Being Jewish

Six siblings in Berlin c.1926. Ludi’s mother is on the left.

JVL Introduction

In a highly personal account, Ludi Simpson reflects on the different elements that have gone into making his Jewish identity.

It  first appeared in issue 4 of Commontary, published in January 2022 by Commoners Choir. The choir is based in West Yorkshire and the magazine is available from its website.


The Making of a Political Taboo

Ludi Simpson

I grew up comfortable with my Jewishness. I was what I was and it was private. I have only been forced to reveal my Jewishness in recent years. I began to wonder what taboo I was breaking when I was dismissed by Councillors as ‘not a real Jew’, after I had written to them asking them not to associate criticism of Israel with antisemitism.

I could have slipped away from my identity but instead I have come to know it better.

I grew up taking pride in my Jewishness. There are, after all, many Jews to be proud of. Wonderful and modest intellectuals like Einstein. Great liberation heroes, whether in the Warsaw ghetto refusing to surrender to fascism, or fighting apartheid in South Africa. I associated Jewishness with education, with principled stands against injustice, and with respect for disagreement. Quakers have a similar progressive reputation, but I was not a Quaker. I was Jewish.

My Jewishness is hereditary from my mother, a refugee from Berlin in 1934. It should not be in question. Religion isn’t necessary for Jewishness, as we shall see. I am ‘lucky’ that my mother’s family was targeted early by Nazi persecution when exile was still possible. My grandfather was among the first to receive a police knock at the door. His sister’s family was not so fortunate. They were murdered in Theresienstadt concentration camp.

I grew up ignorant of religion. For many childhood years I thought we celebrated Christmas on the December 24th due to our Jewish rather than our continental origins. Doh, Christmas is not a Jewish festival! At school I was one of a gaggle who waited for the Church of England assembly to finish before filing in to hear the school notices. The others were declared Roman Catholics, a Mormon and one Jew. I had decided to join the excluded not as a Jew but as an atheist. Religion isn’t necessary for Jewishness.

My Jewishness is recognised by Israel, which gives me the ‘right to return’ to a country my family has no ties to. That contradiction was about the limit of my knowledge and interest in Israel. Israel simply wasn’t part of being a Jew, for me. Israel itself has no state religion. It is defined as a Jewish state, a home for all Jews, with or without faith, based on the claim that Jews are a nation. This is the key political claim of Zionism.

So why wasn’t Israel on my radar as home? My mother’s family maintained a very different political tradition among Jews whose slogan in Yiddish was “Dortn vu mir lebn – dort is unzer land” – “Where we live, that is our country”. It is only recently that I have come to hear about this philosophy of ‘hereness’. It was born as a political movement in 1897: the Jewish Labour Bund.

The Bund became the largest political force among Jews in Poland and much of Eastern Europe during the 1920s and 1930s. It provided social networks and physically protected religious Jews from discrimination and violent attacks. The Bund was not restricted to Jews, and did not adopt religious doctrine. For the Bund, the liberation of Jews was tied to the liberation of all who are exploited or discriminated against. In the holocaust it was almost wiped out. The Bund also became known by the words of a Warsaw ghetto leader, Marek Edelman: ‘Always with the oppressed, never with the oppressor’. All this was new to me.

We need a bit more history, please bear with me. In that same year of 1897 a second political movement was born, the World Zionist Organisation. Like the Bund, Zionism neither adopted religious doctrine nor limited its membership to Jews. It saw a future for Jews in a safeguarded national space. In the aftermath of the first world war, the British and French occupation of the Ottoman Empire gave rise to just such a space in what is now known as the Middle East.

The British Mandate of Palestine favoured economic concessions to Zionist Jewish developers. In 1948 the executive head of the World Zionist Organisation, Ben Gurion, declared the State of Israel on the same day as the British Colonial administration withdrew. He became Israel’s first Prime Minister, presiding over the ‘Arab-Israeli war’ which Palestinians know as the Naqba or catastrophe. Over half of the one million Palestinian inhabitants fled or were forced from their homes. Israel grants them no right of return.

OK, back to the present and the UK. The Jewish Board of Deputies does not represent all Jews. It has no deputies from ultra-Orthodox synagogues, and few Jews not affiliated to synagogues. But it and others have placed a taboo on non-Zionist perspectives. Those challenging the taboo, Jew and non-Jew alike, suffer defamation.

How telling it is that the taboo is not antisemitism itself. Irish novelist Sally Rooney called out Israel’s apartheid laws, which are recognised as such by human rights organisations in Israel itself. The Archbishop of Canterbury was pressured to eat humble pie after referring to the likely climate destruction as even more deadly than the Nazi holocaust. I’m pretty sure that most Jews feel no offence at a truthful estimation of the impact of global warming. Joe Solo, singer and tireless fundraiser for those in need was defamed as antisemitic for having given solidarity to an MP accused of antisemitism who was later cleared of the charge. Bizarre but true.

I feel that I have been unwillingly placed in a combat zone. A bristling armoury of accusers and defamers surrounds the political perspective of Jewish supremacy in Israel. To question that supremacy is to break a taboo, and to challenge the armoury is also to break the taboo.  As with any taboo, its success demands fidelity; even discussing a challenge is to be outcast. Though this taboo is political, and though the unmentionable actions of Israel comprise a racist endeavour, the penalty for taboo-breakers is to be court-martialled as racist themselves.

I don’t think that this taboo is or even can be the result of a conspiracy. Taboos are far more embedded in established thinking; they command obedience through an only partially co-ordinated barrage of moral, legal and political pressure. I will give only one more recent example.

Tzipi Hotovely is the Israeli ambassador to the UK whose appointment in 2021 was controversial among Jews and others because her previous career has been as an outspoken Israeli politician rather than a diplomat.  On November 9th after addressing a student meeting at the London School of Economics she left through very noisy political protests against her championing of Israeli settlements on Palestinian land. The next day the long-established Jewish Chronicle headlined its editorial leader “On the anniversary of Kristallnacht, a Jew hunting mob on the streets of London”. The article talked of violence and antisemitism. Where was the antisemitism here? Mainstream accounts report no violence but boos and shouts of “Shame on you” as she left. Neither police nor University accounts have reported antisemitism.

Nonetheless within hours the ambassador announced that “We will not give in to thuggery and violence.”, while UK home secretary Priti Patel followed up with “I will continue to do everything possible to keep the Jewish Community safe,” and “Antisemitism has no place in our universities or our country.” This was a neat equation of the Israeli ambassador with ‘the Jewish Community’, as if all Jews have her one voice, and as if our feelings are diplomatically represented by Israel.

I am alarmed at labelling as antisemitic any noisy political opposition to the occupying violence of Israel. This labelling undermines any understanding of antisemitism as hatred of Jews as Jews. Because I am part of that noise, it excludes me from my heritage. I am shocked that attacks on those who question this labelling have been successfully used to bleach the Labour party, founded to represent workers in Britain.

I have maybe cast the Bund and Zionism too definitely. Zionists range from those mildly supportive of the idea of a safe national space for Jews to rabid deniers of Palestinian claims to human rights in Israel. The problem there is apartheid, ethnic cleansing, violence and discrimination.

I am left determined to live by my Jewishness in a way I never have before. In no way does this oppose other Jews who see things differently. We are united by our common heritage as well as the oppression and the killing that destroyed so many of us. That heritage unites us too with all other oppressed peoples. I’ll join others to break the taboo that demands we do not call out the Israeli government for its systematic violations of Palestinian rights. Such a taboo is not based on Jewish tradition. I know it to be a recent political prohibition that pollutes all our futures until we overcome it.

 

Comments (12)

  • Al Wallace says:

    What an informative explanatory piece. Thank you Ludi.

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  • Joseph Hannigan says:

    Thank you…but are you in the
    Labour Party?

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  • Alan Stanton says:

    Thank You Ludi Simpson, for nearly every sentence.

    Plus very special thanks for the luverly introduction to Commoners Choir.
    I began with listening to “Singing Together Apart”. But sadly, do have to pause and go to bed.

    But read it again and then a third time and thought there are of course differences. But nothing which undermines the underlying message.
    I wasn’t, for example, only “forced to reveal my Jewishness in recent years.” There was no big reveal. At least not until anes time then comment, Ludi. almost entirely to just

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  • Hazel Davies says:

    Very well explained.

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  • Bonny Ambrose says:

    Excellent article. Thanks so much.

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  • Mike Scott says:

    Give or take a few details and quibbles, I could have written this – and I’m sure there are lots of us who can say the same. We need to keep asserting our view of Judaism, at least to show the world there isn’t just one “community”.

    After all, Jews are a famously argumentative lot and the joke about “two Jews, three opinions” isn’t entirely inaccurate!

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  • Leah Levane says:

    Really well put – although I was brought up with more knowledge of my Jewishness, including a fair amount of involvement with the synagogue, and also was not (knowingly) directly descended from family caught up in the Nazi era, otherwise this sums up really well what I feel and experience. Thank you for this

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  • Alan Stanton says:

    Apologies, I shouldn’t type and cut & paste in the small hours. My third paragraph was jumbled nonsense.
    My thanks in paras 1 and 2 was heartfelt.

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  • Bob Cannell says:

    Great article Ludi.
    It is well known that the victims of abusers often become abusers themselves. We can understand their PTSD and psychosocial illnesses that underlie this behaviour but we don’t condone their abuse to their victims. We try to stop that and try to help them heal themselves, to break the cycle.
    80 years is too short a time to recover from genocide. Of course Jewish people and Jewish communities are flailing around and in the case of Israel building walls to lock themselves in to what they hope is safety.

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  • Robin de Brea says:

    As your brother, Ludi, I am happy to read this. I concur with everything you write. I somehow take pride in a jewishness I never even knew I “had” until I was 17, and part of me knows that my jewishness is purely a “chance” consequence of being born to this particular mother. I pity all those whose racial and religious origins have led them into challenging physical and emotional places – I’m lucky to be able to live without provoking too much undeserved abuse! I like to see us all as human beings of different shapes and colours and origins and these differences and diversities add colour to the human race to be enjoyed and never to be used as an excuse to elevate or diminish any one of us …

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  • Graham Reeve says:

    Very well written and very interesting. Can you imagine being called anti on non British because you said Boris Johnson is an idiot. Being critical of Israels politics is the same.

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  • Ken Fuller says:

    Excellent piece, Ludi! You mum would be proud of you.

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Comments are now closed.