The Real Reason Corbyn’s ‘Anti-racist’ Labour Just Can’t Deal With anti-Semitism

The UK Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis’s excoriating article in Monday’s Times has ripped open the wound that is Labour’s anti-Semitism problem. Mirvis  highlights the "anxiety" among British Jews; he decries Jeremy Corbyn’s complicity in anti-Jewish prejudice, and denounces the Labour leadership’s  "utterly inadequate" response to anti-Semitism.

Attuned to the everyday racism suffered by people of color, to Islamophobia, and to the legacies of colonialism, Labour has failed to comprehend and deal with the racism in its own ranks directed at Jews. This is an extraordinary outcome for a party which is, with good reason, proud of its legislative record on equality, race and discrimination.  

The Chief Rabbi is surely correct to point to Labour’s want of effective leadership. But the issues which Labour faces go deeper than this. The very problem itself has been misconceived – both by the party leadership and its critics. 

Amidst the claim and counter-claim over anti-Semitism in Labour there are two points of consensus. One is that prejudice against Jews is "a virus" (or sometimes a "disease," a "cancer" or, for Chief Rabbi Mirvis, a "poison") that erupts or takes root at different times and infects people who were once healthy. It follows from these metaphors that anti-Semitism can be "expelled" or "stamped out" from the Labour Party. The second point of agreement is that counting anti-Semites is the key measure of the party’s problem.

The quarrel only begins at the next stage: when we ask whether anti-Semites are the many or the few within Labour, and whether Jeremy Corbyn is one of them.

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– Mirvis tweet

"A new poison – sanctioned from the top – has taken root in the Labour Party. Many members of the Jewish community can hardly believe this is the same party that they called their political home for more than a century," writes @ChiefRabbi Ephraim Mirvis https://t.co/oM907fpB07

— The Times (@thetimes) November 25, 2019

The idea that anti-Semitism is a virus or a poison has become a cliché. Some clichés express important truths, but this one obscures far more than it reveals.

In Britain prejudice against Jews has been longstanding and widespread, not discontinuous. For the most part the problem we face today is not ideological anti-Semitism displayed by a few,  but negative and stereotypical ideas about Jews that have accumulated over centuries and are embedded deeply within our culture.