Beyond Antisemitism

A range of new books and reports on antisemitism offer important insights but need to go further to escape the confines of orthodoxy

This article first appeared in Vashti. It was written in December 2024 and January 2025, but reflects issues and questions that I’ve been thinking about for some time. It’s worth stating here that I much admire the books and reports mentioned below, I just want them to go further and forge a new and more inclusive path.

Of the writing of books on antisemitism there is no end, as Kohelet might have said had he lived in the 2020s. And verily, there has been an enormous outpouring of words on the subject in the last decade or so. Many of those words have been journalistic, ephemeral and not very analytic. But in recent years, quite a few have made it into book and report form, making it easier to examine them for their positions, assumptions and approaches. 

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Marching Days

On London Palestine Marches, Synagogues and Cultural Christianity

Things I’m reading:

I’m slowly working through Amos Goldberg and Bashir Bashir’s remarkable 2018 collection The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History. It’s a very significant text and feels like required reading for anyone active in this area.

I found this academic article by Raz Segal very topical and helpful: Settler Antisemitism, Israeli Mass Violence, and the Crisis of Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

Connected to it, this piece from Shira Kline on the political divide amongst Holocaust studies scholars is also excellent.

A great piece on Palestinian anti-Nazi art from the 1940s.

I liked this piece from almost a year ago by Shane Burley – Why Antisemitism is an Insufficient (and Risky) Explanation for Hamas’s October 7 Attack on Israel.


As I finish writing this on 14/1/2025 it feels like a ceasefire/prisoner exchange deal is on the verge of being announced. I very much hope it is. Even if it happens, the war will not necessarily end, and I suspect that Palestine marches will continue.

I wanted to write something on the police restrictions placed on the planned National Palestine March on January 18th. In short, despite previously having agreed to it, the police have banned the PSC from beginning their march outside Portland Place, the BBC headquarters, which the PSC hoped to use to highlight criticisms of the BBCs coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza. Jewish and pro-Israel groups (and sadly the line between the two is increasingly non-existent) called for the march to be banned or the route changed due to the proximity of the starting point to Central Synagogue (the entrance to which is in Hallam Street), pressure which was amplified by politicians and the press. Last week the police caved on this and said they would use the Public Order Act to prevent the PSC using that starting point on that day, explicitly due to a supposed need to protect synagogue-attending Jews on Shabbat. In the last couple of days, the PSC has said they will reverse the route – starting at Whitehall and ending at the BBC. Despite the fact that this would avoid the arrival of the marchers clashing with the end of Shabbat services, and very few shul-goers would be around, the police have said that the restrictions around Portland Place will remain, showing a predictable lack of understanding of the times when most Jews are in shul.

Now obviously this is all nonsense. Right-wing politicians of all stripes have been attempting to ban the national Palestine marches from day one, no doubt embarrassed by the attention they brings to the UK’s military support and arms sales to Israel. They have thus jumped on ‘Jewish concerns’ as a useful pretext to demand police crackdowns on public protest. Naturally, Jewish communal groups have been all too happy to go along with this, with spokespeople, including the Chief Rabbi, frequently presenting them as ‘hate marches’. But to use the approach beloved of hasbaraists, if any other country were perpetrating a genocide, wouldn’t you expect to see large protests?

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It's Channukah So Haunt Me

A bit of Jewish light entertainment analysis for the festive season

As it’s nearly chrismukkah I thought it a lighter post might be appreciated. I also thought that it would be appropriate given the Victorian tradition of telling ghost stories at Xmas, out of which emerged Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (a text which I can’t help but see as indebted to Christian conversion narratives). This is a piece I wrote for the Parkes Institute at the University of Southampton, where I did my PhD, as part of a series on Jewish historical sources. I chose to focus on a piece of low culture, a television sitcom from the 1990s that I grew up watching. As you can probably tell, I like it very much and feel that it has been unjustly forgotten. No doubt that is in part because it is a very British Jewish show, making it an ideal subject for this newsletter which is dedicated to celebrating how Jewishness has been expressed in our strange little corner of the diaspora. I could write another PhD on So Haunt Me, and on its star, Miriam Karlin, but the below will do for now.

Wishing you a jolly nittel, a merry khanike and a very happy goyish new year.


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Seeing Things Clearly

How projecting past persecution onto Palestinians only perpetuates the war

Things I’ve been reading:

Rachel Shabi’s new book Off White: The Truth About Antisemitism is thoughtful, insightful and compassionate. I don’t wholly agree with all of the book, but I think it’s well worth engaging with. (Needless to say, there are many truths about antisemitism).

Lutz Fiedler’s Matzpen: A History of Israeli Dissidence is a terrific read. I can almost guarantee you will learn a lot.

Critical Theories of Anti-Semitism by Jonathan Judaken is also brilliant. It combines an introduction which reconceptualises the field, using Judeophobia as the umbrella term and anti-semitism (he makes a strong case for the hyphen) for the 1870-1945 period); chapters on each of Sartre, Arendt, Lyotard, Poliakov and more on their theories of Jews and anti-semitism; and a conclusion that considers forms of Judeophobia that have grown since 1945.

A must-read from +972 on the current situation in Northern Gaza.

I found this piece by Louis Fishman in Prospect really interesting, on the ongoing influence if Ottoman and Mandate structures in the contemporary Middle East.


I want to address an underlying issue that I think has led many Israelis and diaspora Jews to support the war. I think it is based on a fundamental misunderstanding or misdiagnosis of the conflict, one that is rooted in historical trauma.

A primary argument frequently made by supporters of the war is that Israel has no choice, that it is faced, in Hamas and Hizbullah, with genocidal enemies who plan to kill not just every Israeli but every Jew. We, they say, are compelled to destroy them before they destroy us. We have no choice. You can see why this argument is so popular; if there if is no choice then there is no debate. If your military enemy is the epitome of evil, who aims to destroy you entirely, then there can be absolutely no compromise with them and there is no argument. To support this position Hamas has been described as genocidal, and October 7th an attempt to simply kill as many Jews as possible. But this analysis misunderstands October 7th and the Palestinian struggle more generally. And this misunderstanding did not begin with October 7th – it is one that goes back decades and is probably constitutive of Israeli society.  The primary subject of the misunderstanding is Palestinian violence. Such violence may often be brutal, unethical and tactically unwise. But it is not genocidal. It does not aim to kill all Israelis, still less all Jews.

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A Time for Dancing

Simchat Torah was a creation of the diaspora; it shouldn’t be altered because of events in Israel

We are seeing many calls this year to do Simchat Torah differently. In the light of the October 7th attacks, which took place last year on Simchat Torah, there are suggestions that our joy should be tempered with sadness – that the traditional dancing of the festival should be replaced or changed to make it more suitable for mourning. I understand this sentiment. I remember seeing the news on my phone on the way to synagogue last year. At that point we didn’t know the extent of what had happened and so my community decided to carry on as normal which I felt was the right decision. At that point the attack hadn’t yet been framed as ‘October 7th’, this quasi-mythical event which has been repeatedly framed as the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust. So, this year, particularly in Israel, there have been many calls for changes in ritual such as more morning prayers and conducting some of the hakafot silently instead of joyfully.

For me what’s important is the kavannah, the intention of these changes. If the changes in ritual are in memory of all who have died in the past year in the war that began on October 7th, be they Israeli, Palestinian or Lebanese, then I don’t object. But if, as seems predominantly to be the case, they are designed purely to mourn the Israelis who were killed on the 7th of October or the hostages or soldiers who have died since then I don’t think it’s acceptable. Because it is not enough to mourn the Jews and Israelis that have died – we must also mourn the 10s of thousands of Palestinians and now Lebanese people killed in the war that’s now lasted just over a year. There’s something almost obscene about only mourning our dead and not mourning the deaths that ‘we’ have actually caused. This is of course is the story that many Jews don’t accept, the story that says we have not only lost people this year, but we have taken lives as well, some 42,000 of them, and probably many more. It is not just a case of a Palestinian massacre of Israelis it is also a case of an Israeli massacre of Palestinians, one which may well have reached the threshold of genocide. Surely we cannot mark one of these ritually, and not the other?

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What Would a Jewish Liberation Theology Look Like?

A recording of a live panel event from last month

This is a recording of a live event held on 18th September at Mosaic Jewish Community in Stanmore. It was a panel entitled What Would a Jewish Liberation Theology Look Like?, and comprised Rabbis Robyn Ashworth-Steen, Leah Jordan, Anthony Lazarus Magrill, Daniel Lichman and Judith Rosen-Berry, and was chaired by me, Joseph Finlay. This is an edited recording, containing all of the panel contributions but omitting most of the contributions from the floor, as they were sadly not well picked up by the recording.

It’s a rich and multi-faceted conversation, with subjects including the book of Exodus, the character of Moses, the influence of empires, both ancient and modern rabbinic attitudes to poverty, the difficulties of doing liberation theology within a halachic framework, the possibilities of a ‘haskalah chadasha’ (new Jewish enlightenment) and the opportunities and challenges of attempting to organise synagogues around ideas of liberation. It is not especially focussed on issues of Israel/Palestine, although I did bring that subject in towards the end. While the current conflict is omnipresent it seemed important to consider issues of Judaism and Liberation Theology in the broadest possible way. I hope it is of interest, and can lead to many more such conversations.

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Zakhor

Remembering All the Victims of the Last Year

Today, 7th October 2024, sees memorial events across the Jewish world, in memory of the roughly 1100 Israelis who were killed on October 7th 2023. In Jewish terms it is the end of Shnat Ha’evel, the year of mourning that follows the death of a close relative. It is right and good to mourn them, and to remember each of them in all their individuality and specificity, not only as a group united by the day of their deaths. They leave behind a huge gap amongst their families and friends. May their memories be for a blessing.

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Beyond Punching Up and Down

Overcoming Divisions in Anti-Racism

Things I’ve been reading this week:

This piece by David Feldman, the organiser of the conference in which the paper I share below was delivered, has written a very interesting essay on disconnections which have emerged between anti-racism and antisemitism since the 1960s.

I found this dialogue between Orla Guralnik (the therapist from the Netflix show Couples Therapy) and Christine, a former participant on the show, rich and fascinating. Guralnik grew up in Israel and Christine is Palestinian and they have a full and frank dialogue on all aspects of the conflict.

This long article on Ta-Nehisi Coates’ new engagement with Israel-Palestine after taking a trip there in the summer of 2023 is a must read.

This (again long) New Yorker profile of Jewish Currents magazine is a great read, and can usefully be paired with this New Left Review interview with Currents editor Arielle Angel (although both the New Yorker and the NLR bring their own agendas to the pieces in quite unhelpful ways)

I’m really enjoying this book, a new history of the Palestine Liberation Organisation Research Center in Beirut.


This was a paper I delivered on September 18th at the one day conference ‘Anti-racism and anti-antisemitism’ which took place at Birkbeck, organised by the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism.

There is a tendency today to do anti-racism in siloes. The bodies which deal with antisemitism have little to say about anti-racism more generally and bodies who work on anti-racism do scarce work on antisemitism. There is a distinct lack of organisations who do both simultaneously, and this results in an atmosphere of suspicion, competition and sometimes hostility between two worlds which, on the face of things, ought to be allies.

This separation has major ramifications at governmental level, particularly under recent Conservative administrations. Broader anti-racist campaigning, particularly when centred around anti-Black racism, or Afriphobia, is treated with little concealed hostility, depicted critically as ‘woke’ and presented as a threat to the memory of Britain’s glorious national and imperial past. Anti-antisemitism campaigning, on the other hand is welcomed, and the issue treated as a national priority. Jewish safety has become treated as integral to the well-being of the British state and used to justify restrictions on popular protest.

This bifurcation has led to politicians with a history of racism styling themselves as warriors against antisemitism. To give just one example, one of the stranger attendees at the 2018 Enough is Enough protest, against antisemitism in the Labour party, was Norman Tebbitt, the creator of the ‘Cricket Test’ – where he asked the descendants of South Asian or Caribbean migrants – ‘which side do you cheer for’?

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Crossing the Narrow Bridge

On Diaspora Jewish Fear, and Those Who Stoke it

Things I’ve been reading recently:

A great piece about campus wars since October 7th and what they show about our ides of ‘the campus’

A highly thought-provoking article on ‘The Jew as Reactionary in the US Media’ with many implication for the UK as well.

A piece from 2017 on growing up Jewish in Holland and constantly being compared to Anne Frank

A fascinating essay connecting the Yiddish and Palestinian writer Avrom Sutskever and Mahmoud Darwish (email signup required)

A brilliant ‘Declaration of Diaspora Jewish Independence’ from the Prague-based group Jewish Voice of Solidarity


Jews are afraid. We have been told this again and again over the last ten months, so presumably it must be true. We’ve been told it mostly by media sources, with articles replete with anonymous Jewish testimonies, or ones with names changed, a time-honoured technique for insinuating something without having to actually prove it.  We have also heard it from Jewish family and friends, usually influenced by this media coverage. On the whole, this is the source of the fear, rather than direct personal experience. But in addition, many people know someone whose niece’s friend saw something nasty. And everyone has seen a screenshot of something offensive. There’s a reasonable chance that you reading this have also felt afraid, unnerved at a comment or something you’ve seen online. And if you haven’t felt afraid, isn’t that in itself a cause for concern? Do you worry that you’re missing something? Or that there might be something suspect about your Jewish identity?

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Anatomy of a Merger

The Politics of Progressive Judaism, and what it could learn from the Quakers

Things I’ve been writing / reading

I recently published this review of Marc Dollinger’s Black Power, Jewish Politics: Reinventing the Alliance in the 1960s in the journal Racial and Ethnic Studies, including some wider discussion of the scholarly and political issues in question. (This is a limited gift link, if it has expired just email me for a copy)

This is a powerful and disturbing piece from Jewish Currents about ‘October 7th Tourism’ in Israel.

This piece argues that Israel has expanded the human shield argument to new degrees, tracing the history of the concept.

A rich account of a contemporary descendant of a German Jews returning to his family bookshop in Berlin

A provocative but often insightful piece on the antisemitism of the Israeli state

An extraordinary account of the 1989 Mizrachi-Palestinian peace conference in Toledo


This week I want to write about a topic that absolutely nobody is asking for. A subject so niche and so deeply British and Jewish, that it cries out to be covered on Torat Albion. That’s right, you’ve guessed it, it’s the merger of the UK Liberal and Reform movements and the creation of a new single body called Progressive Judaism. To the seven people who are really interested in this: strap right in, it’s going to be one hell of a ride. To everyone else, stay with me, the subject is deceptively interesting, and contains much ideology underneath its managerialist façade.

The merger was first announced in April 2023, in a top-down manner. Presumably the organisers wished to get the announcement out before consulting synagogues – to present it as a fait accompli. Two primary reasons have been given for the move. The first is technocratic: it will save costs. Why run two offices, with two backroom teams, when you can have one? Within a neoliberal hermeneutic, in which everything is reducible to expenditure and profit, this logic is difficult to refute. No doubt there is also a desire to bring in the three independent synagogues who are broadly aligned with progressive Judaism – West London, Westminster, and Belsize Square Synagogues. Bringing some or all of them into the fold would certainly increase funds and reduce costs.

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The New Sectarianism

The Muslim Vote campaign has been criticised for engaging in sectarian politics in the election, but in reality everyone is doing it

Thing I’ve been reading / listening to

This Jewish Currents podcast, on Arab Jewish / Mizrachi identity and politics is a must listen, and happily contains some British accents, being based on a retreat which took place in the UK.

I’m reading Once We Were Slaves: The Extraordinary Journey of a Multiracial Jewish Family. It’s a historical book, tracing a prominent American Jewish family with ancestors who were slaves in the Caribbean.

A good piece on the recent Tel Aviv peace conference by Haggai Matar

A thoughtful and thought provoking debate between Matan Kaminer and Andreas Malm on October 7th and the war on Gaza.

Brian Cheyette’s lecture Decolonising Testimony, connecting the testimonies of Frederick Douglass and Primo Levi


I didn’t write about the election during the campaign. There was nothing for me to say, because, blissfully, there was little discussion of Jews. The only exception was Keir Starmer saying that he tries to stop work at 6pm on Friday evenings to be with his family, clearly a reference to Shabbat dinner given that his wife is Jewish. Laughably, the Tories tried to paint this as an example of the Labour leader being lazy. Otherwise, nobody was talking about Jews, and this was a huge relief. In the 2019 election, and the year or two preceding it, it seemed like almost every programme or article felt the need to say something about Jews and antisemitism, with much of it being total nonsense. The experience of being constantly talked about, and feeling compelled to rebut it when it was wrong, was exhausting and unwelcome. This time round, no Jews was good news.

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All of Them

We are telling the wrong stories in relation to violence in Israel-Palestine. A historical overview can open up a new story; one in which we mourn all deaths together.

Combatants for Peace Ceremony 2024

Things I’ve read / watched recently:

A video of an excellent Zoom talk organised by the fairly new group – Progressive Jews for Justice in Israel/Palestine. It contains contributions from 4 young British Jewish leaders who critique the response of the community, and in particular Progressive Judaism, to the Gaza war.

A very enjoyable read: Isaac Asimov on Dominationist Ethnonationalism about a furious argument with Elie Wiesel.

This Jewish Currents podcast on secularism, featuring older Jewish secularists furious that the magazine has introduced a Parashat Hashavua (Torah portion of the week) has produced much debate and is well worth listening to. This one on conflicts over politics in synagogues is also great.

I recently read Leon Rosselson’s memoirs, Where are the Elephants? It’s a great read, and well worth engaging with for anyone on the British / Jewish left, especially if you’re interested in political songwriting.

Do get in touch if there are subjects you’d like me to write on in future


(10-15 minutes reading time)

There has been, in the last two months, two different stories, told by two groups of people. The Jewish/Israeli story is ‘October 7th’; a day repeated on loop in the Israeli media. In this narrative the Israeli victims of the day are the only ones remembered, in addition to soldiers who have died since then ‘because of October 7th’. This is then placed in the context of a longer story, of Jewish and Israeli deaths over the last 100 years. In contrast, the Palestinian/Palestinian Solidarity story is ‘the genocide’; an approach which sometimes treats the war in Gaza as if did not arise because of October 7th and was simply a continuation of Israeli attempts to ethnically cleanse Palestinians. This is placed in the wider context of Palestinian deaths and expulsion since the Nakba.  This narrative inevitably only mourns the dead in Gaza – understandable given how large the death toll there is – and does not consider Israeli victims of Hamas.1 What if we brought these narratives together, as part of a single story? What if we could mourn all of them, and treat them all as mutual victims of war, nationalism and empire?

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Learning from Edwin Montagu

What a British Jewish politician from 100 years ago can teach us about anti-Zionism and antisemitism

This is the 6th Torat Albion essay. It has a more historical bent to the others and relates to my academic research more closely. Thank you for subscribing or reading, and I hope you’re enjoying the journey. I’d love this to feel like a community of enquiry rather than just a top-down initiative, so please do post your thoughts as comments or send them to me by email. If I can, I’ll incorporate your thoughts into future pieces. At some point I hope to create a Torat Albion podcast, to discuss the issues in the week’s essay with some guests, thus furthering the dialogue. And do share the posts with others who you think might be interested.


Things to read (I don’t necessarily agree with everything in them):

A rich piece on the history of the Venetian ghetto in the LRB.

A provocative but enlightening piece on philosemitism and the White House by Em Cohen

A fascinating read from August 2023 on Israel’s bizarre futurist neo-liberal plans for rail lines across the middle east

A detailed overview of developments within the anti-antisemitism movement over the past 15 years from Adam Sutcliffe

A thought-provoking collection of essays from 2022 on Palestinians imagining futures beyond the model of the nation state (free book)


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By now, most people are aware that Jewish non, or anti-Zionism exists. The numbers of such people attending the regular Palestinian solidarity demonstrations has become too large to ignore. When it comes to the history of Jewish non/anti-Zionism, most people think of two distinct groups. Firstly, there’s Neturei Karta, a spin-off from the orthodox Agudat Yisrael movement which was founded in the late 1930s in Jerusalem. Their ubiquitousness at Palestine demos has made them wildly popular amongst non-Jews who wish to state that Judaism is not synonymous with Zionism (it’s not, but it’s complicated). The other group is more obviously historic, the Jewish Labour Bund, the revolutionary Jewish socialist organisation founded in Russia in 1897 who helped founded the Social Democratic Labour Party which would eventually lead the Russian Revolution, and who would later flourish in inter-war Polish. Again, most activists are drawn to the Bund for its fierce anti-Zionist rhetoric, although its anti-Zionism was very different to contemporary forms, founded on the lack of realism involved in the idea that millions of Jews from Eastern Europe would move to Palestine and be able to support themselves there. But there is a third group which receives far less attention, and even shorter shrift: the assimilationist anti-Zionists of Western Europe and the United States.

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The New Jacobs Affair

Censoring British Rabbis Who Don’t Toe the Line on Israel

Some articles I’ve been reading recently:

On Jewish Revenge: An overview of themes of revenge in postwar modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature

A piece on bizarre forms of philosemitism in contemporary Germany: How German Isn’t It: The Ceremonial Performance of Jewishness in Germany

A piece on a very influential Bialik poem: The 120-Year Old Zionist Poem Still Being Used to Smear the Diaspora and Justify Atrocity

A tremendous D’var Torah on the concept of Ahavat Yisrael (Love of the Jewish People_ by Rabbi Aryeh Bernstein

Excellent podcast episode from Jewish Currents on the implications and efficacy of competing terms: Anti-Zionism/Non-Zionism/Cultural Zionism/Diasporism

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Interior of the New North London Synagogue

In the early 1960s the British Jewish community was rocked by what would come to be called ‘The Jacobs affair’. It concerned Louis Jacobs, a brilliant Manchester-born Rabbi who had trained at the Ultra-Orthodox Gateshead yeshiva and was often seen as a future Chief Rabbi. Jacobs held a several prestigious posts, as Rabbi Manchester Central Synagogue, Munks in Golders Green and the New West End Synagogue in Bayswater. He became a tutor at Jews College, the British Orthodox Rabbinical training school, with the expectation that he would eventually become its principal. The trouble was that Jacobs was an independent thinker. While he loved the trapping of United Synagogue Orthodoxy, its top hats and rabbinical vestments, he also venerated academic scholarship, and particularly the academic study of religion. From his studies, Jacobs came to accept that ‘higher criticism’ of the Bible, or the ‘Documentary hypothesis’ was essentially correct; that the Hebrew Bible was written by a range of authors writing in different periods, and later collated and framed by a group of scribal editors. Jacobs argued that it was necessary for modern-thinking Jews to accept the truth of such arguments; he believed that Judaism could continue to be practiced, albeit with a new understanding, that revelation had come from human hands. Jacobs suggested that the phrase ‘Torah Min Hashamayim’ still stood, it just depended on how one understood the ‘min’ (from).

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End the War Already

If there was ever a credible case for Israel’s war on Gaza, the arguments have now evaporated

Anti-war protests in Israel January 2024

It’s time to stop the war. I admit I thought it was time to stop the war almost as soon as it began, but at that point I never thought it would still be raging, 6 months on. The time to end it is now.

I write here to those who have supported the war, if with caveats, and are to some degree continuing to do so. I’m assuming that the Israeli political and military leadership have some kind of rational arguments behind their actions. I appreciate that many believe that Israel is simply trying to kill as many Palestinians as possible, and the vast and terrible destruction we have seen in Gaza gives support to that view, but I think there is more going on than that. I still think that persuasion is important, even if forms of economic pressure are also needed, and that Jewish and Israeli supporters of the war are worth engaging with. If we want the war to end, and fast, we need to engage with them.

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Empty Chairs: History, Politics and Theology

Critical reflections on calls to set an extra place at Passover Seders for Israeli hostages held in Gaza

There has been a widespread call this Passover for Jewish families to take an extra action at their seders; to create an ‘empty seat’ for one of the Israeli hostages still held in Gaza. For several months now, synagogues have been doing this each week at Shabbat services, and now the campaign has been extended to Pesach, with the Board of Deputies urging ‘individuals and families to set an extra place at their seder table for one of the more than 100 men, women and children still held captive by Hamas.’

Made to be shared, this is a campaign built for the social media era, and the Board has asked people to ‘share pictures of their laid Seder Table with the seat set aside for a chosen hostage, along with the #SederSeatForAHostage hashtag.’

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Of This Place

Introducing Torat Albion – Creating a Torah of Britain

It’s customary to devote the first post of a newsletter to introducing yourself and discussing what the newsletter is going to be. I didn’t manage to do that, I simply dived in headfirst and started in on one of the meaty subjects I wanted to cover. But I think it’s still worth doing that introduction, so idiosyncratically enough I’ll do it here, as my second post.

Mostly I want to talk about the name – Torat Albion. Torat is from Torah – teaching, wisdom, the name for the Pentateuch (the Greek term for the first five books of the Hebrew bible, a term which nobody except Jews know, see also phylacteries), and more broadly it can describe the whole canon of Jewish textuality. Torah is not wholly fixed; in Judaism there are two Torot, a written and an oral Torah. In its most expansive meaning, Oral Torah includes all the debates Jews continue to have about the nature of Judaism; we are continuing to create Torah in our own time and places. I admit that describing your own writing as Torah is rather grandiose, perhaps we can also translate it more modestly: thoughts, ideas, suggestions.

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What Do We Do Now (Jewishly)?

Reflections on opposing the current conflict ‘as a Jew’

What should we do? The question looms large right now, in the wake of the carnage in Gaza. As ordinary westerners the answer is straightforward; we should march, hold vigils, lobby our politicians and do all we can to lobby for an immediate ceasefire, a negotiated hostage/prisoner exchange, a full Israeli military withdrawal from Gaza, and its inhabitants allowed to return to whatever remains of their homes. There will be much to do after that, but none of that can begin without these fundamental initial steps.

But there is a more specific question that some of us find ourselves wrestling with right now. What should those of us who are Jewish do right now? And particularly; what should we do as Jews? There are a couple of popular options. The first is that promoted by the major Jewish diaspora institutions: stand solidly behind Israel, mourn its losses, support its narrative. Such a position is based largely around remaining in a perpetual October 7th paradigm, almost in denial of the Israeli army’s action’s in Gaza, seeing global protests against those actions as motivated by antisemitism. It will be no surprise to anyone reading this that I do not see this option as remotely sustainable or ethical. The other option, less widespread but still quite common, is to explicitly protest Israel’s military action as Jews, largely by attending the Palestine Solidarity demonstrations as part of the Jewish bloc, perhaps with Jewish specific banners and t-shirts, and/or attending some of the specifically Jewish-led vigils organised by Na’amod. While I have attended some of these and have great sympathy with others that have on a more regular basis, I have some reservations. More specifically I don’t think this is the whole answer to our dilemma.

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The Rothschilds – Capitalism, Nationalism and Conspiracy Theories

 

Jews and musicals go together like fish and chips, tea and cake, bread and butter. The list of  Jewish musical theatre composers is pretty comprehensive: the Gershwins, Irving Berlin, Richard Rodgers, Frank Loesser, Kander and Ebb, Stephen Sondheim and Jason Robert Brown to name a few. Cole Porter, one of the handful of non-Jews amongst the writers of golden age musicals, realised that he would need a change of approach after some initial Broadway disappointments: from now on, he told his dinner companions, “I’ll write Jewish tunes”.

But Jewish writers preferred to remain behind the scenes rather than put Jewish characters on the stage. As Andrea Most demonstrates in her book Theatrical Liberalism, Jewish writers preferred to examine their identity issues through shows that dealt with notions of ‘performance’ in everyday life (particularly through ‘backstage musicals’), rather than write explicitly Jewish narratives and characters.

That all changed in the 1960s. Most famously, due to the blockbuster Fiddler on the Roof (1964), but also in more obscure examples such as Harold Rome’s South African comedy The Zulu and the Zayde (1965) and Jerry Herman’s Milk and Honey, set on a communal farm in Israel’s Negev desert (1961) . These were cultural products of what has become known as the white ethnic revival, the 1960s movement in which European immigrant groups who had previously been desperate to assimilate into a generic ‘whiteness’ began to rediscover, and emphasise their own particular identities. For American Jews, this movement led to the ‘do it yourself’ Judaism of the Chavurah (grassroots services) movement and the Jewish Catalogue (a popular A-Z of Jewish practices), a newfound interest in the Klezmer music that had been seen as passé in the post-war years, and a burgeoning sense of Jewish pride, which exploded after Israel’s rapid victory in the 1967 war.

The Rothschilds/Rothschild and sons, is a product of this era and this milieu. Opening in 1970, and written by the Bock and Harnick team who gained such success in adapting Sholem Aleichem’s stories of Tevye the Milkman into Fiddler on the Roof, the Rothschilds ran on Broadway for a respectable (but not outstanding) five hundred and five performances. While it took little effort to gain audience sympathy for the residents of Anatevka, constantly persecuted and ultimately expelled by the Czar, telling the story of how a major international banking dynasty gained its name is a little more challenging. The show gives us the back story — how Meyer Rothschild is trapped in the ghetto of Frankfurt, and works to order to liberate himself and his family.  As such it’s an explicitly political musical — and a pretty hard hitting one. This is all the more so in the recent revival, based on a 2015 off-Broadway production, which condenses the show into a single 2 hour act, and dismissing with such trivialities as Nathan Rothschild love affair with Hannah Cohen (who is described as an ‘English Jewish Joan of Arc’ — sounds like she deserves her own show) and keeps the family’s attempt to emancipate themselves centre stage. Mayer cannot only do so much on his own, therefore he hopes for sons (‘Sons extend a man’s vision / sons extend a man’s reach’), of which his wife Gutel gives birth to 5. In real life the couple also gave birth to five daughters — had the musical included them it might have been less of a kosher sausage fest. As it stands Gutel is the one female character, and she gets little to do beyond supporting and fretting over Mayer’s increasingly chutzpedik schemes.

The show is politically hard hitting in how it shows the Rothschilds overcoming their oppression. They do so not by classic musical theatre techniques of showing your enemies your humanity, or, better still, convincing them of it through a blistering song-and-dance routine. No, Meyer and his sons gain their freedom (and the freedom of all the Jews of Frankfurt) through the raw and unapologetic use of power. Initially Meyer builds up a business by befriending Prince William of Hesse, and in time, Rothschild and sons are appointed the Prince’s representatives as he lends money to the King of Denmark. When Hesse is overthrown by Napoleon, the Rothschilds decide try to collect the court’s debts, and the sons are sent to various countries to do this — the Rothschild  international banking business is born. (That fact that Napoleon was actually the great emancipator of European Jews is entirely glossed over). Years later, having built up the business extensively, Nathan Rothschild, living it up in London (portrayed as a safe haven, clearly a stand in for America) facilitates a loan to the British government to help them win their war with France, on the condition Prince Metternich, of the Austrian empire, liberates the Jewish ghettos. After the war, Metternich reneges on his pledge — at which point Meyer dies having failed in his dream of seeing freedom (‘This Moses wants to see the promised land / In my own lifetime’). The Rothschilds, at great financial risk to themselves, take the fight to the prince by undercutting his Peace bonds with bargain basement bonds of their own (keep up at the back). The Prince, facing financial ruin, gives into the Rothschilds’ demands — the liberation of all the ghettos and the sole right to issue state bonds in the future. The family is victorious and Western Europe’s Jews are liberated.

Politically, there’s a lot going on here. ‘The Rothschilds’ are high on the list of every conspiracy theory fantasist who wants to tell you WHO IS REALLY RUNNING THE WORLD. Though the idea is antisemitic nonsense, this show doesn’t do much to dent the conspiracy theory, there’s even a disturbing moment at the end where a conspiracy leaflet is produced and the sons laugh it off, seeing it as useful if it makes people fear them. The Rothschilds – and implicitly Jews – learn that the only way to overcome their oppression is through strength, because hatred will be a constant through history. I want to suggest that all of this is a dramatisation of Jewish nationalism — expressed in its purest form in the theories of Meir Kahane. Founder of the Jewish Defence League, Kahane was a Jewish terrorist and founder of the extreme racist organisation, Kach, that was banned by the Israeli government in 1988. For Kahane, what mattered most was Jewish survival in what he saw as an unremittingly hostile world. Kahane focussed not on Jewish piety or spirituality, but  on Jewish pride, to be found in unity and strength, and in ethnic continuity. As scholar Shaul Magid puts it: “Kahane’s worldview is gnostic; the world is an endless battle between the forces of good and the forces of evil. Evil needs to be eradicated; it can never be redeemed”. This entails a particular view of antisemitism, primordialist rather than constructivist. ‘They’ will always hate ‘us’—so there is no point appealing to their sense of morality, the only answer is to be strong so they cannot kill us. Every enemy is another Hitler – we have to kill them before they kill us.

This philosophy was relatively new when the Rothschilds opened in 1970. As such, the show would have seemed fresh and contemporary — and appealed to the new philosophy of Jewish national pride which was taking the diaspora by storm. But now, when the dualist view of them and us, the essentialisation of hatred and the validation of strength have become the central outlook of mainstream Jewish life, particularly in Israel, the Rothschilds feels more like propaganda for ethno-nationalism. As such, I think we should take its message with a significant pinch of salt. Antisemitism is not a single dark force surging through history – Prince Mitternich is not a predecessor of Hitler and the Palestinians are not the descendants of either. Sometimes we need strength but sometimes we need kindness, humility and justice. Meyer Rothschild plaintively sings: In my own lifetime / I want to see our efforts blessed / In my own lifetime / I want to see the walls come down and then I’ll rest. It’s a noble sentiment, but not one to be interpreted in a narrow fashion. Let’s dedicate all our efforts to bringing down the walls — all of them. For everyone.

Not Gonna Give Up My Centrism – The Politics of Hamilton

It’s a strange thing, nationalism. While most nationalisms have elements in common (take out the words and national anthems sound pretty much the same) watching propaganda for another country is rather disconcerting. You get all the sound and fury, speeches and parades, but, lacking any connection, you don’t really care about it. I’m sure that if I was American I’d find the stories of the war of independence, the actions of the founding fathers and the creation of the US constitution deeply meaningful and I would consider the importance of these stories to be self evident. Hamilton the musical proceeds on this basis. Its eponymous hero is important because he is a founding father with a low historical profile, best known for appearing on the ten dollar bill. This doesn’t seem enough — lots of people are written out of history. What did he stand for? Why do we need to remember him now? The opening number makes a lot of his humble background: ‘How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a / Scotsman, dropped in the middle of a forgotten / Spot in the Caribbean by Providence, impoverished, in squalor / Grow up to be a hero and a scholar?’. This classic musical theatre trope, that anyone can make it if they work hard enough can rise to the top is an American version of the Protestant work ethic, and the large body of evidence against it does nothing to dent its popularity. ‘If you keep your goal in sight / You can climb to any height / Everybody’s got the right to their dreams’ as Sondheim’s Assassins sing. As they prepare to kill the president.

But surely Hamilton wants to do something specific? Presumably this will be clarified in the obligatory ‘I want’ song, traditionally placed second in the running order? Not really. All we really learn here is that Alexander Hamilton is  ‘just like my country/I’m young, scrappy and hungry / And I’m not throwing away my shot’. Good to know. Of course, like the other founding fathers he believes in gaining freedom from the British monarchy. Who can disagree? I wish we Britons could do the same. If the whole show was about this (rather than just the first half) it would be a straight up anti-imperial yarn, but there wouldn’t be much of a specific role for Hamilton per se. His specific moment turns up in act two – Hamilton,  as the first Treasury Secretary, takes the decision to take on state’s debt and create a strong centralised financial system. So perhaps this show is not really about immigrants rising to the top and actually a celebration of capitalism? Should the I want number not have been — ‘I dream of creating a federal central bank so we can continue to borrow at favourable interest rates’? Gordon Brown would certainly approve.  When Jefferson calls for the US to aid post revolutionary France as it fights the British (‘now is the time to stand/Stand with our brothers / as they fight against tyranny’) Hamilton retorts: ‘If we try to fight in every revolution in the world / We never stop. Where do we draw the line?’ Are we really supposed to be on Hamilton’s side here? Jefferson’s vision of helping revolutionaries around the world seems a lot more inspiring than prudent financial management.

Of course the show isn’t really about the eighteenth-century. Hamilton premiered in 2015 and is steeped in the politics of the Obama administration. Like Obama, Hamilton is fundamentally liberal — focussing on individual advancement whilst being relaxed about structural inequality. The show’s most celebrated move is to have the founding fathers portrayed by actors of colour, and the use of hip-hop is integral to that. (Strangely this approach doesn’t extend to casting across gender — the female performers are all limited to falling in love with Hamilton, rather than getting to fight the British or set up a new government). The racial inversion is fundamentally a liberal approach, rather than a radical one. It’s designed to make everyone feel good about the (white) national story by reading people of colour into it without changing it’s fundamentals. Much like Obama’s presidency. Actors of colour in Hamilton never play actual characters of colour, because most of them would have been slaves, and Hamilton totally avoids the issue of slavery. Why sadden the tone? It’s not as if the subjugation of millions of people is a major part of the American story. Earlier drafts of the show included a third rap battle between Hamilton and Jefferson, in which the latter defends slavery as ‘the price we paid / for the southern states to participate / in our little escapade’. Hamilton condemns slavery but Madison forces him to concede that ‘if we support emancipation / every single slave owner will demand compensation’. Miranda ended up cutting the number saying:

While, yeah, Hamilton was anti-slavery and never owned slaves, between choosing his financial plan and going all in on opposition to slavery, he chose his financial plan. So it was tough to justify keeping that rap battle in the show, because none of them did enough.

Miranda’s honesty is admirable but it leaves a moral vacuum at the heart of the musical. If no-one of the protagonists did enough to end slavery, then maybe put that in the show, portray them as flawed politicians rather than heroes. Or tell the story from someone else’s perspective — an abolitionist campaigner and/or a slave. But then, would that have brought in white liberal audiences in such huge numbers?

But who am I, living in Britain, to criticise the glorious American independence narrative? A British equivalent is hard to imagine, as British monarchs don’t really strive for anything, they just, er, inherit it. We’d have to go back to the days of the Wars of the Roses in the fifteenth century and the I want song would become ‘I want to show everyone that my lineage gives me a better claim to the crown than that ludicrous pretender in Lancaster’ . We can’t do anti-imperial tales because, embarrassingly, we were the empire. Cecil Rhodes maxim of ‘the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race’ is unlikely to lead to a West End hit.   Perhaps we could instead produce Owain! — a celebration of Owain Glynwyr’s Welsh revolt against the evil English.

Hamilton’s ongoing success is partly down to (mis)fortune; the election of Trump in November has cast the Obama administration, and anything associated with it, in a Kennedy-esque glow. For your ticket price you not only get a great show but also 3 hours of pretending the 2016 election result never happened. It’s a lot like the Clinton campaign — say lots of nice things about fairness and responsible government without dealing with the underlying structures of discrimination and inequality. Which is perhaps why Hamilton is so beloved by Blairites and other centrists that are baffled by why their oh so sensible politics aren’t popular like they used to be. The words of the closing song ‘He took our country from bankruptcy to prosperity / I hate to admit it, but he doesn’t get enough credit for all the credit he gave us’ are the elegiac cry of every third-wayer — why aren’t they more grateful? Hamilton could do with being a bit less Blairite and a little more like the socialist from Vermont. With a few Lin Manuel Miranda songs behind him, Bernie definitely would have won.

Putting Ourselves First In This Election

First Published in the Huffington Post

This election isn’t about the things it’s supposed to be about. It’s not about leaders, parties, candidates, rallies. It’s not about wall to wall news coverage, interviews, speeches and gaffes. It’s not about them. It’s about us. Specifically what we, the electorate, think of ourselves. Do we have self-respect? Do we care for ourselves? Or do we have such low self esteem that we’re willing to accept the worst? Are we, as a society, so depressed that we think things can’t be any better than they are now?

The current government has contempt for the British people. Firstly, it called an unnecessary election simply because it thought it could win a bigger majority. Secondly, the Prime Minister has refused to engage in televised debates. She considers them unnecessary – she is ahead so why take the risk? Thirdly, the Conservatives are determined to announce as few policies as possible. Trust us, they say. Only we can deliver strong and stable leadership. We will make the right choices, no need to worry yourselves with difficult questions about policy.

If the polls are correct we are fine with all this. We are fine with being taken for granted, of being laughed at. If the Conservatives can behave like this and be elected with a enlarged majority why would they be anything other than contemptuous of the British people

Continue reading

The Tories Could Lose This Election – Here’s How

First Published in the Huffington Post

The 2017 election is already being described as a fait accompli. An enhanced Conservative majority is widely seen as inevitable. It’s not. It’s true that a Labour majority is almost impossible; it’s been incredibly unlikely ever since the SNP’s dominance over Scotland became cemented, and Labour’s weak polling position only confirms that improbability. But that doesn’t mean a Tory majority is inevitable: a hung parliament, out of which a non-Conservative government might arise, is a definite possibility. It would require all or most of the following factors to occur: Continue reading

A Progressive Alliance Is The Only Way To Defeat The Conservatives

First Published in the Huffington Post

A progressive alliance is gradually creeping onto the agenda. Some kind of electoral pact between progressive parties (generally understand as Labour, Greens, Plaid Cymru, the SNP and the Lib Dems) has been proposed by the new leadership of the Green party, important figures in Labour and by a range of think tanks and media commentators. It’s not hard to fathom why; without some kind of pact the Conservatives seem a dead cert to win the next general election. Even if Labour’s current infighting ends, and its polling position recovers somewhat, the boundary changes that the Tories have pushed through make it far easier for them to win, as safe Labour seats are abolished in far greater number than safe Conservative ones. Labour tribalists dream of another 1997 style comeback in which it wins back hundreds of seats, but the idea of any party again receiving more than 40% of the vote seems implausible in our current era of multi-party politics. Continue reading

Time To Put Labour NEC Reform On The Agenda

First Published in the Huffington Post

In 2014 Labour had a democratic overhaul. Out went the electoral college – an awkward child of the early 1980s – and in came a genuine one member one vote system, in which the votes of ordinary members, MPs and trade union members all counted equally. But other Labour institutions have not kept pace and many remain unwieldy, murky and insufficiently democratic.

Most important of these is the NEC, Labour’s ruling body. Its makeup has echoes of the old electoral college, giving allocated representation to members, trade unionists and elected representatives (MPs, MEPs and councillors). But the proportions are unbalanced – Labour members directly elect only 6 out the 33 seats. This is not fit for purpose in a 21st century organisation that claims to be democratic. Members expect their votes to make a difference, but the recent NEC elections in which the Momentum/CLGA slate was totally victorious will make little difference to the overall balance of the NEC. Although the left/pro-Corbyn side gains 2 seats, this is partially offset by the fact that in the MPs section, Dennis Skinner is stepping down and will be replaced by the anti-Corbyn George Howarth. The ‘new NEC’ will look very similar to the old one. Continue reading