Hi Sara,

Interesting piece. I’m Jewish — I’m the grandson of a Holocaust survivor — and I’m afraid our views differ. I am extremely sorry that you’ve experienced what you have: any abuse is totally unacceptable and I condemn it totally. But I must query your piece on a number of grounds.

1. How can you simultaneously correctly state that Jews of course have the right to define our own oppression… while supporting ALL the IHRA examples: which, er, deny the Palestinians the right to define their own oppression?
2. British Jewish support for Labour collapsed… when Ed Miliband was leader. I’m not even going to state what the explanation for that very obviously was. It’s just rather curious how Corbyn is so often accused of having alienated the British Jewish community when his Jewish predecessor apparently did.
3. Could you run past me what kind of ‘anti-Semite’ tried to ensure Yemeni Jews were given refuge in the UK… only to have almost the entirety of Parliament reject this?

I’ve written about all this on various occasions. Here (originally, on Open Democracy): https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/in-full-support-of-jeremy-corbyn/

And here: https://medium.com/@shaunjlawson/enough-is-enough-rachel-riley-gnasherjew-and-the-political-weaponisation-of-antisemitism-da21ccc7da67?source=rss------politics-5

That second article, incidentally, covers — among many other things — the ‘Jews not understanding irony’ comment. I note with surprise that you appear totally oblivious to the context behind it.

And while I do, genuinely, sympathise with your concerns and the very real pain you’ve expressed, the victims in today’s UK are those who die every single day — the disabled, the poor, the sick — because of this government. Not to mention Muslims: hate crimes against whom dwarf those against our fellow Jews; yet strangely, are almost never reported by the media at all, while Islamophobia has been completely normalised across discourse, society and to a quite staggering extent within the Conservative Party.

But my very real fear is simple. When prominent commentators and even leaders obsess with antisemitism on the left (which amounts to less than 0.1% in the Labour Party; and is at the same level more broadly across wider society: source, the Institute for Jewish Policy Research) and totally ignore it on the right; when people scream ‘antisemitism! Antisemitism!’ at seemingly anything at all on the left, it’s going to leave us like the Boy Who Cried Wolf. Meaning that when the monster appears through the far right, many people will have stopped listening to us altogether.

To put it another way: this incessant campaign is actually seriously endangering you, me, and all our fellow British Jews. If that doesn’t give you room for pause, I don’t know what would.

All best, and thankyou again for the article.