Being a Jew on the Corbyn left is soul- crushing. In the name of the cause, you must excuse racism in all but its extreme forms. The presence of a real Jew in its midst provides the left with cover. But stray from the party line, and you are not a comrade having a legitimate disagreement. You are a Jew and only a Jew, a corrupted and illegitimate voice that has no place in left-wing discussions.
The compromises Jewish leftists must swallow can be seen in the faintly pathetic career of Jon Lansman. In theory, there is nothing pathetic about him. The founder of Momentum is the third most powerful man in the Labour movement, behind only John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn. In the current issue of the Jewish Quarterly, Lansman insists he is not living a kind of lie but combining left-wing politics with a principled stand against anti-Semitism. ‘Having grown up as a north London Jew, the fight against anti-Semitism is core to my political roots. Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust were what brought me to where I am politically.’
Lansman went on to tell Guardian readers that, far from producing a charter for racists, Labour’s rewriting of the internationally agreed definition of anti-Semitism set a new ‘gold standard’. There was not one person on Labour’s National Executive Committee who did not ‘want to deal with anti-Semitism’.
Here are the gold standards Lansman must live by. This week, Peter Willsman, a Momentum member of the very National Executive Committee which Lansman said was united in its opposition to anti-Semitism in Labour, denied its existence: ‘I’ve certainly never seen it.’ In a voice filled with venom, he boomed that concerns about racism weren’t genuine but the malicious inventions of Jewish ‘Trump fanatics’. Labour MPs condemned him for propagating straight lies, but Lansman stayed silent, as did his patron, Jeremy Corbyn. At the time of going to press, Momentum was recommending that its supporters did not vote for Willsman in a forthcoming NEC election. Lansman was maintaining his silence, however, and keeping Willsman as a Momentum member.
Read the article by Nick Cohen in The Spectator.