Mostly blokes, mostly old, the Podcast Rabbi has become one of the most important public figures of the current age
Eighty years ago this month, something that tried to stop me being born was unveiled to the world. When the Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camps were liberated on January 27 1945, three months before Hitler shot himself dead, it was clear that such an event could never happen again. Three years later, the State of Israel was founded, and Jewish people have been safe ever since.
And then I woke up.
What I do think is worth pointing out is the rise of the secular rabbi, by which I mean an old sage, usually a white bloke, who has a pulpit in the form of a podcast. Consider this: When It Hits The Fan, a podcast about public relations hosted by David Yelland and Simon Lewis; The Rest is Politics, hosted by Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart, respectively a Prime Minister’s press secretary and a former tutor to the current king’s spare; and Media Confidential, hosted by Alan Rusbridger and Lionel Barber, who like Yelland edited national newspapers, although in their cases for 20 and 15 years respectively (Rusbridger at the Guardian, Barber at the Financial Times), rather than the five Yelland helmed the Sun for between 1998 and 2003.
Plus The Rest Is Football, where Gary Lineker gets to call the England men’s team derogatory names because he scored 48 goals for them a very long time ago and Alan Shearer, who has 30 England goals and was once the world’s most expensive footballer, also gets to use words he cannot use even after the watershed on Match of the Day. You will notice I missed out Micah Richards, who is more a yeshiva student than a rabbi.
And let’s bung in Tom & Dom: Tom Holland and Dom Sandbrook of The Rest Is History. They’re here because they explain the past to many millions of people a week. That’s a total of ten white blokes over the age of 13, or what is known in Judaism as a minyan, a quorum that must be assembled in order to pray. Women, in many Jewish denominations, do not count, and if you look at the podcast chart of 2024 you will see hardly a woman in the top 20 most popular ones.
All hail Emily Maitlis of The News Agents, Marina Hyde of The Rest Is Entertainment, celebrity wives (to be blunt in the extreme) Abbey Clancy and Rosie Ramsey, and the token woman on the No Such Thing As A Fish team Anna Ptaszynski, who all featured in the 20 most listened-to podcasts in April-June 2024, according to Edison.
But it’s the rabbis I am more interested in, with apologies to the women who respectively broke Prince Andrew (Emily) and who has been satirising the world from her Guardian pulpit (Marina, who – fun fact – is a very posh lady whose dad is a baron and whose grandfather worked on the jet engine in the 1930s). The brother of the latter’s Rest Is Entertainment colleague Richard Osman plays bass for the band Suede, who are Britpop aristocrats.
Between them, these ten rabbis have worked alongside Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown or (satire) been in the actual employ of Rupert Murdoch. Two of the shows are hosted by the BBC, while The Rest Is Politics pair did so well that they could sell out the Royal Albert Hall, just so that Alastair Campbell could moan about Boris Johnson and finish the night with the bagpipes.
Of the five shows, I religiously listen to Media Confidential and Fanhitters, as the hosts of the latter call it; Yelland and Lewis often appear on other BBC podcasts such as the imaginatively monikered Today Podcast, which has an actual person of Indian descent, Amol Rajan, and a former BBC political editor, Nick Robinson. Now we’ve got 12 rabbis, which is a nice number; as my old English teacher David Brown used to say, 12 is the perfect number, divisible as it is by one, two, three, four, six and – oh yes! – 12 (salut M. Brown, who moved to France, if you’re reading this).
And so these rabbis transmit thoughts into microphones, which are edited for clarity and slander, and then separated to allow for ad breaks with products and services microtargeted to different listeners, or not in the case of Fanhitters thanks to the unique way the BBC is funded. Media Confidential is a podcast that promotes Prospect magazine, which Rusbridger edits (fun fact: his daughter is the crime writer Bella Mackie, who is married to Greg James, who as of this autumn will be the highest-paid BBC presenter).
Goalhanger make squillions off of their Rest Is stable, which includes more rabbis: Gordon Corera, formerly the BBC’s security reporter; William Dalrymple, a quite brilliant writer on the British Empire and the East India Company; comedian Al Murray, who has shed his Pub Landlord skin to become a renowned history writer himself; and Robert Peston, whose dad was in the House of Lords and who co-presents The Rest Is Money with Steph McGovern, who comes from the North-East where this is an actual Jewish seat of learning, the Gateshead Yeshiva. (To my knowledge, Robinson and Peston are the only fully or partly Jewish members of my Beth Din of Pod Rabbis.)
Incredibly, I have just learned that Simon Lewis is the brother of Will Lewis, who has been spoken of in great detail by Rusbridger and Barber in his current role as EiC of The Washington Post, where democracy is (allegedly) dying in darkness. No wonder I have heard nothing on Fanhitters about a quite enormous fan-hitting moment in Lewis’ own family! Hey, what’s a rabbinical court without a bit of broigus (no time to explain, look it up).
The Rest Is Politics can yammer on about the Conservative Party, but of their ultimate boss Mr Lineker I suppose they can say little. When the Match of the Day host was suspended for noting the suspiciously authoritarian language of the then home secretary (whose husband, fun fact, is Jewish), Campbell did the TV media round firing shots at ‘the creeping right-wing authoritarianism’ that forced the BBC’s hand.
The man who was forced out of his own job by the BBC 20 years ago (again, no time to explain, look it up) was thus able to launch into his pet peeve of getting one in, studs up and off the ground, on Auntie Beeb. Lineker, naturally, bided his time and chose to hand in his notice publicly, so that the 2024/25 season of Match of the Day will be his last, although he will be the lead presenter at the 2026 FIFA World Cup.
If you are your own boss, you answer to yourself. But to return to the opening image of the liberation of the concentration camps: every rabbi of the last century knows how great his status is as a community and religious leader. Jewish folk don’t have to agree with every word of the Torah – in fact, debate is encouraged! – but the basic premise is that wisdom, knowledge and habits are a fine way to live a life.
It does seem as though these 12 rabbis are disseminating a message to the listener: we know what we’re talking about, so pull up a chair and listen.