, and it is a maelstrom. One man says he laughed on a visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Another says the Final Solution wasn't final enough. Yet another says the world is run "mostly" for the benefit of Jews. I'm called a genocidaire, immune to non-Jewish suffering. I present my credentials – a Liberal Zionist, in favour of two states – which are dismissed, since, to some, all Zionists exist in a state of pre-murder. The most sympathetic people are religious Christians, which initially confuses me: I am contrite, and grateful to them. I am not grateful for "allies" who use Jews to pursue their vendetta against Muslims – and if you mention European anti-Semitism, they insult you and withdraw, for you have disappointed them.
  • "The strange discord of being British and Jewish", New Statesman (18 October 2023).
  • The 2023 Israel–Hamas war began on 7 October with attacks perpetuated by Hamas. According to historian and US antisemitism envoy Deborah Lipstadt, it was "the most lethal assault against Jews" since the Holocaust.

• I now know my generation of Jews is the luckiest in modern history. I never saw antisemitism in my youth. I know that others did. OK, a boy at my school shouted, "Jew" at me once, but I knew it was lust. Likewise, a boy at my college – a devout Christian – also shouted "Jew" at me once, but I think his DNA test would come up 25 per cent Ashkenazi Jewish at least, and we both knew it.
  • "I never saw antisemitism in my youth. Now retro Jew-hate is all the rage", The Jewish Chronicle (18 October 2023).

"The book Adrian Mole would have written (if he hated Israel)" (2023)

"The book Adrian Mole would have written (if he hated Israel)" The Jewish Chronicle (17 May 2023) From a review of Asa Winstanley's book Weaponising Antisemitism: How the Israel Lobby Brought Down Jeremy Corbyn.

• [In the book under review] When left-wing activists — Momentum, for instance? — organise, it is righteous, but when "Zionists" organise, it is sinister.

• His conclusion is darkly hilarious. Corbynism failed because he was not brave enough to defy the cabal: the people needed more antisemitism, and Corbyn denied them.

• It's a truism that every wretch in the village is a king on the day of the pogrom because he is not a Jew. And here is his book.
  • For the reference in the article's title, see Adrian Mole.

2024–present

• Holocaust Memorial Day is 24 hours of shame, but not in the way you think. It was designed to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust, and it falls on the day that Auschwitz-Birkenau was liberated by Soviet forces: January 27, in 1945. This is tragedy enough for the Jewish people, you might think, but HMD — I don't mind giving it an acronym, it deserves one — has changed. It is now an annual festival for the abuse of living Jewish people and the denial of our loss, and we brace ourselves for the memory of the past, and the cruelty of the present. This was the worst year yet.
  • "Antisemitic, nasty and hypocritical: this is the world on Holocaust Memorial Day in 2024", The Standard (20 January 2024).

• I've long thought that monarchy allows us to imagine our kingdom – our national story – as more interesting and singular than it is. Monarchy is attractive but necrotic: it looks backwards by nature. If there was an opportunity for dynamic monarchy – the Norman lawmakers, perhaps, or the Tudor propagandists – we haven't taken it. The instruments of monarchy are imperial, and in daylight they look increasingly odd and piteous. It's a truism of addiction – and many are addicted to monarchy – that the larger your fantasy life, the smaller your real one.
  • "The fragile crown", The New Statesman (3 April 2024)

• When I was young, being female was not something to enjoy, but to navigate carefully: there was always a terrible jeopardy in it. When I look back on the mild workplace assaults and the insinuations — so long ago I feel they were directed at a different woman — what strikes me most is how little they had to do with sex. I don't think men who harass women at work want sex: at least not principally. It is a function of inadequacy and the dominion that masks it: putting you on your knees, where you belong.
  • "What does it say about Britain that only Mr Bean had the measure of Mohamed Al Fayed?", The Standard (23 September 2024)