Rebranded Limmud is a festive hit
FIVE DAYS of education, culture, religion and entertainment have culminated with organisers of the Limmud Festival praising its “amazing” atmosphere.
The rebranded event — known as Limmud Conference until this year — which closed on Thursday, saw more than 2,500 people pack out the Hilton Metropole site in Birmingham.
Abi Jacobi, Limmud Festival co-chair, said: “Limmud has lived up to its reputation of providing a unique array of learning opportunities for our participants. The atmosphere has been amazing and truly reflects the warm, volunteer-led ethos that Limmud is all about.
“Every participant has contributed to making Limmud Festival the place to be this winter.”
Among the most spoken about events were a speech from Jo Johnson, the minister for universities; a live taping of a podcast featuring a black, gay, Yiddish vocalist; a Lubavitchraised drag queen’s explanation of his make-up routine; and a debate on whether robots can count as part of a minyan. The festival programme, which included more than 1,000 sessions, featured a series of talks, panel debates and discussions on mental health, LGBT issues, politics and rabbinical thinking.
Participants attended from more than three dozen countries along with around 600 presenters. The age difference between the youngest and oldest festival-goers was 96 years.
JON LANSMAN, the founder of the hard-left Momentum activist group, believes there is no “one-size-fits-all” approach to tackling antisemitism in the Labour Party.
Speaking at a packed Limmud session in Birmingham on Tuesday, Mr Lansman said the problem of Jewhatred had to be dealt with by all political parties, and revealed he had not expected Jeremy Corbyn to win the Labour leadership.
He said Labour must “stamp out antisemitism, oppose it, make clear it is unacceptable. We have to challenge every form of antisemitism, and I do.
“I don’t think there’s a one-size-fitsall method of dealing with it. There are some lesser forms of antisemitism where what’s really required is education. People need to understand the effect of their words.”
Expressing well-thought-out views on Jew-hate and its occurrences in politics and society, Mr Lansman said he believed there was as much antisemitism in the Conservative Party as within Labour.
He told the Limmud audience: “There is antisemitism in the Labour Party — I think it falls into three categories. There’s the kind of petty remarks about big noses, which are dreadful, completely unacceptable antisemitism. People make petty xenophobic remarks and some are made against Jews. I don’t think there’s much of that [in Labour].
“There’s the antisemitism that arrives from the Israel-Palestine conflict. We all understand that, when that conflict heats up, it results in dreadful antisemitism. It shouldn’t… but it does.
“The third type is extremely rare — it’s the real, old-school antisemitism that believes in blood libels and so on. I don’t think there’s a lot of that. But there is a lot of denial of antisemitism.”
In a compelling interview with Andrew Gilbert, a prominent Jewish Labour supporter, Mr Lansman told the audience that he believed the “furore” around Jew-hate in the party had only “started with the front page of the Jewish Chronicle asking ten questions of Jeremy Corbyn during the leadership campaign” (in 2015).
The JC had challenged Mr Corbyn’s past associations with hard-line antiZionists and antisemites.
Mr Lansman said: “I’m not saying they were unreasonable questions to ask — it was very difficult to answer them. Some were dealing with meetings that happened many years earlier. It was hard to check some of the details. Jeremy had not expected to be a candidate for leader. He had not researched the backgrounds of people on panels many years earlier.”
Mr Lansman did not directly answer a question from Mr Gilbert about how controversial figures including Ken Livingstone, Jackie Walker and Tony Greenstein remained Labour members. He said: “The party has a process and it’s right to have a fair process.”
The audience openly laughed when Mr Lansman said he was “not aware of Jewish people leaving the party…
“They are under pressure from Jews in the community who do not support Labour,” he said. “Jewish Zionists in the party are treated to unreasonable pressure from those on the political right of the community.”
Asked whether he had chosen Mr Corbyn as a potential leader of the party, Mr Lansman said: “It was most certainly not planned in advance. We wanted a candidate to shift the debate left. Jeremy Corbyn was not the first person I thought of. I thought of dozens of other people.
“With hindsight, he was the only person on the left who could have gone on the ballot paper. People saw him as having integrity and being principled.”
I’m not aware of Jewish people leaving the party’