Holocaust Memorial Day at Hornsey and Wood Green CLP
JVL Introduction
Holocaust Memorial Day at Hornsey and Wood Green LP should have been an occasion for reflection and remembrance.
Instead, it was an occasion marred by some 30 members of the GC “walking out” (deliberately turning off their Zoom links) to boycott taking part in a talk given by Sue Levi Hughes, daughter of refugees from the Nazi regime.
Who could be more appropriate to have been invited to give such a talk? Sue was due to speak with Rabbi David Mason, also an appropriate choice of speaker. Both had accepted invitations, as Jewish members of the GC.
But Mason, an active member of JLM, changed his mind at the last minute, and refused to speak on the same platform as Sue, because he has political disagreements with her over Israel. He also demanded that she did not speak.
It is a sad occasion – but also an outrage – that the memory of the Holocaust should be weaponised in this upsetting and factional way.
The contributions below explain what happened.
First, the Jewish Socialists’ Group account of the meeting, including the video Sue had produced for the occasion, focusing on the role of women in the Warsaw ghetto resistance to the Nazis.
Then Miriam David, a now former member of the GC of Hornsey and Wood Green, explains how the event unfolded in such a way that she felt forced to resign from the Labour Party.
Finally, Geoffrey Bindman, who happens to be a member of the CLP and a Labour Party member for over 60 years, asks Rabbi Mason to seek to make amends.
The right to remember
Jewish Socialists Group, 28th January 2022
A battle is being waged over who is permitted to tell our history and who owns our memories.
For this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day, Sue Levi Hughes was invited by her Labour Party in Haringey to give a presentation. Sue’s parents had escaped to Britain from Nazi Germany in the late 1930s and other members of her family died in Auschwitz and Bergen Belsen. For this event she researched and made a wonderful short film about acts of resistance by women in the ghettoes and camps established by the Nazis. Rabbi David Mason of the Jewish Labour Movement had also agreed to speak about Holocaust remembrance at the meeting.
Hours before the meeting, Catherine West MP tried to persuade Sue to withdraw because David Mason was refusing to share the Holocaust Memorial Day platform with her. He claimed this was because several days earlier she had shared a tweet about the expulsion of Palestinians from their homes which referred to Israel as an apartheid state. This definition is widely used by B’Tselem and numerous other Israeli human rights organisations.
At the meeting itself another attempt was made to block the presentation but a clear majority of the those present voted to continue with the agreed agenda. However, as Sue began her presentation, a third of the members left the online event.
The overwhelming majority who stayed were very moved by the short film made by Sue Levi Hughes about courageous women who defied the Nazis in the face of impossible odds.
Sue says: “I feel devastated that ordinary members walked out, and were more concerned with internal, factional differences than with learning about – and from – the women who had the courage to stand up against the terror and who saved many lives, often at the cost of their own.
“My parents left Nazi Germany after years of persecution just before the Holocaust; my aunt, uncle and cousins were left behind and were murdered. This is my history and it has affected every aspect of my life. To be honest, I think the way I and the members of Haringey Labour Party have been treated is not only insulting and disrespectful but antisemitic.”
Here is the presentation she gave.
Holocaust Memorial Day 2022
Introduction and film by Sue Levi Hughes
The Holocaust is part of my family history. My parents and grandparents were refugees from Nazi Germany in the late ’30s, after several years when Jews were being persecuted, driven out of their homes and physically attacked. My aunt, uncle and cousins perished in Auschwitz and Bergen Belsen.
The history of the Holocaust is also part of my present. It is a part of me, ingrained into me. I live with it and I live with the trauma my parents unwittingly passed down to me and my sister. My mother’s fear of not having enough food means both my sister and I are unable to throw food away or waste even the smallest scrap.
My families’ fear that we would be recognised as Jews outside of the Jewish area we lived became my reality and I ditched my recognisably Jewish name as soon as I could. Now I am proud to use my Jewish surname: Levi.
You can watch the short film here: We remember – Stories of Jewish resistance with a focus on women fighters
Miriam David writes:
I have been a member of the Labour Party in Highgate for over 5 years (when I moved here), and became a member of the GC during lockdown, representing the smallest branch in the CLP. I have attended these GC meetings somewhat reluctantly because of the difficulties of managing such large meetings on zoom.
But I was excited by this meeting scheduled for January 26, 2022 the evening before HMD, as there were to be 2 speakers about HMD, one a local Rabbi of Muswell Hill and the other a socialist feminist, daughter of Holocaust survivors. I share a background with Sue and had recently edited a book on being so-called second generation with 12 contributors, entitled Debating the Zeitgeist and Being Second Generation (2021, Vallentine Mitchell).
I was horrified by what unfolded at the meeting. The formal meeting opened after the first speaker with a very confusing discussion relating to the fact that Rabbi Mason had changed his mind about speaking at the meeting and was not attending on principle. He was also insisting that Sue not be allowed to speak, because she did not represent the Jewish community. We therefore debated how to deal with the demand and challenge to the chair’s authority. After much wrangling, and a statement from the chair that she had spent an hour earlier in the day trying to persuade the Rabbi to change his mind and not ‘no platform’ Sue Hughes, a motion was formulated about whether to allow the challenge to the chair’s authority or to allow Sue Levi Hughes to give her prepared speech. The motion was passed by a two-thirds majority to allow Sue to present her talk about Women’s Resistance to Nazism. At this point about 30 or more members of the GC left the meeting.
This meant that Sue gave an excellent presentation to over 90 remaining members of the GC. It was also decided that the meeting would end at the agreed time of 10 pm.
After Sue’s talk with powerpoint, there was little time for the rest of the agenda and the chair decided to allow our MP, Catherine West, to give her overview of national political issues.
She decided to admonish the meeting for its poor treatment of the rabbi, rather than his appalling and disrespectful treatment of another Jew. It was like a bear-fight about who is a proper Jew, and how to define antisemitism. As the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, I don’t need our MP to tell me what is and is not respectful behaviour around antisemitism or even simply being Jewish. The Labour party needs to learn what is respectful behaviour to all Jews and not simply the unrepresentative Board of Deputies (BOD).
I therefore decided to leave the Labour Party with immediate effect, as I could not bear the way in which the Holocaust was being used for sectarian Jewish purposes. I wrote to the general secretary of the LP, David Evans, copying in Catherine West, MP, and the chair of my Highgate branch (who also happens to be married to a son of Jewish refugees from Nazism.)
Below are 2 extracts from my letter:
I write to tender my resignation from the Labour party with immediate effect. It is with a mix of anger and sadness that I do so, especially as today is Holocaust Memorial Day. I have been unhappy with the direction of the LP on issues of anti-racism for several years, especially on the privileging of antisemitism above all other forms of racism. Recently, however, I was beginning to think that Sir Keir Starmer was developing his professional legal skills to defeat this ghastly, incompetent, racist, self-serving and xenophobic Tory government. But he has not seized the opportunity to point to the racism, Islamophobia and xenophobia within the government and has allowed the moment about Islamophobia, last week, to pass without comment.
…..
I am a proud and committed Jew and am committed to fighting antisemitism and all forms of racism. I have been a professor of feminist sociology of education for over 30 years, teaching and researching about all forms of equality including gender and race. I recently published an edited book (with Merilyn Moos) Debating the Zeitgeist & Being Second Generation (2021, Vallentine Mitchell) which explores the values and feelings of 12 British-born children of refugees from Nazism. We tease out how our personal and political values today have been influenced by our parents, our pasts and how we stand up for refugees and migrants today. So it is with profound regret that I leave the LP but I do not feel it values and respects the issues that I hold most dear.
Yours sincerely, etc….
I received an almost instant and somewhat disingenuous reply from Catherine West, as follows:
Good morning Miriam,
I am very sorry to hear that you have left the Labour Party and I was trying to avoid that sort of a confrontation in advance of the meeting but sometimes it is simply not possible to manage these tensions, especially with the online meetings, which, in my view, do not aid communication.
Thank you for copying me in here,
Best wishes,
Catherine
I also had a more sympathetic correspondence with the chair, and many other members of Hornsey and Wood Green, as well as with JVL. I have still not heard from David Evans. The after-effects of the meeting continue to sour the Labour Party at a time when we should be mounting a concerted effort to unseat the racist and xenophobic Prime Minister and the whole government.
Miriam was invited to talk on Not the Andrew Marr Show last week and a video of the discussion posted on YouTube on 1st February.
Geoffrey Bindman writes:
I am a member of Hornsey and Wood Green Constituency Labour Party. I have been a member of the Party for over 60 years. I was not present at the meeting at which Holocaust Memorial Day was commemorated and I have never met Rabbi Mason or Sue Levi Hughes, the two speakers who were invited and who had agreed to speak.
However, I have been given a full account of what occurred by members who were present at the Holocaust meeting. If it is true that Rabbi Mason demanded the withdrawal of the invitation to Sue Hughes as a condition of his carrying out his prior agreement to speak, then my view is that this is unacceptable behaviour by one Party member towards another. I hope he will agree on further consideration and seek to make amends.
His action is also puzzling because the reason as stated falls far short of justifying his response. Of course Rabbi Mason, and those who supported his action, may disagree with the view that Israel is an apartheid state, as they are obviously entitled to do, notwithstanding the recently published conclusion of Amnesty International to that effect, echoing that of Human Rights Watch , B’Tselem, and Yesh Din.
A difference of opinion on that issue has no place in the commemoration of a monumental crime which surely Labour Party members can condemn with total unanimity.
Thank you to Sue Levi Hughes and JVL; a very moving presentation!
This should be no surprise. The Holocaust has only ever been of interest to the Zionist movement as a propaganda weapon to employ against its opponents. It is therefore no surprise that Rabbi Mason refused to speak with Sue because of her views on Apartheid Israel.
For 3 days in the year Israel commemorates the Holocaust and for the remainder it allows the survivors to choose between eating and heating, having stolen the bulk of the reparations meant for them.
As Ha’aretz put it: ‘Israel Is Waiting for Its Holocaust Survivors to Die: There are three different days committed to remembering the Holocaust, but during the rest of the year, the Israeli government only thinks of Holocaust survivors as a financial burden.’
https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-amos-rubin-waiting-for-shoah-survivors-to-die-1.5228490
The Holocaust has been instrumentalised by Zionism to such an extent that Netanyahu can seriously claim that it was the Palestinians, not the Germans, who were really responsible. But this should not be any surprise.
During the war the Zionists argued that anti-Zionists should not be able to come to Palestine as refugees even.
In the words of Polish Zionist leader Apolinary Hartglass,
‘indiscriminate rescue might even prove harmful.’ These were people who had ‘no feelings for Palestine or Zionism. They were harmful to Zionist values, shirked work and tried to lead an easy life at public expense. … they might return to the Diaspora after the war and slander the Zionist enterprise even though it had saved their lives.’
You can find this in Tom Segev’s ‘The 7th Million’ and Dina Porat’s ‘The Blue & Yellow Stars of David The Zionist Leadership and the Holocaust’ p.246
Just appalling!!! Labour is doing the equivalent of knitting, where in an attempt to create a closely knitted garment (for which read carefully scripted narrative), you get to the point where it’s so tight you can’t move the needles anymore. The Zionist cabal in charge of Labour are pursuing an entirely untenable position on Israel Palestine, and in the wider context the narrative is in any case falling apart. When well know authorities like Amnesty (synonymous in the UK public mind at large with protecting human rights), call your country an apartheid state, and your response is to say that’s anti-semitic (the stock response of Israeli proxies as advised by the Ministry of Strategic Affairs), you’re probably running out of road.
will there be ANY principled members left in the Party if this goes on?
It is now imperative that anyone who has a platform must do all they can to break the link between Zionism and Judaism, a link which Zionists are desperate to encourage and maintain. We know that the occupation of Palestine is a Zionist project. Zionists must not be allowed to engulf all Jews in this criminal, murderous enterprise.
Solidarity and best wishes to Sue, and to Miriam and all at the CLP who resisted this crude attempt at censorship.
The leadership and administration of the LP in allying itself with the most reactionary voices in the Jewish Community, in trying to force everyone to go along with false and ‘bad faith’ attributions of antisemitism, makes it particularly painful for Socialist Jews trying to speak, participate, and contribute constructively (and memorably) on matters core to our politics and lives, as Sue has done here.
I understand Miriam leaving (as I have done) but solidarity too for those who stay and resist this stuff (and to officers and members of the CLP who did not give in to this pressure). Thank you for the powerful short film Sue, best Simon
Each year on Holocaust Memorial Day I am moved to remember my late father who was a member of the group of the Allied Forces which liberated the Bergen Belsen Concentration Camp in the closing stages of World War II.
He often used to speak of his experience of standing at the wire of the starvation camp and his horror at the consequences of the Holocaust which he witnessed first-hand.
After the war, he wrote his experiences in a note book.
He never failed to teach our family and anyone else of the lessons of anti-Semitism and where it can lead.
His descriptions and the lessons have never left me and I have often passed his words on whenever the Holocaust is remembered.
It is a betrayal of history when certain members of the Jewish Labour Movement refuse to share a platform with other Labour Party members for purely-sectarian reasons when the purpose of the meeting is to Commemorate one of the greatest crimes against humanity.
Credit to Su Levi Hughes and the JVL for that moving presentation and all those who stayed to hear it
The Leadership and the Labour Party are responsible for the divisions taking place in the Party since the change of leadership and the direction the party is being taken And it is wrong especially when is affecting the importance of Holocaust Rememberence Day When everyone should be united in Rembering all those Men Women and Children who were murdered on that terrible time in history which should never be forgotten and should never be allowed to happen ever again again to anyone
I fully agree with Miriam David’s actions and endorse her statement “I have been unhappy with the direction of the LP on issues of anti-racism for several years, especially on the privileging of antisemitism above all other forms of racism.”
I have long believed that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) completely covers all forms of racism/discrimination. All that is needed is for the protection it embodies to be enforced. The recent UN report on Israel is a damning indictment of the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinians as being on a par with South Africa’s former treatment of non-whites: apartheid. There must be no ‘league table’ of racism/discrimination, rating the deserving and the not-so-deserving.
I wonder if the late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks would have stayed in the meeting? On the cover of his book on Morality the (presumably approved publishers’) summary of the book states: “Traditional values no longer hold yet recent political swings show that modern ideals of tolerance have left many feeling rudderless and adrift…… Toxic public discourse makes true societal progress almost unattainable; A more divisive society is fuelled by identity politics and extremism, and the rise of a victimhood mentality calls for ‘safe spaces’ but stifles debate“.
Just remember this. Starmer WANTS people to leave. Few people understand just how morally and intellectually corrupt the LP right wing is. They have always been like this. Leaving the LP – while we have first past the post – is a luxury we can’t afford. I want to do it every day. Labour has become a despicable organisation. If we had PR and the possibility of a more genuine politics I would burn my Party card in public.
“Hours before the meeting, Catherine West MP tried to persuade Sue to withdraw because David Mason was refusing to share the Holocaust Memorial Day platform with her.”
If that is true, it is hard to reconcile with West’s later statement that she was “…was trying to avoid that sort of a confrontation in advance of the meeting”.
If David Mason, or some members of the Hornsey and Wood Green CLP, chose to stay away from the meeting, that was their right. It didn’t have to lead to a confrontation.
Amazing piece of work from Sue Levi Hughes who I have long known as a dedicated socialist and trade unionist and very knowledgeable and determined fighter against antisemitism and all other forms of racism.
In recent years Sue has been part of group trips I have been on as well to both Auschwitz and Treblinka. I know she has also done brilliant work in her CLP around the Windrush campaign. Total solidarity with her over this disgraceful and horrible incident.
Rabbi Mason doesn’t earn special privileges to speak, let alone determine who else should speak at events, simply by being a rabbi. It is a job, his work, not an elected post. He has no more and no less rights than any other local CLP member. I would hope that after his appalling behaviour he will at least have sat down and viewed the brilliant presentation that Sue made (and which he sought to deny the right of fellow CLP members to view, or to hear Sue’s powerful introduction.)
Similarly I would hope that Catherine West who played a completely reprehensible role in this affair, and couldn’t even bring herself to comment on the content of Sue’s presentation, will also look at it. Both she and Rabbi Mason would find it educational.
Catherine West’s role was also puzzling given that Rabbi Mason was apparently objecting to an unrelated tweet Sue had put out several days earlier re Sheikh Jarrah, yet West has previously been a relatively outspoken pro-Palestinian Labour MP.
The absurdity of Mason’s position is well illustrated by the slide in Sue’s presentation of female resistance couriers (whose work included obtaining and smuggling arms to the ghetto fighters) you have used with this piece.
Of the four women shown, two are left wing Zionists and two – Vladka Meed and Hanna Fryshdorf) are anti-Zionist Bundists. Would Mason like to airbrush the Bundists from the pictures? In the Warsaw Ghetto left-wing Zionists, anti-Zionist Bundists, and non/anti-Zionist Communists worked in a United Fighting Organisation (Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa) against the Nazis
There is also an irony here. The Zionist ideologues of the JLM are always saying how the fight against antisemitism must be addressed in its own right and separated from commentary on Israel/Palestine/Zionism. I happen to agree with that, but who has been coupling them together here? Not Sue Levi Hughes.
As I understand it, the JLM is the tail which currently wags the Labour dog, while JVL remains out in the cold.
It’s obvious why Rabbi Mason and his fellow supporters of Israel took this line. Those who insist that we believe that two and two makes five can’t allow anyone who says otherwise to have a voice because to do so would expose their nonsense for what it is. Which brings us to the unhappy case of Keir Starmer. We in Britain have got ourselves into the absurd situation where a group of lobbyists for a foreign power, aided by the media and the establishment, are able to determine our choice of opposition leader and destroy any candidate who refuses to sing to their tune. If this onetime human rights lawyer were to agree with the human rights groups’ assessment that Israel practices apartheid —if he were to depart by one degree from his unqualified support for Israel right or wrong — he would immediately get denounced by apartheid profiteer Margaret Hodge, antisemitism czar John Mann, the Board of Deputies and the orchestrated chorus of the traditional media. They would all vilify him as an enabler of antisemitism if not an outright antisemite, and his chances of hanging onto his job for long enough to become the next PM would be reduced to zero.
Of course any leader of principle would refuse to accept these humiliating terms, but Starmer has no problem with them. That is where we are, and why the Labour Party under Starmer has forfeited the loyalty of so many committed socialists.
This is a very sad story but seems to confirm the shocking confusion of anti-semitism with criticism of the actions of Israeli governments which was rife in the Labour Party and elsewhere but was thought to have bern expunged.
The demand by Mason that the invitation to Susan Levi Hughes to speak on the same platform with him be withdrawn was horribly intolerant and doesn’t fit with the vital tradition of open debate in a democratic society.
Full solidarity and best wishes to Sue and Miriam and all at the meeting who rejected this pitiful attempt at censorship.
That short film is an excellent piece of work by Sue Levi Hughes and should be shown as widely as possible.
As for Mason – shame on him!
Thank you Miriam for your powerful words & action. I am one of those children of Holocaust survivors (my father) who grew up surrounded by absolute silence. I learned from a very early age never to ask about his parents & sister. Only very recently, long after his death, I discovered that I am half Jewish, that his father perished in Warsaw in 1939, imprisoned by the Nazis for being a member of a group of Jewish lawyers protesting against the their disbarment, that his mother & sister perished in the Warsaw ghetto from typhus. All of this is taking much time & emotional work to take in. Polish Holocaust survivors’ & their children’s Jewishness has been hidden & silenced for a long time.
That silence was an act of personal/mental self-preservation & represented fear of a repetition of murderous anti-senitism, all understandable. But the silencing of Jewish voices now, both among Jews & socialists is, as Miriam put it, outrageous. The Israeli government & its policies are not the sole legitimate expression of Jewish identity or values. Some, like Marek Edelman & others who fought in the Warsaw ghetto uprising, defined Jewish values as always standing with the oppressed.
Discussion, argument – yes. But silencing those who stand with the oppressed is abhorrent. As is privileging those who silence, define & divide. Labelling those of us who oppose the policies of the Israeli government in relation to the Palestinians as anti-semites is disingenuous & dangerous, horribly reminiscent of the totalitarian terror of our historical & personal histories.
The JLM opposed a Labour victory at the last general election, yet they were not expelled, as they should have been.