27 July 2025 - 8:00am
Last year at the Edinburgh Fringe, I saw precisely two shows — which, for a Festival Grinch like me, was more than usual. By coincidence, both of them happened to be by Jewish performers. The first was Messianic Moments And Cosmic Conversations, performed by the award-winning Barbara Heller. She and I hit it off after her insightful one-woman performance exploring the human cost of cancel culture, and she invited me along to see her friend Rachel Creeger’s comedy show Ultimate Jewish Mother that weekend. The title struck me as a brave one, as Heller had informed me she had been advised not to openly advertise her show as in any way Jewish-themed.
Creeger’s 2025 show, which was to be hosted at the same venue as last year with extra security, has now been cancelled altogether due to alleged “safety” concerns from staff at the pub. Comedian Philip Simon was also due to perform at the venue, hosting Jew-O-Rama, a show platforming Jewish comedic talents. Neither act is currently listed on the Fringe’s website anymore.
While it shouldn’t matter either way, Creeger’s show last year was far from overtly political, and was instead a send-up of stereotypes around Jewish motherhood and identity. When a venue is afraid to book a woman cracking jokes about the perfect chicken soup recipe, it’s hard not to see this as an indictment of a broader antisemitic climate.
Scottish First Minister John Swinney has given the problem some typically vague lip service, issuing a statement on “community cohesion” last September in which he condemned antisemitism along with Islamophobia and other forms of prejudice. Last May, he made a point of meeting the Scottish Council of Jewish Communities on the matter. But these gestures — not to mention the silence since — hardly amount to emphatic solidarity and a zero-tolerance approach.
In response to the Fringe cancellations, comedian and Triggernometry co-host Francis Foster wrote on X: “The snivelling narcissists who infest the comedy industry bang on about racism every six minutes. Apart from when there is genuine racism. Then they shut their traps like the cowards they are.” The point could also apply to the Scottish National Party. After all, it is ironic that a government responsible for drafting some of the most draconian hate speech legalisation in recent years seems to be twiddling its thumbs when it comes to antisemitism.
Anti-Jewish discrimination, as a social issue to be tackled, is less dominant in the Scottish psyche than south of the border. This could be partly due to the extremely small Jewish population in Scotland — just 0.1% according to the most recent census, compared to 0.5% of England and Wales. Put simply, antisemitism is just further down the list of priorities.
But the SNP has also leaned decisively in favour of Palestine and against Zionism since the 2014 Gaza conflict, long before Nicola Sturgeon’s full embrace of radical progressivism in alliance with the Scottish Greens. There is a strand of Scottish nationalism that sees Scotland’s oppressed “plight” under Westminster mirrored in conflicts across the globe. While this way of thinking is confined to particularly extremist nationalists, it goes a long way in explaining why oversimplified racial identity politics imported from the USA — that categorise Israelis and the Jewish population as a subset of “white”, and ergo “oppressor” — were embraced so unthinkingly along with the rest of the omnicause by Sturgeon and her successors.
Two cancelled Jewish comedians may sound insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but this sets a terrible precedent for both the Fringe Festival and the wider arts culture in Scotland. A bare-minimum gesture from Swinney would be to emphatically condemn the intimidation of Jewish performers — just as he would for any other, more fashionable group.
