The Guardian has a go at the Labour Party on Holocaust Memorial Day

Here is a paragraph from today's Guardian editorial for Holocaust Memorial Day:

"In Hungary, the prime minister, Viktor Orbán, has pursued a prolonged dog-whistle campaign against the Jewish philanthropist George Soros, whose arguments in favour of accepting Muslim migrants from the Middle East have been presented as “endangering the Christian culture of Europe”. Meanwhile, in the UK, the Labour party’s failure to effectively combat the use of antisemitic tropes by some members led to a breakdown in its relations with the Jewish community."


This leaves out:
1. The person who has repeated the Soros trope in Britain is Rees-Mogg. Not only 'repeated'! He directed his comments to two Jewish MPs, Oliver Letwin and John Berkow. 

2. Tim Montgomerie, Johnson's aide at the time, said that the UK should have a closer relationship with Orban who not only plays the antisemitic card but also has racialised IVF treatment in what must be one of the first official government pronouncements in Europe of racialised eugenics since the Nazis. 

3. Dominic Cummings (Johnson's adviser) has twice picked out Goldman Sachs as a special example of what's wrong with the EU and its financial arrangements identifying the bank having 'fingers in every pie'. By selecting a bank that was founded by Jewish financiers, I suggest that this is deliberate dog-whistling in order to racialise Cummings' real or phoney objections to international finance. We should remember that whatever arguments that we have with international financiers it's not the ethnicity or religion of the financiers that is the problem. 

4. And if we're talking about the failure of dealing with 'antisemitic tropes', Johnson himself has never had to answer for the fact that he platformed and edited 'Taki' a self-identifying antisemite when he, Johnson, was editor of the Spectator.

5. The Guardian has conceded here that the long and the short of the Labour antisemitism crisis is the use of antisemitic tropes. Is that it? Well, if that's the case, how does that distinguish the Labour Party from the rest of society? UK society and culture and politics is full of antisemitic tropes. My thought has always been: if we are combatting antisemitism but only combat it in the Labour Party, we are not combatting antisemitism, we are combatting the Labour Party. And that's precisely what the Guardian has done on Holocaust Memorial Day.

Holocaust Memorial Day song for children

Each year Holocaust Memorial Day has a theme. This year it’s ‘Stand together’. I work closely with schools in Cambridge doing poetry, song, drama and documentary, doing a variety of story-telling, poetry performance, getting the children writing and performing too. This is all under the auspices of Professor Helen Weinstein and ‘HistoryWorks’. This year they asked me to write lyrics for three songs, one for Primary, one for Secondary and one for the Community.

Here are the lyrics for the primary song. Hundreds of children will sing this in the Cambridge Corn Exchange on January 26:


A child wanders through the ruins

A family fears a knock at the door

A grandma looks for her old home

They know they didn’t start this war



We are better

when we stand together

When we stand together

We are better



The child is ours, we must make it safe

The family’s ours, we must hear their call

The grandma’s ours, we must find a home

We know we have to stand with all



We are better

When we stand together

when we stand together

we are better






The music is here:

https://audioboom.com/posts/7470401-we-are-better-when-we-stand-together-singing-guide-by-bethany-kirby-composer-for-historyworks?playlist_direction=reversed

Oh dear, I shouldn't have been at the vigil

Over the last 60 years I've been on hundreds of demonstrations in support of people or in solidarity with them and then last week along came an issue where I was actually demonstrating on behalf of myself: the antisemitic daubing in Hampstead - about two miles from where I live.

I now find that instead of being told that this or that issue (as with the last 60 years worth of demos) was not really my issue and that it was e.g. a matter for the government to decide which country to invade or it was a matter for the police to decide which group of fascists could walk down which street, this time I find that there are people saying that I wasn't entitled to be at this demonstration because it wasn't really to do with me. This seems to be because the graffiti (apparently) wasn't attacking me, it was attacking them.

I had no idea that antisemites were so careful and nuanced in their choice of Jew.

I'm in another mainstream Jewish tradition

Sigmund Freud was Jewish but he didn't affiliate to a synagogue and, as far as I know, wasn't in any way 'observant' in terms of Jewish customs and worship.

In the present climate of labelling Jews as 'mainstream' or 'not mainstream', if Freud was alive today he would be 'not mainstream', 'not in the community', 'not part of the Jewish community'. This way, whatever he had to say about e.g. fascism and Nazism (which he wrote about by the way), could be dismissed as 'not representative' and if (in this little fantasy I'm running by you) he signed letters to the paper in support of a candidate for election or if he didn't go along with 'mainstream' opinion then he would be vilified as e.g. a 'used Jew' or even a 'kapo'.

We might imagine Freud would say that he never sought to 'represent' anyone and that he is 'his own man'. More than that, that he feels he has inherited and studied traditions of thought from many cultures including those expressed by people of Jewish belief and/or origin. Or more than that, perhaps, that he expresses a kind of culture or sensibility that developed in Europe over hundreds of years as part of the encounter between Jews, Christians, Muslims and people of no religious belief but in his case, it's 'flavoured' or is intertwined with specifics to do with the Jewish beliefs, customs, habits, communal life of his predecessors and people around him in Vienna and later Hampstead, London.

And more than that (!): now that Mr Freud's own ideas have had a huge impact on how people all over the world think about consciousness and what it is to be human, then talking about Freud as either 'mainstream' or 'not mainstream', or 'representative' /'not representative' misses the point. No statistic represents his impact. No attempt to minimise him by excluding him from the 'mainstream' deals with the fact that his ideas have spread.

Now, if you multiply Freud by all the other secular Jewish thinkers, and add in anyone and everyone who has led their life in some respect or another in acknowledgment of their Jewish background without being religious, we have a picture of something much bigger and much more significant than an entity that can be dismissed as 'not mainstream'.

And, importantly, its claim - if ever one were to be made - is not to counter it by saying, 'o yes we are part of your mainstream'. Its claim is simply that it exists, that it is diverse, multi-voiced, does not have to be corralled into specific categories or given labels that reduce it to this or that minority.

What is absurd is that the media (in the fullest sense of the word ie the whole Fourth estate' or 'republic of letters') has plenty of such people working in it and yet the media as a whole has repeatedly trotted out the fib that there is just 'the Jewish community'. It's as if Freud (and Marx and Kafka and Walter Benjamin (you add thousands more!) had never existed and that there is nothing for those of us alive now to read, be inspired by or to draw on in our lives, politics and action from this huge tradition!

We need another word: a word to counter this reductive matter of 'mainstream' or 'not mainstream'. The word 'secular' doesn't do it. For the moment I can only think of whole sentences along the lines of 'inheriting some of the many diverse traditions of secular Jewish thought - and that there are millions of people, Jewish and not-Jewish who are part of this.' (Not much of a sound-bite, though!)

Every time someone uses phrases like 'inferiority complex', 'Kafka-esque', 'class war', and thousands more, they come from the minds of people who were born into some kind of Jewish tradition and have been taken up by millions of people since then.

I, for one, am delighted and proud to be part of this, both as someone who was also born into one aspect of Jewish tradition but also as someone who lives and works in a world which shares these ideas (along with the ideas of course of many other cultures and traditions).

Perhaps - thinking aloud here - I (we?) should reclaim the 'mainstream' word and say, 'I'm part of the "mainstream secular Jewish tradition", thank you very much.'

I'm not in your mainstream perhaps (seeing as you keep telling the world I'm not!) , but I am in another mainstream Jewish tradition...

The history of the UK in the 21st century in one statistic

Stat put up on Twitter by Matt Thomas:

Between 2010 and 2018, aggregate wealth in the UK grew by £5.68 trillion:

6% went to the poorest 50% of households.
94% went to the richest 50% of households.

Source: ONS Total Wealth Dataset

There is an argument for saying that the history of the 21st century in the UK so far is written in this stat.