Jews From The United Kingdom

"Thanks to Corbyn, the Labour party is expanding, attracting many leftists who would previously have rejected it or been rejected by it. Among those are people with hostile views of Jews. Two of them have been kicked out, but only after they had first been readmitted and once their cases attracted unwelcome external scrutiny. The question for Labour now is whether any of this matters. To those at the top, maybe it doesn’t. But it feels like a painful loss to a small community that once looked to Labour as its natural home – and which is fast reaching the glum conclusion that Labour has become a cold house for Jews."

"The catharsis lasted all of three hours. From 10am on Thursday morning until lunchtime, British Jews were allowed to feel a small measure of relief: after nearly five years of being dismissed as liars and dissemblers, deceitfully engaged in an elaborate smear campaign, a neutral legal arbiter had ruled that those who had sounded the alarm about antisemitism in Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party were, after all, telling the truth. Yet the pause for reflection that so many had hoped for expired before it had really begun. It was overtaken by word that Labour had suspended Corbyn for suggesting that the whole business had been "dramatically overstated". ..."

"[On his play Jews. In Their Own Words compiled from the testimonies of 12 people] The result is, I hope, a mix of stories and perspectives that will never have been heard before on the London stage. Among them is the first-hand testimony of an ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jew, recalling the day he was violently beaten on an English street. Or the odyssey of Edwin Shuker, who fled to this country in 1971 as a refugee from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Or the former MP Luciana Berger giving the most complete account yet of the journey she made from young Labour idealist to the target of a daily onslaught of racist, misogynistic and mortally threatening abuse, before losing the job she "lived and breathed and loved". ... The 12 conversations yielded all kinds of surprises. I did not ask every interviewee the same questions, except one. I wanted each of them to tell me where their grandparents or great-grandparents came from. The answers – Belarus, Ukraine, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Holland, Russia, Iraq and more – confirmed how much British Jewry remains a community of immigrants or the descendants of immigrants. When I put that question to [[Margaret Hodge|[Margaret] Hodge]], it elicited a family story that forms what might be one of the most moving passages in the play. After you have heard it, you will understand why Hodge’s father advised her always to keep a packed suitcase by the front door – and you might shudder when you remember the way that formative experience of hers was mocked when she recalled it during an especially rancorous phase in Labour’s civil war."

"[After referring to his March 2016 column cited above.] But these warnings were cast aside, dismissed as politically motivated smears rather than cries of pain and concern from a community that, for generations, had seen Labour as its political home. The dismissal came from the very top: when that column of mine appeared, Corbyn was filmed declaring it to be "utterly disgusting subliminal nastiness"."

"The Republican party’s shift away from democratic norms is no longer confined to one man, even if he embodies it and accelerates it. It is embedded in the ethos of the party now. Reversing that trend is a daunting prospect because of another shift, one that has been apparent for a while but which is taking especially vivid form in these midterm elections. It is the polarisation of information, so that Americans now exist in two distinct spheres of knowledge, each one barely touching the other."

"House of Glass begins in 1901 in a shtetl in Poland, and ends in 1999 in Paris, London and New York. It tells of Alex and his siblings, Jacques, Henri and Sala, Freeman's adored grandmother, with whom she spent a lot of time in her native US. Jacques died in Auschwitz, but Freeman saw Alex a fair few times before his death in 1999, and met other members of the family at a one-off reunion in Deauville in 1983, when she was five. Her book, she insists, is a family story, just with a number of unusual real events, such as when, in the late 1970s, Henri and his wife, Sonia, were neighbours of the Ayatollah Khomeini in Neauphle-le-Château."

"How much of one's ancestral identity must one give up to live in the modern world?"

"My life and internet bandwidth are too limited to fight with Assange’s online army of defenders about his politics, but surely we can all agree that he probably won't be commissioned to write an etiquette guide any time soon. And if any Ecuadorean embassy staff members wish to share further stories, please consider me the WikiLeaks of your bad houseguest stories."

"Do musicians who play private concerts for dictators and tour countries where homosexuality is illegal have a "nasty stain" on their albums? Or just the ones whose concerns about medicalising children are in line with NHS policy? Asking for me."

"Obviously there have been some men in this argument who have lost work — most obviously Graham Linehan [...] But the vast, vast majority are women. It’s the women journalists who write about this who get singled out, whether it's myself or Sonia Sodha or Catherine Bennett or Helen Lewis. There are men who write about this — James Kirkup, David Aaronovitch, Matthew d'Ancona — but they've had nothing like the abuse that Julie Bindel has had or Suzanne Moore has had. It's totally a gendered thing. Which just goes to show that some people really do know what a woman is."

"Arguments about gender are now so vicious that most high-profile people would rather eat their hair than speak out. But sport, it turns out, is a more clear-cut issue to some than, say, prisons – where various groups have argued over whether trans women should be housed with female inmates. The current ideology is that gender identity is at least as important, if not more so, than biological sex. That is why an LGBT sports group like Athlete Ally can dismiss Navratilova's arguments about male skeletal advantages with a simple "trans women are women". The International Olympic Committee allows trans women to compete if they have been reducing their testosterone for 12 months; but, increasingly, female athletes are saying that testosterone is not the only advantage. Boys start growing bigger bones, muscles and greater heart capacity from puberty, and no gender switch will undo that. One can firmly defend a person's right to live in the gender identity of their choosing yet also look at photos of trans women athletes such as Gabrielle Ludwig, Natalie van Gogh and [[w:Rachel McKinnon|[Rachel] McKinnon]] standing alongside their strikingly smaller female team-mates, and think Navratilova’s arguments are worth investigating instead of dismissing with cries of bigotry."

"[[w:Tony Slattery|[Tony] Slattery]] pretty much vanished from public life in the late 90s, and while 20 years will change anyone, he looks at least a decade older than his 59 years, and close to unrecognisable from his Whose Line days. Where once he was energetic and prickly, occasionally accused of grating self-satisfaction and gratuitous cruelty (he once said Jeremy Beadle should be "clubbed to death"), the man I meet today is like a lost, anxious teddy bear. Heavy-set and visibly nervous, he is still hyper-eloquent, with that familiar melodious voice, but the syllables sometimes stumble on his tongue. It is noon and there is a faint smell of alcohol about him, although he promises he hasn’t drunk anything today. "I made a special effort for you," he says with a sweet smile. As we walk through the office, I notice that he is limping. "I’ve got to get my leg sorted," he says, rolling up his trousers. His leg is purpled with vivid rashes and lesions. "It's some kind of cirrhosis," he says, unconcernedly. Whatever Slattery took out of life when he tore through the 90s British entertainment scene, life has since reclaimed its debt tenfold."

"Palestinians cannot live as subjugated citizens, and what is happening in Gaza now is an overwhelming tragedy."

"On Monday I went to the Jewish Vigil for Israel opposite Downing Street. It was nice, but it was also strange, because everyone I could see there was clearly Jewish: the men wore kippahs and tallits, and everybody knew the words to Hatikvah, Israel's national anthem. Across town a pro-Palestinian rally was happening. I looked at the photos in the papers in the next day and was struck by what a mixed crowd it was. Young Muslims, older white people, everyone marching together in defence of — what? Pogroms? Meanwhile, the Jews just had themselves. Now we know."

"This poses its own danger for democracy. Because there can be no collective decision-making – which is what democracy amounts to – without a collective, agreed-upon basis of facts. If we can’t first agree that the house is on fire, we can’t begin to talk about putting out the flames."

"When it comes to Diane Abbott, two important things need to be said first. One is that as the first black woman elected to parliament, she will always have an important place in the political history of this country. The other is that, according to one study, she receives more abuse, both racist and sexist, than any other woman in parliament, and by some distance. Yet both of those facts only make her letter all the more dispiriting, even baffling. How could someone with such direct experience of racism show such little understanding of how it works for people who are not the same as her?"

"[T]he main complaint in this piece seems to be that [[J. K. Rowling|[J.K.] Rowling]] does not write nice ladylike novels about nice ladylike things."

"Not all celebrities who disappear retire into gated-community comfort in Surrey and, contrary to the lie we are sold, fame is no cushion against falling between the cracks. Slattery is charming company – sweet, solicitous, his brain somehow still sharp despite his best efforts to blunt the thoughts that tormented him. He gave up the coke around the millennium when his beloved mother found some in his flat and he was mortified into abstinence. He couldn’t afford it now anyway. When I ask what his plans are this week, he says: "Buy some food, because we've run out. But we're waiting for money to come in from jobs and that often takes a while. So just make it to the weekend." It is very hard to not measure the distance between what is, what was and what should have been. He does still drink and, yes, he knows it would be better if he stopped completely, but he doesn't think he has the strength to do that. I tell him I am worried that performing will make him drink more. "I've been quite strict with myself so far," he says. "But there have been times when I've thought: 'I can't go on stage, I need that half bottle of vodka right now.' I’m getting better, but there's still some way to go.""

"[Referring to Jeremy Corbyn, M]any Jews do worry that his past instinct, when faced with potential allies whom he deemed sound on Palestine, was to overlook whatever nastiness they might have uttered about Jews, even when that extended to Holocaust denial or the blood libel – the medieval calumny that Jews baked bread using the blood of gentile children. (To be specific: Corbyn was a long-time backer of a pro-Palestinian group [Deir Yassin Remembered] founded by Paul Eisen, attending its 2013 event even after Eisen had outed himself as a Holocaust denier years earlier. Similarly, Corbyn praised Islamist leader Sheikh Raed Salah even though, as a British court confirmed, Salah had deployed the blood libel.)"

""Politicised", like its trendier, more modern version, "weaponised", is used by people as a means of discrediting an allegation or argument. When yet another school shooting happens in the US, Republicans dismiss anyone begging for more gun control by telling them they are "politicising a tragedy". Antisemitism, Jews were repeatedly told over the past five years, was being "weaponised" against the Labour party purely to destroy Britain's socialist future. And it is a flat-out certainty that this winter, when the effects of the coronavirus begin to bite again and people, shall we say, vent their displeasure at the government for not locking down cities sooner/failing to provide key workers with PPE/lying about the safety or otherwise of care homes, ministers will accuse them of "politicising" the virus. But just because it might be people who don't like [[Julian Assange|[Julian] Assange]], or guns, or the Labour party, or the Tory party who are making these points, it does not follow that the arguments are untrue. "Politicise" and "weaponise" does not mean an argument is invalid – it means someone else knows they can't argue against it. Disagreements are styled in such a black-and-white fashion these days: I am good, therefore anyone questioning me is bad. Are people really this absolutist, or are they just disingenuously pretending to be so in order to avoid awkward questions? Maybe both. But there does seem to be a general fear of ambiguity, or just a resistance to acknowledge grey areas."

"When I became an adult, I suddenly couldn't stop thinking of them. Moments I had barely noticed at the time, yet they made enough of an impact to leave a footprint in my memory, began to surface."

"There is a sense in which Hadley Freeman's Good Girls has been written by two authors: the anorexic teenager she once was and the recovered 44-year-old journalist with three children she now is."

"Pathology is the place where history talks with its loudest most grating voice."

"There is no third path and that is the one we are going to take."

"Too much you've view'd, too poignantly you've felt, Too long on human sufferings we've dwelt; These woful visions shift, but scenes appear, Which tho' less painful, cause the conscious tear."

"If after ages grow more humaniz'd, And present cruelty almost forgot; How will the reader, shudd'ring, be surpris'd, At living lobsters in a boiling pot."

"The scale of the movement was impressive, with over 120 committees established nationwide. The Antifa claimed 150,000 adherents. Many of these organisations broke through entrenched social barriers to include foreign slave labourers and establish working class unity across political parties and trade unions. Their functions ranged from creating local democracy, to restoring basic services like food supply. [...] The fact that so many committees adopted similar names and policies poses the question of whether there was a centralised organisation at work. Communists were prominent in nearly every Antifa despite the opposition of Moscow. Walter Ulbricht, the KPD leader, criticised the 'spontaneous creation of KPD bureaus, people's committees, and Free Germany committees', but he could do little as the KPD central apparatus had no communication link with the rank and file. Once communications were restored he could report: 'We have shut these [Antifas] down and told the comrades that all activities must be channelled through the state apparatus.' The Western Allies were equally disconcerted by the Antifas self-proclaimed 'ruthless struggle against all remnants of Hitler's party in the state apparatus, the local authorities and public life'. The US authorities expelled the committee from its offices, ordered the removal of all leaflets and posters from the streets, and then banned it. Any further use of the name 'Free Germany National Committee' would be punished severely. The military government stopped 's workplace councils purging Nazi activists and then abolished them. 's Nazis had been arrested by the Antifa, but were liberated by Allied command. When Antifa housed people made homeless by bombing in apartments abandoned by fleeing Nazis, the authorities evicted them."

"We should not, however, fall into the common error of imputing a false parallelism between the two great warrior ideologies."

"Nazism, for all its revolutionary jargon, represented in its essence a reaction against the nine-teenth-century faith in human progress. It was an attempt to seize history by the collar and frog-march it in a direction determined primaly by the selfish interests and obsessive beliefs of those in power. From the outset it wan an movement, offering its adherents the spurious solidarity of the street gang and the prospecive enjoyment of stolen booty."

"We find the highest rates and greatest diversity of the M17 line in Pakistan, India, and eastern Iran, and low rates in the Caucasus. M17 is not only more diverse in South Asia than in Central Asia, but diversity characterizes its presence in isolated tribal groups in the South, thus undermining any theory of M17 as a marker of a “male Aryan invasion” of India. One average estimate for the origin of this line in India is as much as 51,000 years. All this suggests that M17 could have found his way initially from India or Pakistan, through Kashmir, then via Central Asia and Russia, before finally coming into Europe. (Oppenheimer, 2003: 152)"

"Another geneticist, S. Oppenheimer, offers independent confirmation (2003) that there was no Aryan entry, either male or female; he focuses on the M17, or so-called “Caucasoid” (=Aryan!), genetic marker: “South Asia is logically the ultimate origin of M17 and his ancestors; and sure enough we find highest rates and greatest diversity of the M17 line in Pakistan, India and eastern Iran, and low rates in the Caucasus. M17 is not only more diverse in South Asia than in Central Asia but diversity characterizes its presence in isolated tribal groups in the south, thus undermining any theory of M17 as a marker of a ‘male Aryan invasion’ of India” ."

"Yet the class structure which cripples Britain more than any other European state, is as nothing compared with the stratified hierarchies in Austronesian traditional societies from Madagascar through Bali to Samoa. (...) This consciousness of rank is thus clearly not something that was only picked up by Austronesian societies from later Indian influence.” (p.484)"

"Oppenheimer is a medical doctor who has lived in Southeast Asia for decades. Like most of us, he is vaguely influenced by Marxism, e.g. where he dismisses religion as a means to “control other people's labour”, with explicit reference to Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. His book is based on solid scientific research (genetic, anthropological, linguistic and archaeological), and is in that respect very different from the numerous Atlantis books which draw on “revelations” and “channeling”... Stephen Oppenheimer makes a detailed and strong case for the importance of the culture of sunken Sundaland for the later cultures in the wide surroundings. India too must have benefited of certain achievements and human cargo imported from there."

"Oppenheimer, a leading advocate of this scenario, summarizes it in these words: “For me and for Toomas Kivisild, South Asia is logically the ultimate origin of M17 and his ancestors; and sure enough we find the highest rates and greatest diversity of the M17 line in Pakistan, India, and eastern Iran, and low rates in the Caucasus. M17 is not only more diverse in South Asia than in Central Asia, but diversity characterizes its presence in isolated tribal groups in the south, thus undermining any theory of M17 as a marker of a ‘male Aryan invasion’ of India. One average estimate for the origin of this line in India is as much as 51,000 years. All this suggests that M17 could have found his way initially from India or Pakistan, through Kashmir, then via Central Asia and Russia, before finally coming into Europe.”"

"First, that the Europeans’ genetic homeland was originally in South Asia in the Pakistan/Gulf region over 50,000 years ago; and second, that the Europeans’ ancestors followed at least two widely separated routes to arrive, ultimately, in the same cold but rich garden. The earliest of these routes was the Fertile Crescent. The second early route from South Asia to Europe may have been up the Indus into Kashmir and on to Central Asia, where perhaps more than 40,000 years ago hunters first started bringing down game as large as mammoths."

"Barley cultivation was developed in the Indus Valley."

"We went on the day on the boat train. I was 7, I had never seen a ship before. It looked very big. Everybody was very excited. We went down to the cabin and that's when my mother said to my father that she had made up her mind quite firmly that she would not go to bed in that ship. She would sit up at night. She decided that she wouldn't go to bed at night and she didn't!" I saw that ship sink, "I never closed my eyes. I didn't sleep at all. I saw it, I heard it, and nobody could possibly forget it." "I can remember the colours, the sounds, everything," she said. "The worst thing I can remember are the screams." "It seemed as if once everybody had gone, drowned, finished, the whole world was standing still. There was nothing, just this deathly, terrible silence in the dark night with the stars overhead." The band played one version of 'Nearer My God to Thee' of which there are three and the one they played was the one that was played in church." "I never closed my eyes at all – I saw that ship sink. And I saw that ship break in half."

": This administration is all about enriching -style businesses at the expense of low-income workers and consumers. This is the same administration, after all, that has gone out of its way to turn the into a vehicle to protect payday lenders and that has waged war on the student loan forgiveness program. The NLRB’s extraordinary anti-union efforts are more of the same. They are about making workers more vulnerable and more insecure, as are the administration’s relentless efforts to roll back the and expansion—because the more insecure that people at the bottom of the economy are, the easier they are to bully and exploit."

"In the wake of teachers’ strikes in a number of states, recent polling shows public support for unions at 64 percent—the highest, except for a few blips, in half a century. These are important developments. Labor is finally stirring. And Americans are on to the fact that Trump’s faux populism is actually all about rigging the game in favor of the wealthy."

"I'm all lost in the supermarket I can no longer shop happily I came in here for that special offer A guaranteed personality"

"He was just there, looking fantastic... the bastard."

"I was always left out when I was a little girl. I was different from everyone…People were jealous but I didn’t realise. I had a reunion with some school friends recently and they said, 'We were mean to you because you got special attention because you were so beautiful.’ I said, 'I wasn’t beautiful. I was gawky.’ I never ever imagined myself to look nice."

"When you get older, as a leading lady it gets harder…You try not to have someone else upstage or take the shine. When I play character roles I am usually playing people who are slightly over the top, so that goes fine."

"Over the years, I’ve learnt that out of challenge comes opportunity and I know if I hadn’t been tested, I wouldn’t have pushed myself or been able to discover my abilities."

"She always taught me, ‘Open your heart when times get tough, accept what happens, live in the moment and reach out to help others as there’s always someone worse off than you’. She believed, rightly, that gives you purpose and helps you heal. So I always do my best to forgive and move forward."

"The ICGS Bullying and Harassment Policy was breached repeatedly and extensively by the most senior Member of the House of Commons. In all, 21 separate allegations were proved and have been upheld. The House may feel that his conduct brought the high office of Speaker into disrepute. This was behaviour which had no place in any workplace. Members of staff in the House should not be expected to have to tolerate it as part of everyday life. ... [T]he respondent [Mr Bercow] has been widely unreliable and repeatedly dishonest in his evidence. He has attempted to defeat these complaints by false accusations of collusion and by advancing lies. ... The findings of the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, which we have upheld, show that the respondent has been a serial bully. [...] His evidence in the investigations, the findings of the Commissioner, and his submissions to us, show also that the respondent has been a serial liar. His behaviour fell very far below that which the public has a right to expect from any Member of Parliament. The respondent’s conduct was so serious that, had he still been a Member of Parliament, we would have determined that he should be expelled by resolution of the House. As it is, we recommend that he should never be permitted a pass to the Parliamentary estate."

"All I can say is that the case against me would have been thrown out by any court in the land since it is based on the flimsiest of evidence, rooted in hearsay and baseless rumour, and advanced by old school dogmatists once intent on resisting change at all costs and now settling some ancient scores with me. Add to that a dash of personal spite and you have some idea of the vengeful vendetta mounted against me. It is a travesty of justice and brings shame on the House of Commons. This has been a protracted, amateurish and unjust process which would not have survived five minutes' scrutiny in court. To describe what I have experienced as a kangaroo court is grossly insulting to kangaroos. None of the investigators is a lawyer and the Commissioner overseeing them has no expertise whatsoever in the consideration of alleged bullying."

"Well I'm sure he's got a great many merits, but thus far they've been fairly effectively concealed from public view."

"You are an incorrigible delinquent at times. Behave yourself, man!"

"It’s a point so blindingly obvious that only an extraordinarily clever and sophisticated person could fail to grasp it."