Life has a habit of surprising us, and if you’d asked me a few days ago what the hot topic for this week would be, I would have given you long odds against goblins.
But a combination of US comedian Jon Stewart and the desperation of some people to find any stick with which to beat JK Rowling means I have spent the past couple of days debating the origins and meaning of the goblins in Harry Potter.
To recap: last month Jon Stewart recorded a podcast, in which he made a throwaway remark about what he said were antisemitic stereotypes in Harry Potter. He singled a scene in one of the films where Harry Potter walks into a bank as stereotyping Jews:
Stewart also implied the story deliberately stereotyped Jews, saying:
I am not going to get into a discussion about the iconography of goblins, save to say that sometimes a goblin is just…a goblin. Besides, whatever visual impression Mr Stewart may have had from the film, JK Rowling neither directed nor designed it; and there is nothing in any of the books that is even glancingly antisemitic.
The reality is that none of this is actually about goblins or even about Harry Potter. It’s about feminism and the ideological obsession of those who consider sex to be a construct rather than a biological fact.
In truth, the only interesting part of this mini-saga is what it tells us about those jumping on the bandwagon. First, some context: during the years of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of Labour, the British Jewish community felt under threat in a way that it hadn’t for generations. On every metric, antisemitism was rising faster than ever recorded — in official police statistics, in Community Security Trust recorded incidents and anecdotally.
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