Let’s put a moratorium on Bernstein and Sondheim and Hammerstein and Hart and Menhuin and Baremboim and Bette and Barbra.. take down those Chagalls, Modigliani’s and Soutine’s…need I go on?
January 15, 2026 15:34
Sometimes I muse, as I try to return to sleep, on whether it would be possible for Jews of the world to go on strike. I mean to withdraw our labour. More than that, if we could also block our inventions, innovations and discoveries, and our contributions to the arts. Broadway and Hollywood would shut down. As would medicine, of course, and technology, so no research on DNA. Chuck away that mobile phone and stop with the googling, Facebook scrolling and – well, enough already, although we could trawl through the Nobel prizes and we could put a block on Freudian psychotherapy, Marxism (no loss perhaps), and American humour… so that’s merely Friends, Phil Silvers, Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, Larry David.
Music? Well let’s put a moratorium on Bernstein and Sondheim and Hammerstein and Hart and Menuhin and Barenboim and Bette and Barbra… take down those Chagalls, Modigliani’s and Soutine’s… need I go on?
We just down tools and refuse to allow anything Jewish to be aired. Think of Germany during and after the Second World War. Think of the poetry, music, literature, film and scientific discoveries that didn’t come out of that country, for decades. Think of the benefit to the US from all those German and Lithuanian and Baltic émigré brains. There would be no polio vaccines, no theory of relativity, no pacemakers and very few museums, galleries and theatres would survive without sponsorship. And, for better or worse, no video games. Oh… and no religion. And no Ottolenghi! What will they do with all that harissa?
We punch above our weight and give without restraint, everyone reading this knows that and asks for little in return. Which tends, wearyingly, in every generation, to make us unpopular. We have more than 2,000 Jewish charities in the UK, which is roughly one charity per one 150 people.
For example, before you go to the fridge to get milk for your cornflakes, spare a thought for Milton J. Rosenau M.D. born in Philadelphia, 1869, who died in 1946 exactly one month before your columnist was born. Milton was an epidemiologist (yes, he did really have an “ology”) and a public health expert who taught at Harvard for 25 years. He was also a campaigner to make milk safe in the US. He wanted to reduce milk-borne diseases and stated: “Next to water purification, pasteurisation is the most important single preventive measure in the field of sanitation.”
He wrote his book The Milk Question, publicising how the low, slow – as opposed to rapid – heating of pasteurisation protects milk from contamination with bacteria like salmonella, listeria and E. coli. Tests have failed to show any advantage of raw over pasteurised milk, indeed, there are 840 more hospitalisations from raw milk than from pasteurised.
His greatest work, Preventative Medicine and Public Health, is in its 15th edition and remains widely used to this day.
Even the great Louis Pasteur, whose influence on Rosenau’s research was immense, was himself influenced by Jewish thinking. His friend Rabbi Rabinowitz was translating the Talmud into French. When Pasteur read a tractate in the Seder Mo’ed dealing with Jewish holidays it alerted his interest:
‘’When someone is bitten by a rabid dog, he should be fed a lobe of the dog’s liver.’’
He realised that the sages knew that an infected body produces antibodies, which attack an invading infection. Pasteur immediately began a series of experiments that resulted in the saving of millions of lives:
“You will search from there for your G-d and you will find Him. The search for healing comes from the very place of pain.”
Which leads me to Robert J. Kennedy, the oddball secretary of state for health and human relations. The croak-voiced conspiracy theorist, disbeliever of vaccines and proposer of bringing back raw milk and its incipient ailments to American tables, alongside full-fat cheese, butter and animal fats. In a country with a massive obesity problem. There is insanity around the White House and it is lacking culture, drowned in cruelty, drenched in gold and entirely without irony. So, will the Jews of the world strike while the irony is hot? I think not. We will continue creating and inching our brains above the parapet until the next lot of arrows find their perennial target.
Take Jewish football chairmen, who will bail out clubs when they are facing tsunamis and straight-ways find themselves in the firing line. All the good an Alan Sugar did was forgotten when the club lost a match or two. Levy has gone, driven out, though Tony Bloom at Brighton and Cliff Crown at Brentford are still in their corners. David Bernstein once even moved up to FA chairman.
This week, I was a guest at Brentford v Sunderland, courtesy of Crown and it was a wonderful night out. Although I was supposed to be cheering Sunderland in my new role as the wife of an Hon Black Cat, I found the small stadium and the plucky Brentford team – who played with brio, without playing for time by means of boring back shots, even though they were three goals ahead – a bit irresistible and an ideal place to take keen, young football obsessives.
Anyway, about the strike. Obviously, the demo has to start at Brent Cross and take in every Marks & Spencer and Tesco en route to reach Old Jewry Street in the city. Marchers from Leeds, Manchester and Glasgow will join at King’s Cross proudly singing We Shall Overcome. Again. The bagel and latke stands will line the routes, with philosemitic friends handing out flasks of lemon tea, mit sugar lumps. The speakers will include Douglas Murray, Hadley Freeman, Matthew Syed, Lord Austin, Julie Burchill, Baroness Deech, Niall Ferguson, Paul Johnson and Josh Howie will rally the troops. Tracy-Ann and and I will read from Émile Zola and Jean-Paul Sartre. Mayor Khan will be as happy to close the streets for us, as he has been for two years, week after week, for disruptive, Palestinian Re-Action marches.
The music will be by the Neils, Diamond and Sedaka, Bobby Zimmerman and Leonard Cohen. Radio Two and Spotify will have gaps in their playlists, lasting hours, and the brave and brilliant CST volunteers, who protect us daily, will be praised, from the hustings. There will be no way to prosecute us for downing tools and withdrawing our labour and our historic creativity because most of the lawyers will be on strike. Bring it on.
(PS. 500 young protesters were killed in a day in Islamist Iran.
United Nations? Helloo? Greta, Angelina, Billy and Finneas… Hadids.. Roger W? Miriam? I can’t seem to hear the chant yet? I can’t see the placards… sorry, but, unlike the Palestinians, the Persians are an ancient civilisation, aren’t they? With a language, borders, leaders and a written history… so does this not count as a “genocide”? I mean if no Jews are involved? Just asking…)
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