Ed Miliband meets Jewish leadership

Labour leader Ed Miliband has agreed to visit a Jewish school in the next few weeks as part of an attempt to build trust with the community. Mr Miliband made the pledge at dinner with the trustees of the Jewish Leadership Council, organised to mend fences and clarify the Labour Party's position on Israel.

The dinner for Mr Miliband, hosted by Sir Trevor Chinn, took place on January 12 at Dukes Hotel in St James's in central London and was described as "a very useful constructive dinner" by one Labour source.

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Ed Miliband aide gets first-hand knowledge

Streatham MP Chuka Umunna, who is also PPS to Labour leader Ed Miliband, heard the testimony of survivor Agnes Grunwald-Spier at the Lambeth HMD event.

Mr Umunna also addressed the audience and there were contributions from youngsters from Lambeth primary and secondary schools and South London Liberal Synagogue. The shul hosted an educational project for 100 pupils of Dunraven School, Streatham.

In Lewisham, faith groups and children from across the borough came together for an event at the Broadway Theatre, Catford.

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Ed Miliband: my door is open

Ed Miliband has said his door is always open to the Jewish community and urged people not to see his critical comments about Gaza and the Turkish flotilla as hostile to Israel. The first Jewish leader of the Labour Party told the JC that he recognised he has some work to do to reassure some in the community: "There is a task for me to get to know the Jewish community better as the leader of the Labour Party... and there's a task for the community to get to know me."

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JNF chairman dismisses plea to Miliband

The chairman of the Jewish National Fund has responded to a personal attack on him by the pro-Palestinian Jewish campaigner Tony Greenstein.

Mr Greenstein, a long-time anti-Zionist, implied in a letter to the Guardian newspaper that JNF UK’s chairman Samuel Hayek had been lying for his country.

On October 7 Mr Greenstein was one of the signatories to a letter calling for Ed Miliband to break the tradition, set by former Labour leaders Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, of being a patron of the JNF.

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Proud Jew Ed strong on Israel

Now that Ed Miliband has been elected as the first Jewish leader of the Labour Party, what does this tell us about Labour and its Jewish constituency?

What does Ed's acceptance speech at the party conference last month tell us about his approach to his Jewishness and how - if at all - it will shape his leadership of the party? I raise these questions because Ed himself went out of his way to raise them in that conference speech, which is one of the few party-conference addresses that I've bookmarked for future reference.

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