Back to the future: why Jamie Susskind has rejoined Labour
The time is right: Susskind is rejoining Labour
what he calls the “digital lifeworld”. He believes we are not ready for the changes that “relentless advances in science and technology” will bring.
One major issue is the power tech corporations such as Google, Apple and Microsoft will exert.
“In the future, those who control
and own the most powerful technologies will increasingly have a great deal of control over the rest of us. The quality of our democracy, the extent and nature of our freedom, and the amount of justice in society will be increasingly be determined not just in the traditional places of politics but in digital technology and what we do with it,” he says.
Susskind’s mission, as he sees it, is to raise public awareness of the issues facing us and encourage “a great mindset shift”, in the same way the public has become attuned to the threat of climate change.
“We should stop looking at technology just as consumers and instead look at it as citizens as well,” he says. “We have to start as a society asking what these systems, are doing to us and the way we live.”
The coronavirus pandemic could accelerate the dawn of the digital lifeworld, he believes, as we acclimatise to a world where human contact is perilous and reliance on technology increases as a result.
It is not surprising that Susskind is fascinated by this area. As he says, “writing about the future has become a weird family business”.
His father is Richard Susskind, a lawyer who is a leading expert on technology in the legal profession and IT adviser to the Lord Chief Justice.
Older brother Daniel is an economist specialising in the consequences of technological advance for the labour market.
“I grew up in a household that took technology seriously,” says Susskind.
It must have made for some rarefied conversations around the Shabbat table in the family home in Radlett? Actually, no.
“We’re in many ways a quite normal, mildly chaotic north London Jewish family,” he says.
No pressure was exerted on Susskind, or Daniel and younger sister Alexandra, to follow in “the weird family business”. His parents — Richard and mother Michelle, a former nurse who is now a cognitive behavioural therapist — emphasised the importance of “finding our passion and having fun”. As it happens, he laughs, “we did turn out on the nerdier side”.
After attending Haberdashers’ school and Oxford, where he studied politics and history, Susskind was called to the Bar in 2013 and now works at Littleton Chambers in the Inner Temple, specialising in employment and discrimination law.
One particular case caused ripples in the Jewish community when, in 2017, he acted pro bono for the Campaign Against Antisemitism in challenging a decision by the Crown Prosecution Service not to prosecute a neo-Nazi hate speaker. The Director for Public Prosecutions reversed the decision.
For now, Susskind’s future holds another book — a follow-up to Future
— and a wedding. Earlier in the year he announced his engagement to his partner Joanna Hardy, a criminal barrister.
The couple live in north London with their miniature sausage dog, Mr Pickle.
Rejoining Labour may be an important move for Susskind, but his engagement… “that’s by far the biggest news in my life,” he says.
business people; Poland’s first woman deputy in parliament, Roza PomerantzMeltzer, was Jewish (and a Zionist).
Most Jewish children went to Polish public schools, where Polish valour, nobility, greatness and beauty were cel
ebrated. The historian Isaac Deutscher recalled his childhood indoctrination in Polish patriotism:
“I was a Polish child, brought up in a Polish school. For us the Germans, like the Russians, were oppressors who robbed us of our independence for a century and a half, and against whom we had struggled in numerous insurrections.”
Jewish patriotic loyalty to Poland culminatedatthetimeof theGermaninvasion in September 1939, when an estimated 180,000 Jews served in the Polish army, with over 30,000 casualties.
As in other European countries, Jewish assimilation often roused hatred rather than acceptance. Jews in the past were hated for being different — Orthodox, Yiddish-speaking, averse to assimilation and secular learning. How could they be hated also for trying to blend in, become part of the nation and contribute to its achievements?
AmongdisillusionedassimilatedJews was Julian Tuwim, a major Polish and European poet, an innovator devoted to Poland and Polish literature and hostile to Jewish bourgeois “materialism” and “philistinism” as well as Zionism.
Ferocious antisemitic attacks on Tuwim for “debasing” and “sabotaging” the Polish language were symptomatic of the fragility of Polish-Jewish acculturation in the interwar years. Tuwim had a vision of Poland as forward looking, civic, pluralistic and European, but the Poland he experienced was narrow and inward-facing, specifically Catholic, obsessed by Poland’s tragic history, and hostile to foreign influences.
As Polish antisemitism grew, so did Zionism and the Hebrew language and literature. Many leading Zionists, including David Ben Gurion, Menachem Begin and Shimon Peres, were born in Poland. The Fourth Aliyah (wave of Jewish migration to Palestine) in 1924-26 was driven chiefly by antisemitic Polish government policies.
Some Polish Zionists saw parallels between Jewish and Polish nationalism, which the historian Jacob Talmon described as “Judaic”, “that of a conquered, humiliated and oppressed nation dreaming of resurrection”.
Polish Jews were drawn to socialism, too, as an ideology which fought antisemitism. ThesocialistBund,somewhat paradoxically, was fiercely patriotic and opposed emigration of Jews as Poland was their homeland. “Here we were born”, the Bund declared in 1936, “here we work and struggle, here we live with our anguish and joy, here is our homeland;” and in 1937: “Today, as always our slogan is still true: right here [in Poland] and not elsewhere – in a relentless fight for freedom, arm in arm with the workingmassesof Poland–liesoursalvation.” For the Polish “working masses”, however, freedom meant not fighting “arm in arm” with Jews but being free of Jews.
Isaac Bashevis Singer’s only novel written in Poland, Satan in Goray (1933), describes the murderous antisemitic rage of 17th century Polish peasants — “In silence each day they sharpened their scythes … in silence they filed the blades of their axes”. Contemporary Poland was clearly in Singer’s mind as the Jews of Goray foresee the gathering of Christians to “exterminate” them; though Singer in his post-war novels acknowledges the many Poles who risked their lives to save Jews in the Holocaust.
Even so, historians have found much evidence of collaboration of Poles with Nazis, and they tend to link modern Polish antisemitism and the atrocities perpetrated by Poles during and after the Holocaust — notoriously, the massacre by Poles of the Jewish community in Jedwabne and the post-war pogrom in Kielce — with a long ugly past.
PolishJewishartistsoftenseemdrawn in unexpected ways to the troubled historyof JewsinPoland. RomanPolanski’s classic film Knife in the Water (1962) is, on one level, an allegory of the violent failure of Jewish assimilation in Polish society after initial hope of acceptance. The Polish-born novelist, Louis Begley, like Polanski a child survivor, gives in Wartime Lies (1991) a semi-biographical pictureof aPolishJewishchildwhosurvives among mostly hostile Poles by pretendingtobeCatholic. Indoingso,headopts inadvertently the antisemitism rampantamongPoles,ironicallymimicking thembyapplaudingthemurderbyPoles of Jewishsurvivorswhoreturnedtotheir homes in Kielce in 1946.
In 2018, the Polish government made it a criminal offence to blame the Polish nation for Nazi crimes. Poland, to be sure, suffered more than most countries from Nazi rule. Also, Poland’s view of Jews as foreigners was largely shared throughout Christian Europe — and by the European Jews themselves — until modern times, as exiles from Zion.
Yet, as the Polish diplomat and historian, Jan Karski, observed in 1940, though Germany and Poland were bitter enemies, they found in war conditions a narrow area of agreement in their hatred of Jews. Polish refusal to make amends for the expropriation of Jewish property is widely seen by survivors and their descendants as a confession of Polish collaboration and of unrepentant Polish Jew-hatred.
Uri Zvi Greenberg’s Hebrew dirges for the Jewish dead during and after the war lament the Jewish communities murdered in the Holocaust, their former homes inhabited in post-war Poland mostly by murderers, collaborators, and onlookers:
Now – our bodies made holy in their blood rot there, the inheritance of worms, house and vessels bathed in holiness of Sabbath and festivals, song of deep longing, the flap of the Shekhinah’s wings – the inheritance of goyim: for in their land we built houses and synagogues and dug graves not in Jerusalem Jerusalem of rock of gold. Allelai Amen
Poland rEFusEs tO MAKE AMENDs for the expropriation OF JEwIsH property