Joseph Finlay
@joseph_finlay
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Historian of British Jews and race relations in postwar Britain. Composer and musical director. Socialist and דאָיִקער. @josephfinlay .bsky.social
London
Joined September 2013
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I'm now mostly active on Bluesky - alongside increasing numbers of UK people. Please find and follow me there
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If you think that Corbyn pronouncing Epstein as ‘Epshtein’ last night was an example of antisemitism, there is a high chance that you may be an idiot.
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A reminder that the Chief Rabbi isn’t ‘the leader of the Jewish community’. Nor is the President of the Board of Deputies or the Editor of the JC. We don’t have one. We are diverse and each make our own decisions. And a substantial number of us will be voting Labour.
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I left Labour today after a decade of membership. Starmer is so right wing that I’m unsure a Labour gvt under him would be much better than Sunak. Blocking of Corbyn the final straw. Will support any credible left independents at the next election. Hopefully Corbyn amongst them
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It’s unconscious but North London as a term of insult has antisemitic undertones, conjuring up a (largely lost) world of 1930s and 40s European emigrés in Hampstead and on the Finchleystrasse, lefty lawyers, Marxist intellectuals (like R Miliband and Hobsbawm) and strudel cafes.
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Is it a march against antisemitism or a march in solidarity with Israel?
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When your fight against antisemitism involves suspending Jews I think you might be part of the problem rather than the solution
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Let’s call it what it is: the horror and outrage at the election of a left wing Jewish woman to Labour’s NEC is an example of antisemitism.
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You can take antisemitism seriously, or you can suspend Jeremy Corbyn from the Labour party due to completely reasonable comments he made today. You can't do both.
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Friends, please don't say the Jewish community is acting in bad faith, they have genuine concerns even if I think the issue is not so huge. And please don't deny that antisemitism exists. But do keep defending, and campaigning for Corbyn.
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Treating a diverse group of people with a common ethnic or religious background as a singular ‘community’ with ‘leaders’ and ‘collective interests’ is an inescapably colonial practice
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While I disagree with this, it is worth understanding and not simply condemning it. Abbott is using racism to mean institutional racism, oppression by state bodies, a concept coined by Carmichael and Hamilton in 1967 and subsequently often described as structural racism 1/
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Emma Dent Coad, Sam Tarry, Maurice McLeod, probably Jeremy Corbyn and any other socialists fractionally blocked from standing should stand as independent socialists. Some would win and could form a block in parliament, giving them more influence than Labour backbenchers
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First reading of the EHRC report: 1) It makes some helpful recommendations in relation to procedure 2) It points out some examples of bad process, some under McNichol, some in the interim, and some under Fornby.....
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No need to compare the government’s appalling immigration policy to Nazi Germany. Instead compare it to the 1930s British response to Nazi Germany - when Britain kept out most refugees, an act which likely resulted in their death.
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And if white gentiles could stop using Jews as a means to accuse Black people of racism that would also be great
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@kimch1stryder
Oh yes Ed Miliband received tons of antisemitism but nobody cared because it was coming from the right
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Very good. Waiting for complaints that it was filmed in front of the wrong kind of bush.
There is no place for antisemitism in the Labour Party. We must drive it out of our movement for good.
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Suspending people for antisemitism when they haven’t actually done anything antisemitic is misguided philosemitism and is really bad for Jews. Please stop doing it.
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@KarenPollock100
@thetimes
@HolocaustUK
I don’t see how you can square this article with your organisation’s mission
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I gather Joan Ryan has lost the no confidence vote 95 votes to 92.
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Nice find in the archives today: 50th anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street in 1986. Of course Corbyn was one of the speakers. Plus the former Jewish Communist MP Phil Piratin
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If these actions are illegal under the 2010 Equalities Act then I would imagine most public bodies in Britain are contravening the law on a regular basis, in much more serious ways than the Labour party.
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Mark Gardner of CST basically said that proper, mainstream Jews stay home, afraid of the protests, while 'Revolutionary Socialist Jews' reveal themselves not to be proper Jews by attending the protests in large numbers. Yet more policing of the acceptable boundaries of Jewishness
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So this £18 million a year from Sunak - can we use it for Jewish theatre? Jewish music? Hebrew, Yiddish and Ladino classes? Talmud study? Oh, it's just for communal security. Right. And in exchange they're conflating us with Israel and setting us against Muslims. I see.
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We’ve got to a bizarre place where questioning a certain narrative of antisemitism, or disagreeing with claims that certain individuals are antisemitic, is in itself antisemitism. What word are we going to use for people who actually hate Jews?
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But before that, most starkly under Nazism, Jews did suffer from institutional racism to a huge degree, despite the term not yet having been coined. Earliest uses of the word racism in English refer to Nazi persecution of Jews. 3/
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Jewish communal orgs really need to retire the ‘no other minority would be treated like this’ line. It betrays a serious lack of understanding of how badly other minorities are treated.
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Since, say 1950, in the West, Jews have not really faced this kind of institutional racism, though they have been victims of prejudice. More complex in relation to Irish and GRT, particularly vis a vis the troubles and subsequent treatment of the Irish diaspora in Britain 2/
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This is a really irresponsible, fear-mongering front page. Jewish fear is stoked to bolster a Conservative 'anti-extremism' agenda, which presents Palestinians and Muslims as a threat. This behaviour by government and the Tory press is a much greater threat to Jewish wellbeing
Growing numbers of Jewish families are considering fleeing London for abroad because of rising antisemitism in the capital
#frontpage
The Campaign Against Antisemitism says some Jewish residents have even left already over fears for their safety
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We need to do the work of applying concepts of institutional/structural racism, coined in relation to African American experience, to earlier Jewish history, as it directly applies: persecution and oppression by the state and its agencies
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‘Cultural Marxism’ is not simply an antisemitic conspiracy theory. It’s an antisemitic theory directed specifically at left-wing or non-nationalist Jews. That’s why it can be condoned or even promoted by the Jewish right.
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It's amazing how many people on here have an irrational hatred of Jewish organisations such as
@jewdas
@JVoiceLabour
@NaamodUK
@_JFJFP
@_VashtiMedia
. It's almost like there's a pattern in which they are telling people that leftwing Jews are the ones it's ok to hate.
It's amazing how many people on here have an irrational hatred of Jewish community newspapers
@JewishChron
and
@JewishNewsUK
. When you add in the venom they express about key Jewish organisations like
@BoardofDeputies
@JLC_uk
&
@CST_UK
it's almost like there's a pattern.
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One more thing: if British Jews haven’t historically been treated as an ethnic minority that’s because (in the main) they, and the communal leaders that sought to represent them, didn’t want to be.
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The party is here being criticised for being TOO keen to suspend and expel people accused of antisemitism 6) Criticism for a lack of training and a lack of clear rules is fair, but of course there is no consensus on who should deliver such training and what the rules should be
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Historically, passion plays were absolutely steeped in anti-Judaism. If you depict the Pharisees (the precursors of rabbinic Judaism, and the villains of the plays) as wearing Jewish religious clothes such as tallitot (prayer shawls) it makes the anti-Judaism totally apparent
Celebration of the Passion of Christ is now…antisemitic, apparently.
Seen this several times now - with it being implied Christianity is antisemitic and Christians observing their faith are antisemites.
So toxic, divisive & disgusting.
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The whole point of Holocaust education is so people can make connections between current events and the events that LED UP TO the Holocaust in order for ‘never again’ to be a reality. Far from being illegitimate, comparisons are necessary.
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Interference from the leader’s office is also seen as indirect discrimination, which is ironic given that in a number of cases the office was the one trying suspend and expel, overriding correct procedures to do so, and not showing due to process to people accused of antisemitism
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Clear rules might mean people who Jewish communal organisations think should be expelled are not. The headlines that Labour broke the law come from these technical failings, not harassment and discrimination as they would normally be understood.
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@JakeWSimons
This is circular logic. The borders of the ‘Palestinian Territories’, ie areas A and B, about 26% of the West Bank, were deliberately defined under the Oslo agreements to exclude Jews living in the West Bank, ie the settlers.
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The comparison between an angry protest against a formal representative of the Israeli state and Kristallnacht is obscene
On the anniversary of Kristallnacht, a Jew hunting mob on the streets of London - The Jewish Chronicle leader
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3) It finds Labour guilty of harassment and indirect discrimination but doesn’t define these in everyday terms 4) The harassment part is purely based on comments by Ken Livingstone (strangely excluding his most offensive ones about Hitler) and a councillor called Pam Bromley
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I see that the Hasbara line 'the Palestinians are not indigenous, most of them arrived in the Ottoman era' has a precedent in a 1958 Jewish apologia for apartheid (Joseph Leftwich, Jewish Chronicle)
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Had my thesis corrections accepted so I think I can possibly maybe call myself Dr? As Dr Finlay my casebook awaits…
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I’d say those particular Jews have had rather a lot of opportunities to speak for themselves in the last few years
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‘I, Herschel Fink, am definitely not in any way Jewish, and neither was my father olev ha sholem’
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It would be peak Britain if the Prime Minister was brought down over a flat renovation rather than the preventable deaths of 127,000 people
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How about we expropriate the property of all billionaires?
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Very much agree with this but it depends on the Lib Dems making PR (without a referendum) a condition of coalition. They failed to do that in 2010.
We desperately need to get rid of the Tories - but a hung Parliament is our best bet to overturn Tory laws, get electoral reform, and put a check on Starmer's control freakery.
My new column!
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Fantastic article. Save the Sadeh farm!
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5) Various things are described as indirect discrimination: a badly managed complaints procedure, lack of antisemitism training for complaints staff, lack of a clear policy to guide suspensions and expulsions...
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Discuss. In 80,000 words. Coming soon to a PhD viva near you
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Very pleased to see that
@JewishSocialist
issues between 1985 and 1992 have been digitised with an introduction by
@juliabard
. Such a great publication, glad it's now more widely accessible
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I think it’s for the best that people who don’t think the party’s elected leader should be Prime Minister don’t stand as Labour candidates. When those people step down it’s a win for the party, not a loss.
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This is the Boris Johnson defence: I didn’t intend to break the rules so it doesn’t matter that I did. I didn’t realise proroguing Parliament was illegal at the time so I can’t be blamed for it. Starmer made 10 firm pledges: in just 2 years he has abandoned all of them.
@OwenJones84
@JolyonMaugham
@AndrewMarr9
@Keir_Starmer
@LBC
I think the question is whether they were pledged deceitfully, i.e. with an intention of getting rid of them. I haven’t seen evidence that they were, and the country has fundamentally changed since they were pledged: Covid and inflation particularly
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This is insane. It is literally the opposite of the truth.
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Real antiracists spend their lives engaged in the hard work of fighting racism in their movements and communities. Fake antiracists go on TV to attack Jeremy Corbyn. Learn to tell the difference.
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If he’s abandoned the pledges he made to become Labour leader why should anyone believe in any pledges he makes to become Prime Minister?
Andrew Marr lists Sir Keir Starmer's pledges before becoming Labour leader, testing whether he stands by them now.
@AndrewMarr9
|
@Keir_Starmer
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1. If you’re Jewish - please don't worry, Jeremy Corbyn is not antisemitic.
2. If you’re not Jewish, please call out conspiracy theories when you see them and don’t elide Jews and Israel.
3. In either case, campaign for a socialist government!
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I support the Palestinian struggle for freedom and justice. And I support the right to resist occupation, apartheid and siege. But that right is not unlimited. Violence against military targets is moral but the mass killing of civilians (in Israel or Gaza) cannot be justified.
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The British establishment is always happy to elevate the super rich from a minority group whilst refusing to take any action that would transform the position of the rest of that community. 2/2
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James O' Brien said that Corbyn wrote the foreword for a 'profoundly antisemitic book'. Nonsense. The book is Hobson's Imperialism, published in 1902. In the whole text there is just one paragraph which contains a veiled form of antisemitism, without mentioning Jews by name.
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The question of whether British Jews should be considered an ethnic minority (or BAME) is not one with a simple yes or no answer: it's complex, contested and historically contingent (which is why I am, in part, doing a PhD on it)
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As well as being a nasty and unjustified smear piece against an important Holocaust education org, this article claims to show a picture of
@AnneFrankTrust
director Tim Robertson but in fact depicts
@MichaelRosenYes
!
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Corbyn says he previously supported boycotts of Burma, South Africa and Chile
#jewishlabourdebate
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The new threat to the Jewish community is, apparently, Jewish Studies academics
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Delighted that my local Labour party backed
@Corbyn4Leader
tonight. Good work Brent Central CLP
@Calderbank
,
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Looking forward to speaking as part of this event tonight
Over 120 people have already registered for our panel on Wednesday!
We'll be hearing from Palestinian voices and experts within our community about what anti-Palestinian racism is, and how we can join in solidarity to end it.
Sign up here:
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@iwasid
Welcome to my academic research: going through the Jewish Chronicle archive and chalishing to go to various now defunct cafes, buffets and luncheon clubs
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Calling British racists Nazis usually misses the mark because it locates fascism as intrinsically foreign. We should compare them to our home grown tradition: Oswald Moseley, Enoch Powell, the Monday Club and the National Front.
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Good afternoon canvassing with Jews against Boris in Harrow East
INCREDIBLE turnout today at our canvasss in Harrow East with Indians Against Tory Division.
We reject the politics of division that try to use our identities to keep a dangerous government in power. Instead, we're building grassroots solidarity from below ✊🏼✊🏽✊🏾✊🏿
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I focused this thread on Jews, as it’s my area, but clearly GRT people have historically faced substantial institutional racism in Britain and continue to do so in the present, from all political parties and particularly from the British state
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@bengidley
I’d say it’s part of the long tradition of anti-communist antisemitism, encompassing McCarthyism and Churchill’s Zionism vs Bolshevism. ‘Patriotic’ Jews are praised while Communist/internationalist Jews who oppose the imperial project become the Jews it’s acceptable to hate
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‘Coronation Shabbat’ is about as Jewish as Yom Ha’atzmaut
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One of the most prominent American liberal Zionist writers now backs a bi-national state. Long but important read
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The Labour party is criticised for dealing with antisemitism complaints without proper process and responds by immediately suspending its former leader without proper process. Did they actually read the report?
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A lot of Jewish people are members of Jewish youth movements when they are young. Yes, these movements are Zionist but also promote cultural Judaism, and in the case of Habonim, socialism. Such past membership does not make them ‘pro Israel activists’
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I don't think diaspora Jewish bodies need to issue statements on events in Israel/Palestine (after all, Judaism≠Israel) but if they choose to do so, to condemn rocket attacks on Israelis without also mentioning the bombs falling on Gaza is unconscionable.
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The contradiction at the heart of the Baddiel/Jews Don't Count thesis, which has many imitators, is that it declares the discourses of 'identity politics' and 'woke' to be nefarious and detrimental while simultaneously demanding that Jews and antisemitism be included in them
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In 1858 Lionel De Rothschild became the first practising Jew to take his seat in the House of Commons, after a long campaign to allow a non-Christian oath. He was a hugely wealthy banker, whilst most Jews of the time would have been too poor to vote let alone stand as MPs. 1/2
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I've written an analysis of CST's 2023 antisemitic incidents report for the new issue of
@jewishsocialist
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I wrote a piece on the question of whether or not Jews should be considered an ethnic minority, giving it some historical context
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Was a joy to take my 3 year old to her first panto today. Cinderella by
@Immersion_Thtr
at
@HarrowArts
is a lovely classic family pantomime, beautifully delivered.
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It’s an inevitable result of having policies that your opponents will criticise them. The answer is to defend your policies rather than to avoid having any
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I don’t share Geoffrey Alderman’s politics, but he’s one of the leading historians of British Jewry, and his critique of the idea that Corbyn is an antisemite is important and well done
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It is bizarre that the Lib Dems, whose main policy for 3 years has been to hold a second referendum, would prefer to go into coalition with the Tories, who have sworn not to have one, rather than Labour, who have pledged to hold one within 6 months.
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Why is the non-Jewish Stella Creasy even at the JLM conference, let alone attacking a Jewish panellist in this way? Labour right philosemitism (exclusively towards the right kind of Jews) is so toxic
🔥🔥Stella Creasy asks Jon Lansman to personally apologise for the disasterous impact Momentum had on the Labour Party
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I find this piece appalling. It uses the successful immigration of the author's grandfather to argue for the exclusion of other refugees, claiming that too rapid immigration would risk the 'country's way of life.
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Had a great time watching a showing of
@UriAgnon
’s engaging and playful new musical ‘Antisemitism’. A tricky score brilliantly performed by
@mollyblynch
@DavidDjemal
and
@michal_horowicz
, in a smart production by
@HeyEmJude
and
@AmirShoenfeld
. All thanks to
@ParkesInstitute
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I'll be supporting Pamela in Harrow West
I am standing as an independent PPC for Harrow West at the next general election. I will fight for the rights of ordinary working class people, for social and economic justice, peace and human rights. If you want to get involved my website is
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The new NUS president Shaima Dallali posted one offensive tweet 10 years ago, while aged 17, for which she has apologised. All the rest of her 'controversial' tweets were simply pro-Palestinian and thus completely reasonable. A storm in a teacup. Best of luck to her.
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Seeing the (ludicrous) controversy over Alexi Sayle being on Desert Island Discs, I see that in 1989 the programme featured Enoch Powell. Appropriately enough his favoured track was a piece of Wagner.
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My piece on UK antisemitism statistics and what they do and don't say (this time with the correct link) for
@JewishSocialist
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I know this is not the main point here but…since when did Jews take over Muswell Hill? I grew up there, did I not get invited to the takeover meeting?
Just another racist Karen harassing an innocent jew in Stamford Hill
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Spotted an antisemitic comments on a left wing page (Rothschild nonsense), reported it to the moderator, they deleted it and banned the (US based) user in minutes. That's the way to do it - it's not hard!
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On the last leg of the journey to Omskirk for the
@JewishStudiesUK
conference
@edgehill
! Looking forward to presenting tomorrow morning on British Jews and whiteness
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Clive Lewis spoke at my local Labour Party meeting tonight - he would be a vastly better leader than Starmer
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