Michael Rosen: He’s Jewish and he’s voting for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party.
Once again there is a huge amount of activity in the right-wing media, with more attempts to claim that Jeremy Corbyn has done too little to end anti-Semitism in the Labour Party.
Former Children’s Laureate Michael Rosen is a Jew, and will be voting for Labour in the general election.
In a Facebook post that I include in full below, he explains his reasons for ignoring the – increasingly desperate, in my opinion – protestations of the witch-hunters.
For me, the standout point is this [boldings mine]:
“The minimum requirements for a claim that there is a ‘problem’ in a given area (e.g. antisemitism in the Labour Party) is that it is distinctly and measurably worse than in other places or in society as a whole. If that hasn’t been shown , (and it hasn’t been) it’s not a Labour Party problem it’s a societal problem.”
Indeed. With that, I would like to couple a comment from a person on Twitter who was incensed at Phillip Schofield’s determination to extract an apology from Mr Corbyn for a problem that is greater in society as a whole than it is in the Labour Party:
“If people like @Schofe are just attacking Labour AS & not AS in the Tories or the far right, or attacking AS in society as a whole, then they are not attacking Labour AS they are just attacking Labour.”
Here is Mr Rosen’s post in full:
1. I’ve met people who think that there are no Jews left in the Labour Party.
2. I’ve met people who think that the Chief Rabbi is in some way or another in charge of, or a representative of all Jews in Britain.
Neither of these statements is true or anything like true.
There are several Jewish candidates for the Labour Party. There are thousands of Labour Party members who are Jewish. Several times in the media people have said how it’s impossible or ‘not safe’ for Jews to stay in the Labour Party. It’s not impossible. If the media had wanted to, they could have asked Jewish MPs, Jewish candidates in this election ‘Is it impossible or unsafe for you to be in the Labour Party?’ It has been dishonest of them to have not done that.
There are also Rabbis who have either said that they will vote Labour and/or have expressed great concern over the way Jewish religious leaders (Rabbi Romain and the Chief Rabbi) have intervened in this election. You can read about these Rabbis in the Jewish Chronicle online: Rabbi Danny Rich and Rabbi Howard Cooper.
This tells us that within the religious part of Jewish life, there are people who are worried about how religious leaders have politicised religion. In the past this has been levelled at Muslims for having brought in ‘communalist politics’. Commentators like Nick Cohen were particularly scathing about this at the time of, say, George Galloway being elected. The silence in the mass media about the dangers of a religious group saying, in effect, ‘don’t vote for Party X’ are very great. Howard Cooper could see a danger that it could invite persecution.
In this particular election, it is also particularly dangerous because it is a two-horse race. Saying ‘don’t vote Labour’ is in effect saying, ‘Let’s have a victory for the Tories’. This is no surprise, as the Chief Rabbi welcomed the election of Boris Johnson to the leadership of the Tory Party and blessed him.
Johnson is a bigot and a liar. He and the Tories have been quite content to snuggle up to extreme right wing and antisemitic parties in Europe – like Orban in Hungary. He has also kept quiet about the pattern of antisemitism coming from Jacob Rees-Mogg, who has talked of his Jewish colleagues in the House of Commons as ‘illuminati’, questioned whether they ‘understand’ the constitution, he has done the ‘Soros jibe’ (this is an antisemitic ‘trope’ about the financier Soros deemed to be an international wheeler and dealer); Rees-Mogg has also retweeted a tweet from the Alternative für Deutschland – the far-right organisation in Germany and he has had dinner with the far-right British organisation, ‘Traditional Britain Group’. There are other incidents of antisemitism in the Tory party that Boris Johnson has ‘kept silent’ about (Crispin Blunt, Suella Braverman, Toby Young).
Yet, the Chief Rabbi is in effect entrusting those who regard him as their figurehead to a Johnson Tory government!
For clarity’s sake, the Chief Rabbi may ‘speak for’ a majority of Jews in the UK but he does not ‘represent’ them. He is the leader of the United Synagogue which has a congregation of around 40,000. According to the Board of Deputies there are 284,000 Jews in the UK. Half of us are affiliated to synagogues, half of us are not.
In all the surveys of Jewish opinion in the UK, I have never been sure of how the survey of the 142,000 non-religious Jews is done. How do they find us? One survey created a ‘panel’ having found secular Jews by focussing on Jews in areas where there is a high Jewish population and people having ‘Jewish names’. Ahem ahem – apart from Hebrew and Hebraic names there are no Jewish names. Most Jews in this country have German, Polish (if they (we) are ‘Ashkanzim’ or Sephardi names which may be e.g. Italian or Spanish) and/or we have English names! What’s more, since the arrival of many EU citizens, there are many Germans and Poles who have names that before were considered to be ‘Jewish’ like ‘Meyer’ – a standard German name that some Jews have.
The surveys may be accurate – perhaps – but this method of polling looks decidedly dodgy. I have challenged this many times on twitter and no one has successfully defended it so far.
I have been asked several times to come on the radio and TV to talk about supporting Corbyn. I have refused. I have said to the producer – ‘Do the honest thing, talk to a Labour voting rabbi, and/or a Jewish Labour candidate and/or a Jewish Labour Party member.’ The reason why I say this is because
a) I can’t answer any questions that the interviewers ask all the time ‘Is enough being done? Are Jews being bullied in meetings etc’ I don’t want to screw up this matter by appearing on programmes and saying ‘I don’t know…’ or ‘some of my best friends are Jewish and they tell me….x’ It’s a trap.
b) The times I have appeared e.g. on al-Jazeera, the method of dealing with me (or Miriam Margolyes or Alexei Sayle) is to say that we represent no one. At one level, I have to say that that is true. I have never pretended and can’t pretend and would never pretend that I ‘represent’ any other Jews. I have no trouble making another claim that I am entitled to have my views but again, is not great TV in a 2 minute interview!
For the record, for people who are not Jewish: I am no less Jewish than the Chief Rabbi. I was brought up knowing that I was Jewish, and have participated in all my life (read, studied, reflected on, been particularly interested in ) secular Jewish activities to do with Jewish writers, artists, and Jewish history and have of course reflected on this in my writing in hundreds of different ways. I see myself as a poet and performer who has absorbed many traditions one of which is ‘aggadic’ – that of Jewish story-telling.
To say these things has invited Jews and non-Jews on twitter to call me a ‘kapo’ (a Jewish concentration camp guard), a ‘used Jew’ (that from the editor of ‘Jewish News’), someone who ‘dons the cloak of Jewishness’ (a Jewish DJ and actor), one of the ‘useful Jewish idiots’ (from the commentator Dan Hodges, ‘a cheerleader for Soros’ (from Lee Harpin political editor of the Jewish Chronicle), and a plea to the BBC to not employ me to present ‘Word of Mouth’ (from the QC Simon Myerson and the campaigner against antisemitism (!) Euan Philips.
Clearly some people think that the best way to combat antisemitism is to be antisemitic.
Further: the whole question of ‘antisemitism’ has been fogged by an unknowing or unwilling lack of clarity over distinctions between slurs, prejudice, bias, discimination, persecution, incitement to antisemitic violence, and the violence itself. There are times when you might have thought that UK Jews were experiencing a pogrom.
Secondly, the minimum requirements for a claim that there is a ‘problem’ in a given area (e.g. antisemitism in the Labour Party) is that it is distinctly and measurably worse than in other places or in society as a whole. If that hasn’t been shown , (and it hasn’t been) it’s not a Labour Party problem it’s a societal problem.
I’ve known Jeremy Corbyn for 30 years. He is no antisemite. He has put his neck on the line hundreds of times in opposing racism, antisemitism, far right fascism, holocaust denial.
For the record the sudden loss of Jewish support for Labour came when Miliband was leader who the Jewish Chronicle described as ‘toxic’ for Jewish voters. MIliband is Jewish. It was his support for recognition of Palestine before negotiations that did for him, they said. Being Jewish was no shield against this hostility.
Ask me, who am I ‘safer’ with: a Johnson-led government with its record of the ‘hostile environment’, persecution of Windrush generation, and persistent antisemitic jibes from leading party members or this Labour Party, and I say, Labour every time.
But I don’t look at the election purely through a Jewish prism. It is a clear class issue: a Tory government will continue to ravage the lives of of working class people through attacks on wages, public services, and the disabled. A Labour government will halt these and start to reverse them.
World business (‘capitalism’) is in crisis: huge levels of debt, massive ‘productivity’ problems (in their frenzy to compete with each other) a slew towards ‘economic nationallism’ (the Steve Bannon philosophy ) and Johnson is riding the Bannon bus which is driven by the US. The US are desperate to create a bogus ‘free trade’ world, which in actual fact is a US-protectionist world. Johnson is backing this as a ‘solution’.
I’m voting Labour.
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