Another Jew supporting Labour
Published
by
Richard Kuper
JVL Introduction
Like so many other Jewish member of the Labour Party, Ian Saville is bemused by his failure to hear an antisemitic statement anywhere in the party.
And this, despite being to hundreds of Party events and meeting thousands of activists, both as an active member of the party and as a performer who travels around doing his Socialist Magic act all over the country.
This article was originally published by The i on Thu 28 Nov 2019. Read the original here.
I am a Jewish Labour member, and the Chief Rabbi's claims about anti-Semitism are based on a view of the party I don't recognise
That is not to say that this doesn’t happen, but if these views were endemic in Labour, I would surely have come across them
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All this needs to be said – and given equal billing with jewish anti-Labour opinion. One important new piece of information I gleaned from the article is that the Chief Rabbi represents only 40,000 of the 300,000 jewish community. Is there a source for this? The impression I had, from recent media coverage, was that he represents, if not all jews, certainly a majority. One published estimate was “over 50%.”
Wikipedia says:
The United Synagogue (US) is a union of British Orthodox Jewish synagogues, representing the central Orthodox movement in Judaism. With 64 congregations, comprising 40,000 members,[3] it is the largest synagogue body in Europe.[6] The spiritual leader of the union bears the title of Chief Rabbi of Britain and the Empire – a title that bears some formal recognition by the Crown, even though his rabbinical authority is recognised by only slightly more than half of British Jews.[7]
That last point must be clarified: “more than half of British Jews” means more than half of religious British Jews. Again, from Wikipedia, over 40% of Jewish households do not have a single member who belongs to a synagogue.
Please contrive to make Ian Saville’s letter (or blog or whatever is the current term) appear in mainstream news media. As a non-Jew it is such a relief to read his testimony.