Anti-Semitism and Britain’s Hall of Mirrors

By Mark Mazower – April 6, 2018

New York Times

As I’ve read about the furor over anti-Semitism in Britain’s Labour Party, I’ve thought of my grandfather and wondered what he would have made of it.

In his youth, in czarist Russia, he had been a revolutionary activist, a member of the Jewish socialist movement known as the Bund. By the time the Bolsheviks seized power, he had fled to England to make a new life in North London. The Labour Party was his natural constituency, as it was my father’s. Can the party that welcomed my family have changed so much?

To read the recent headlines, one would think so. Jeremy Corbyn, the party’s leader, has been under attack for months. If Britain’s news media are to be believed, anti-Semitism is rife within Labour, Mr. Corbyn has willfully turned a blind eye to it, and successive internal inquiries have been mishandled. A wave of protest in the past few weeks has put his leadership under pressure.

Read the full article here: New York Times