Once leader of the Labour party, Ed Miliband has now been appointed foreign secretary to open up a new chapter for a chequered career in which his Jewish identity and family history have played a significant if variable role.
He was born in 1969 to two Holocaust-survivor parents. His mother Marion, who died aged 91 in May, survived the Second World War in her native Poland thanks to the “kindness and generosity of acquaintances in Warsaw”. Some 60 members of her extended family, including her father, were murdered by the Nazis.
His father Ralph Miliband also came from a Jewish family originally from Poland, but was born in Belgium. Fleeing Nazi persecution in 1940 he arrived in Britain aged 16 and went on to serve in the Royal Navy.
Both Ralph and Marion had extensive backgrounds in academia and activism with leftward political leanings. Ralph was a renowned Marxist sociologist and political scientist who lectured at the LSE and published seven books including Capitalist Democracy in Britain and Socialism for a Sceptical Age. He died in 1994.
Marion, meanwhile, was a longstanding human rights campaigner and a signatory of the founding statement for activist group Jews for Justice for Palestinians.
While the family was not religious, Ed Miliband told the JC in 2010 about how his Jewish roots nonetheless influenced his political outlook. He said: “There was a set of values my parents taught me about justice and making the world a better place, which are recognisably ‘left’ values but also owe something to the Jewish tradition.”
Brought up in north London, Ed went to a local state school – Haverstock Comprehensive – before studying PPE at Oxford and quickly embarking on a fast-rising trajectory in Labour politics.
After working as a researcher on Channel 4 show A Week in Politics, he rose through the ranks in Westminster, first working as a researcher for Harriet Harman while she served as shadow chief secretary to the treasury, and then as Gordon Brown’s special adviser in the treasury.
In 2005 he was elected as the Labour MP for Doncaster North. In 2007 he was promoted to the cabinet in 2007 as chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster and in 2008 was made energy secretary.
After Labour’s defeat in the 2010 general election he dramatically defeated his brother David to win the Labour leadership election. But in 2015, he too led his party to defeat at the hands of David Cameron’s Conservative party.
Miliband did not serve in Jeremy Corbyn’s frontbench, but in 2020 returned to Sir Keir Starmer’s shadow cabinet first as shadow business secretary and later as shadow climate secretary.
In 2024, when Labour returned to government, he was appointed as energy and net zero secretary.
Regarding his own personal faith, Miliband said in 2014 that he considers himself a “Jewish atheist”, but acknowledged his heritage by smashing a glass at his wedding in 2011. His wife, Justine Thornton, is not Jewish, and they married in a civil ceremony. The couple have two sons, Daniel and Sam.
The MP has several personal connections to Israel, making trips there in his youth to visit family who live there, including his maternal grandmother, who settled there after the Second World War ended.
His relationship with Zionism has long been ambiguous. In 2013, the JC reported that Miliband considered himself a Zionist, while being critical of some Israeli government policies. However, in an interview with the BBC the following year, he was reluctant to identify as a Zionist while on a trip around Israel.
During his tenure as opposition leader, Miliband was a frequent fixture at Jewish community events, including addresses at events for the Young Norwood current affairs group and the Board of Deputies, and a visit to JCoSS, a Jewish secondary school in Barnet.
However, his comments on Israel have seen him criticised by communal groups.
In 2014, he called Israeli military action in Gaza during Operation Protective Edge “wrong and unjustifiable” drawing criticism from the Board of Deputies and Labour Friends of Israel. He defended them in a JC interview the following year, saying: “I consider myself a strong friend of Israel.
"Friends will disagree from time to time but it doesn’t in any way change my deep belief that we should seek to restart the negotiations, that we should have no tolerance with those who question the legitimacy of the state of Israel, that we should have no tolerance of proposals for boycott.”
The former Labour leader’s support for former London mayor Ken Livingstone was also a source of tension with the community, even before Livingstone’s suspension from the Labour Party for claiming that Hitler was a supporter of Zionism.
But no profile of Miliband would be complete without mention of the infamous picture of him awkwardly eating a bacon sandwich, splashed on the front page of The Sun – and a salutary reminder of the perils of not keeping kosher.
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