Rabbi: It’s time for Jews to leave Labour
ONE of Britain’s most senior rabbis has called for Jews to leave Labour because they are ‘not winning’ the fight against anti-Semitism.
Julia Neuberger also accused Jeremy Corbyn of a ‘lack of sensitivity’ for defending a mural showing Jews exploiting the poor.
She praised Labour members who quit in protest at the election of Mr Corbyn as leader and said anti-Semitism in the party is a ‘disgrace’.
Baroness Neuberger, a senior rabbi at the West London Synagogue, was speaking at a seminar at the Bank Of England on Thursday.
She said: ‘Is there anti-Semitism in the Labour party? There damn well is. Is it a disgrace? It absolutely is. Should a lot of the Jews who are in the Labour Party have resigned? Yes they should.’
She singled out the example of Parry Mitchell, who resigned from Labour two years ago after saying Mr Corbyn surrounds himself with those who are ‘hostile to Jews’. She said: ‘Lord Mitchell resigned from the Labour Party, he was absolutely right to do so. Others are saying they are in there and staying there to fight it. I understand that, but at the moment they are not winning.’
Baroness Neuberger, the second woman to become a rabbi in Britain, said the best way to tackle the issue was to stop electing Labour MPs and councillors. She said she hoped that Labour’s anti-Semitism row was ‘enough of a problem that it’ll stop them getting elected, because that’s the best way of dealing with it’.
She said it stopped Labour winning seats such as Barnet in North London, which has a large Jewish population, in recent local elections.
‘I have to say the response from the Labour Party and from quite a lot of people is: “Oh there’s antiSemitism everywhere, there’s anti-Semitism on the Right”,’ she said. ‘Yes there is. But what has been going on in the Labour Party is new.’
The Baroness said problems existed in the Militant Tendency – the hard-Left faction purged from Labour in the 1980s – but the issue is ‘much, much worse now’. The crossbench peer said antiSemitism was now based ‘partly on a view about Israel and imperialism and partly about a view about Jews being good at money, and capitalists’.
She also described an anti-Semitic mural in East London that was defended by Mr Corbyn to cartoons in the 1930s German newspaper Der Sturmer. She said: ‘If you can’t see something wrong with that you haven’t got a sensitivity to antiSemitism. And that’s on the Left, it’s not on the Right in that way.’
The Labour leader later said he regretted not looking more carefully at the mural.