Just How Many Members of the JLM Are Really Jewish?

As Jeremy Corbyn becomes more popular, so the vile right-wing establishment and media, and particularly the Sunset Times, are determined to smear him and the Labour party as anti-Semites. One of the leaders of this campaign within the Labour Party has been the JLM, or the Jewish Labour Movement. Who I believe should be more accurately called the Zionist Bowel Movement. They claim to represent the Labour Party’s Jewish members and have been active denouncing anyone they can on the Labour left as a Jew-hater.

In reality, what they consider to be anti-Semitism is very narrow: it’s opposition to Israel and Zionism, rather than anti-Semitism in the proper meaning of the word: hatred of Jews as Jews. It honestly isn’t surprising, as the Jewish Labour Movement is the successor to Paole Zion, or ‘Workers of Zion’, a Jewish Zionist organisation that became affiliated to the Labour Party in the 1920s, and which campaigned for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. But Paole Zion was more or less moribund when it was taken over in 2014 or so by embezzler Jeremy Newmark, of the Jewish Leadership Council, who told his friends in a Golders Green coffee shop that he wanted to work for Zionism from inside the Labour party, using the tactics Zionists had already used in the Universities and Colleges Union. The Zionist Bowel Movement has repeatedly claimed that anti-Semitism is rife in the Labour Party, and last week loudly held a meeting to discuss disaffiliation, because the party was allegedly no longer a place where Jews were comfortable.

In fact, this is news to many of the Party’s Jewish members, who acknowledge that there probably is anti-Semitism in Labour, but haven’t met it personally themselves in all their years of membership. Labour also have a number of other Jewish organisations, like the superb Jewish Voice for Labour, which has attacked the anti-Semitism witch-hunt and defended its innocent victims, like Jackie Walker. I’ve also no doubt that the Party has very many other Jewish members, who are not members of specifically Jewish organisations. Many people don’t want to be put in boxes or defined by religion or ethnicity. One of these was Dr. Jonathan Miller, the satirist, broadcaster and opera director. When he was introduced on one programme back in the 1960s as a Jew, he replied by stating that he was ‘Jewish’. ‘I’m a Jewish. I have no interest in being a minority’. Which I dare say is probably the attitude of many assimilated Jews comfortable with their British and Jewish identities.

From their public pronouncements, you could be forgiven for believing that the Zionist Bowel Movement had a mass membership. After all, they claim to speak for the Jewish members of a party, which now has a quarter of a million members. They claimed to have 2000 members, which is trivial compared to that of the Party in general. And it’s probably less than that. From the voting numbers recorded at their general meeting on the issue of disaffiliation, it appears that they may only have 150 members. And not all of those of are Jewish. The Jewish Labour Movement is open to gentiles, and you don’t have to be a member of the Labour Party. Tony Greenstein on his blog stated that as many of 2/3 of the Bowel Movement’s members were actually non-Jews. That’s a hundred out of 150. So you have the spectacle of a Jewish organisation, of which only a third are actually Jewish, trying to tell a party of a quarter of a million that anti-Semitism is rampant in their ranks, in the face of the majority of its members and proper Jewish organisations with an equivalent or higher membership, who assert that it isn’t. And some of these other Jewish organisations have members who are really Jewish.

The JLM is such a pompous organisation, and its claims to represent Labour’s Jews so grotesque, that I was tempted to send them a letter offering to become a member. I’m not Jewish, but have read books on Biblical Hebrew and have the piano music for Hava Nagila, which puts me on the same level as many of their other members. And no, I’m not sneering at Jews or promoting Jewish stereotypes with this comment. I am attacking and satirising a mendacious organisation that has done nothing but spread smears and destroy innocent people’s lives. And they have done this not for any good reason, but simply to defend Israel and its terrorist actions against the Palestinians from criticism. Far from representing the party’s Jewish members, they should be seen as a marginal organisation which grotesquely tries to reduce the rich variety of Jewish opinions on the question of Jewish identity to simply equating it with Zionism and support for Israel.

And in doing so they have smeared decent people, including genuine, Torah-observant and secular Jews. The JLM really only represents Zionism under the pretence of standing for the party’s Jews. And if they departed from the Party tomorrow, absolutely nothing would be lost. Indeed, as Mike and many of the other bloggers have shown from comments posted on Twitter, many people, Jewish and non-Jewish, would be delighted.

Tags: anti-semitism, Anti-Semitism Smears, Blogs, Embezzlement, Golders Green, Hava Nagila, Jackie Walker, Jeremy Newmark, Jewish Labour Movement, Jewish Voice for Labour, Jews, Jonathan Miller, Opera, Palestinians, Paole Zion, Sunday Times, Tony Greenstein, Twitter, Vox Political, Zionism