The Jewish community needs to be careful not to fall into the “honeytrap” of right-wing populism, a number of prominent leaders have warned.
During the Limmud Festival, Rabbi David Mason, executive director of Jewish refugee and antiracism charity HIAS-JCORE, said the political strand “only like certain Jews” and questioned their seemingly supportive stance towards the Jewish community and Israel.
He told the JC: “In their world view, it is the Judeo-Christian culture versus the Muslim world. A successful Jew is one who is on their side of the culture war, but a woke Jew is a ‘failed’ Jew.
He compared their stance to that of former labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who “believed that the ‘ideal Jew’ belonged to Jewish Voice for Labour, but if a Jew was a Zionist, they were the ‘wrong type of Jew’.”
Mason also said the Jewish community should also be concerned about the Popular Right’s “very negative and problematic” view of other minorities. “It is dangerous to unquestioningly go with the Popular Right as they could turn against us. Also, as Brits, we should want to be part of a society that is safe for all minorities, including our own.”
Mason was speaking after presenting a panel on how a sense of abandonment from the Left could push UK Jews further towards popular right-wing parties.
This year’s general elections saw the Reform party winning 14 per cent of the popular vote, although a survey carried out by the Institute for Jewish Policy Research prior to the election found that only six per cent of Jews were intending to vote for them.
Mason’s views echoed those of the president of the Board of the Deputies, Phil Rosenberg, who, during the session, called on the community to use the next five years “to make the case for passionate effective centrism” to counter the “polarisation in our politics”.
Rosenberg, who is passionate about interfaith work, said that before the next general election, the Board would be “challenging the Reform [party] on their candidate selection”.
During the 2024 election campaign, the JC found that a number of Reform candidates had previously published links to antisemitic posts.
Rabbi Sybil Sheridan, who works in social justice and interfaith, said the Jewish community needed “to work to build a moderate centre. We can’t have a society where the Far Left are calling for Intifada and the Far Right are throwing bricks."
She said that during the 50s and 60s, the Jewish community had been “living in the ‘Golden Age’, which was out of keeping with the rest of Jewish history. It was cool to be Jewish. People liked us.
“Now it’s gone back to people hating the Jews, but we don’t know how to deal with it. There is a general panic, which is forcing [Jewish] people to go towards the Popular Right.”
The community’s “default position should be the one with the strong, moral background…the middle way”, said Sheridan.
To achieve this, it was imperative “to look outwards and make connections by engaging with people [of other faiths] on an individual level”.
Lord Mann, a staunch campaigner against antisemitism, who has been appointed to co-chair the Board of Deputies’ groundbreaking Commission on Antisemitism along with former Conservative MP Penny Mordaunt, said: “To anyone who believes there are only problems on the Left, there are problems on the Right too. Populism is based on how to ‘other’ others. By being a populist party, [the Reform party] is going to create problems for the Jewish community.”
He said was incumbent on Jewish organisations to work with other minority groups. “You need to work with the black community. You have a lot of shared experiences of how prejudice impacts people’s lives.”
Mann said there were “some extremists in the Muslim community, but most aren’t like that. There are no big [anti-Israel] demonstrations in Bradford [where over 30 per cent of the population are Muslim]. 99.9 per cent of people just don’t care. They are just getting on with their lives.”
