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Do you feel under "constant attack"? Do you feel "more frightened and threatened than at any time in your lives?" That's what Jewish friends are telling Baron Mitchell of Hampstead (Parry Mitchell if you knew him before 2002 when he was ennobled) and it is what he told the House of Lords last week during a curious mini-debate on "Tolerance, Democracy and Openness." Lord Mitchell, chair of the Weizmann Institute Friends in the UK and the Coexistence Trust, which promotes good relations between Muslims and Jews, told his fellow peers that there were campuses Jewish students preferred to avoid and many instances on campus where stickers saying "Death to the Jews" were posted and removed only slowly.
 
Recalling the anti-Semitism that his own mother had experienced, Lord Mitchell told the House that "Before the war, some of our leading authors, poets and academics were openly anti-Semitic. Our leading public schools thought that they were being liberal when they imposed a 10 per cent Jewish quota on admissions. Indeed, some still do."
 
This woeful tale stimulated Lord Graham of Edmonton, a fellow Labour peer and veteran of the co-operative movement, to inform the House that: "One of my cousins is Miriam Stoppard. She was the daughter of my Auntie Jenny, who was the sister  of my father, and she married Tom Stoppard. Her mother married Sid, who was a Jew, and they became Jewish. The other daughter, my cousin, was Hazel. She married Preston King and her daughter is Oona King. I am therefore fully alive to the problems of the Jewish race and sympathetic to the points of view that have been made."
 
If you are passing by Westminster on a cold winter's afternoon, drop into the Upper House. It can be very warming and there is rarely a queue.
 

Three IDF rescue teams and an IDF field hospital have been working around the clock seeking for survivors and digging out the dead from the rubble of Port du Prince. International observers have praised their tireless efforts. Perhaps, suggests my friend Martin Green, someone in the UK would like to seek warrants for their arrest as war criminals....

I am sure that like me, you have been horrified by the pictures coming out of Haiti following the earthquake on January 12th. We are only beginning to find out about the human tragedy and circumstances that are difficult for us to imagine. The vivid photography and descriptions are extremely painful to see and hear, let alone directly experience. This earthquake marks a heart-wrenching pinnacle of devastation to a people ravaged by multiple man-made and natural disasters that has witnessed Haiti becoming the poorest country in the western hemisphere...

...The people, the land and its produce have been ruthlessly abused...“Ever since the US invaded and occupied the country in 1915, every serious political attempt to allow Haiti's people to move "from absolute misery to a dignified poverty" has been violently and deliberately blocked by the US government and some of its allies.”

To give them their due, President Obama and Prime Minister Gordon Brown, began their terms in office with visionary statements about taking a moral lead in the world. We blame them for lack of results and perhaps at times they have deserved it. But let us look to ourselves as citizens of this country. It is only when we will give up one or two of our own ‘priorities’ to release monies up-front, that we will not have to rush into our pockets in emergency relief as I do urge you to do now through World Jewish Relief. Just think of the demands to change our infrastructure for more snowy weather. Would we still vote for a government that chooses to redirect additional monies for gritting to long-term, foreign development aid?

An Open Letter to Yoav Shamir, who made the film 'Defamation'

This is also published on CiFWatch.com

Dear Yoav Shamir

The alleged Christmas underpants bomber Abdulmatalab was formerly President of the Islamic Society at UCL. He is the fourth President of a London student Islamic society to face terrorist charges in three years.

Now Universities UK – which represents the heads of British universities – is setting up a group to tackle extremism on campus, to be chaired by UCL Provost Malcolm Grant. This is "taking the mick". First it is four years since the Parliamentary All-Party Inquiry into Antisemitism recommended this move. Why has it taken Abdulmatalab's suspected atrocity attempt to prod them into action? Second Grant, in a recent article in the Times Higher Education Supplement, suggested that only badly educated people from poor families become terrorists, thus proving that he hasn’t a clue about what motivates extremism:

What induced this behaviour remains a mystery. He [Abdulmatalab] has not emerged from a background of deprivation and poverty. He came from one of Nigeria’s wealthiest families. He was privately educated, and to a high level. He gained admission to University College London, where he studied mechanical engineering with business finance between 2005 and 2008, and was president of the UCL student Islamic Society in 2006-07.

Have you been reading Ben Macintyre in The Times re-telling, with fascinating new detail, the amazing wartime story of the successful British bluff which duped the Nazis into thinking the Allies were going to invade Greece and the Western Mediterranean rather than Sicily ? Immortalised in book and film with the title "The Man who Never Was," the story highlighted the role of then naval officer, Ewen Montagu, in preparing the corpse of a vagrant to be dropped off the coast of Gibraltar with all sorts of "clues" intended to mislead the Germans. Which it did. Not featured in The Times's account, and why should it, is that Ewen Montagu went on to become - wait for it - the President of the United Synagogue!

Ewen Montagu, who probably never ate a kosher meal in his life if he had the choice was, if I recall correctly, a nephew of Sir Robert Waley Cohen who was himself an unlikely President of the United Synagogue during the period when the Chief Rabbi was Dr Joseph Herman Hertz, celebrated as the man who never resolved a dispute peaceably if there was another way. Hertz was a small man physically, Waley Cohen something of a bear by comparison. The story is told that, on one occasion when Waley Cohen approached Hertz to embrace him, the overwhelmed chief rabbi shouted for all to hear: "Don't squeeze me!"

The unJewish Jew Montagu became, in essence, the prime spokesman for traditional United Synagogue Jewry, a role in which, with his upper class manners and mannerisms, he often seemed out of place. The still greatly missed Chaim Bermant properly described him as the last of the Cousinhood which led Anglo-Jewry from the Victorian into the new Elizabethan age. When Montagu died 25 years ago, Bermant wrote that his demise marked the "passing of a class, indeed of class, in the leadership of the community." Montagu was succeeded in the US presidency by Sir Isaac Wolfson.

Does something still linger in our genes of the biblical prohibition against making graven images? I must confess to being confused by - on the one hand - portraits of the last Lubavitcher Rebbe, which are ubiquitous in the homes and meeting places of his followers, and those frequent, alien, media shots (Brooklyn, Mea Shearim, New Square) of chasidim, hands to faces, trying to avoid the image-making ability of the camera lens. And all the wedding pics, and barmitzvahs, etc etc and mug shots of rabbis which accompany their contributions to this and other newspapers. What gives? And why do I ask the question?

Because, while we deny our philistinism and point with rosy cheeks to Jewish Book Week and the great crowds it musters, and even to our turnout for the Israel Phil (more social outing than musical appreciation?), we do not display any great enthusiasm for Jewish art. Ah, you may ask. Jewish art? Well, I think the Financial Times' wonderfully sensitive and percipient art critic, Jackie Wullschlager, said it all in her column in the weekend edition of that newspaper. She had been to see the great exhibition of Ben Uri - Jewish Art Museum gems, now at rhe Osborne Samuel gallery in Bruton Street, London, which includes the recent challenging Chagall discovery, Apocalypse in Lilac, Capriccio (1945), which earned so much attention in the national Press.

But let me quote Wullschlager: "....this show raises the whole vexed question of whether there is such a thing as Jewish art, and , in turn, whether a Jewish Museum of Art has a role in a multicultural society. For, while some of the masterpieces at Osborne Samuel...are pertinent to Jewish history...most are not obviously so,..

A few days ago, on January 5th, Anat Hoffman, the director of the Israel Religious Action Center, who spoke in our Shul last year was interrogated by the police for more than an hour about her activities during Women of the Wall's last monthly service in December. Speaking by phone from Jerusalem, Hoffman said she did nothing differently that day than she had for the 21 years of her group's existence.

But this incident follows the arrest in November of another member of the group, Nofrat Frenkel, and is contributing to a sense among the women in the organization that the Israeli authorities are stepping up their surveillance and intimidation of activities that challenge the ultra-Orthodox control of the holy site.

Hoffman said that the police told her that she was being investigated for violating a decision of the Israeli Supreme Court that prohibits women from wearing prayer shawls at the Wall. But the Women of the Wall claim to have accommodated themselves to the ruling; instead of donning the black-and-white tallitot, traditional for men, they each wear a smaller, multi-colored shawl like a scarf around the neck and under a coat, so as not to offend the strict sensibilities of other men and women at the Wall.