Rabbi Gabriel Kanter-Webber
Brighton and Hove Progressive Synagogue
Saturday 8 August 2026¹

• The Telegraph recently published a piece entitled: “I’m a white, working-class male with straight As. In Britain, I’m a second-class citizen.”²
• And then, to prove its strong working-class credentials, The Telegraph published another column: “Harrods sent [me] the wrong Le Creuset dish.”³ And they say nurses have it tough! Someone should set up a GoFundMe page for the poor soul.
• Leaving that particular tragedy to one side, the whole ‘modern Britain is inhospitable to white people’ shtick is just another piece of confected outrage in the same genre as, ‘Why isn’t there a Heterosexual Pride parade?’, ‘When is International Men’s Day?’⁴ and ‘People are deliberately catching ADHD just so they can skip the queues at Disneyland!’⁵
• We read some of that same cognitive dissonance in our Torah portion today. Verse 15 says: וְזָכַרְתָּ כִּי עֶבֶד הָיִיתָ בְּאֶרֶץ מִצְרַיִם, Remember that you were a slave in Egypt.⁶ Slavery was horrible. We must never forget how cruel our lives were in Pharaoh’s domain. Then, straight after verse 15, verses 16 and 17 tell us how we can go about acquiring a slave of our own, bind him to us permanently and irrevocably, and literally nail his ear to a doorframe.
• It gets worse, though. The Torah refers to the slave as living עִמָּךְ, with you.⁷ From this, the rabbis infer that slaves must be treated more-or-less like human beings. They need to be given decent bedding, adequate food and drink, and so on. In fact, the owner’s duties to their slave are so extensive that the Talmud indignantly declares: “כל הקונה עבד … כקונה אדון לעצמו, Someone who buys a slave, it is as if they have become a slave themselves.”⁸
• What fresh hell is this? You save up. You buy a slave. You nail his ear to the door. He’s your property. And then you have to feed him, and give him somewhere to sleep. It’s political correctness gone mad! Receiving the wrong Le Creuset dish from Harrods is one thing, but having give food to your slave?! Ugh.
• For some reason, any attempt to support and lift up those disadvantaged by decades and centuries of entrenched mistreatment, is inevitably met by a chorus of privileged voices crying foul.⁹ The Talmud says that being a slave-owner is so burdensome that it’s as bad as being a slave. The Telegraph says that being straight and white is worse than any of the systematic social discrimination inflicted on black people, LGBTQ+ people, disabled people – and let’s not even get started on asylum seekers.
• The story of Jason Arday illustrates this perfectly. Don’t get me wrong, Cambridge’s youngest black professor, appointed at the age of 38, is a bizarre fantasist who should not have been allowed to hold a position of trust. Not only did he plagiarise parts of his PhD thesis,¹⁰ he also fabricated claims that he once ran 30 marathons in a single month¹¹ and that he appeared in the ITV documentary series Seven Up! filmed 21 years before he was born.¹² Extraordinarily, Simon and Schuster are still planning to publish Arday’s autobiography,¹³ which will no doubt be a fascinating opportunity for us to learn more about how he invented the firework in 10th-century China.
• The lies are so ludicrous as to be comical, but the treatment of the man himself has been anything but. Arday is the victim of a horrific and utterly unacceptable racist witch-hunt. The whole drama began when his plagiarism was discovered by Nathan Cofnas,¹⁴ a white supremacist and disgraced academic who lost his Cambridge fellowship after suggesting that black people do not deserve any place in public life “outside of sports and entertainment”.¹⁵
• Cofnas is one of a number of so-called people who systematically pore over the work of black scholars with the intent of finding ammunition to have them dismissed.¹⁶ They can’t argue that their sole interest is the maintenance of high academic standards. There was none of this furore when a white Cambridge don was found to have committed plagiarism back in 2023: there are barely any references to the case online outside of a student newspaper.¹⁷ Jason Arday has been front-page news for days. He was in the wrong, but his wrong was only discovered because people were persecuting him over his race.
• Why is it that sad yet dangerous obsessives like Nathan Cofnas are so angered by the existence of black professors? As The Guardian‘s Jason Okundaye says: “Arday [has become] an avatar for the black colleague who was promoted over you, the black child who was made head boy over your son.”¹⁸
• Or, returning to Judaism, he’s become an avatar for the pesky slave who outrageously insists on their biblical right to be kept alive, while captive in your home, by eating your hard-earned food.
• We have to be better than this, as people and as Jews. We have to stop being irrationally jealous of the extremely limited support society offers to marginalised groups. We have to stop celebrating the downfall of the vulnerable, whether or not the downfall itself is justified.
• Rabbi Pamela Barmarsh argues¹⁹ that the rules requiring slave-owners to feed and house their slaves adequately were a somewhat ham-fisted attempt to disincentivise slave-owning altogether: by making it burdensome, people would be discouraged from doing it – see also the sugar tax.
• That may well be true in terms of the historical intent of our parashah. But that just goes to show that reasoning matters almost as much as substance. If a person chooses not to take a slave because they can’t be bothered with all of the paperwork, that is a bad person. A society in which slavery is judged to be morally unproblematic but just over-expensive and a bit of a palaver, is not a decent society. Rich people should eschew slavery because slavery is evil, not because slavery is inconvenient.
• Similarly, denouncing acts of plagiarism is not necessarily a noble thing to do. It depends why. If the denouncer is genuinely committed to the academic ideal of giving credit where credit is due, and genuinely opposed to dishonest and exploitative practices, good on them. But if they’re actually just trying to depose a black professor of whose career trajectory they are envious, that’s far from virtuous.
• Instead, as our parashah teaches, we should פָתֹחַ תִּפְתַּח אֶת־יָדְךָ: open, yes, open our hands.²⁰ Someone who approaches a life with an open hand is not only generous in material terms – giving sustenance to the needy – but they are morally generous too. Transparent. Straightforward.
• Let us go into the coming week with open hands. כן יהי רצון, may this be God’s will.

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Shavua tov!

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Notes

1. Deuteronomy 15:7-18 ↩︎
2. Anonymous, “I’m a white, working-class male with straight As; in Britain, I’m a second-class citizen“, The Telegraph (30 June 2026). ↩︎
3. Ruth Emery, “Harrods sent the wrong Le Creuset dish and then humiliated me when I asked for a refund“, The Telegraph (27 July 2026). ↩︎
4. Cf [5785] GKW Serm 18. ↩︎
5. Leaf Arbuthnot, “How Britain’s disability diagnosis epidemic reached Disneyland“, The Telegraph (31 May 2026). ↩︎
6. Deuteronomy 15:15 ↩︎
7. Deuteronomy 15:16 ↩︎
8. b.Kiddushin 20a. See more generally Gabriel Kanter-Webber and Mia Hasenson-Gross, “‘Thank God for not making me a slave’” in Dan Pratt (ed), Emerging Theologies and Responses to Modern Slavery (London: SCM Press, 2021), 210-230. ↩︎
9. Cf [5785] GKW Serm 15. ↩︎
10. Lanre Bakare, “Playbooks, plagiarism and a pig’s head: new claims surrounding a star Cambridge professor“, The Guardian (1 August 2026). ↩︎
11. Ibid. ↩︎
12. Adam Sherwin, “Everything you need to know about the Jason Arday allegations as he quits Cambridge“, The i Paper (6 August 2026). ↩︎
13. Ella Creamer and Lanre Bakare, “Jason Arday claimed he was paid ‘1.4 million’ by publisher for memoir“, The Guardian (6 August 2026). ↩︎
14. Jason Okundaye, “The takedown of Jason Arday has overjoyed the right, and must be a wake-up call for the left“, The Guardian (6 August 2026). ↩︎
15. Tommy Castellani, “Emmanuel College cuts ties with ‘race-realist’ fellow“, Varsity (19 April 2024). Cofnas did not actually use the words “black people”. He said “blacks”: cf “Writing about ethnicity“, GOV.UK (undated). ↩︎
16. Alice Speri, “‘We’re like sitting ducks’: the right’s ‘war on woke’ has a well-tested playbook to take down academics“, The Guardian (14 February 2025). ↩︎
17. Erik Olsson, “Plagiarising professor stays in post and threatens student journalists“, Varsity (29 September 2023). ↩︎
18. Okundaye, ibid. ↩︎
19. Pamela Barmarsh, “Introduction” in Pamela Barmarsh and W David Nelson (eds), Exodus in the Jewish Experience: echoes and reverberations (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2015), vii-xiv: xiii. ↩︎
20. Deuteronomy 15:8 ↩︎