Shabbat Shalom to Those Who Keep Showing Up
There are people who use their standing to create a better world when the easier decision, at every stage, would have been to walk away.
It’s been a few weeks since I wrote one of these. I’ve missed it, and this week I realised just how much I needed it.
I spend a great deal of time writing about people who hate Israel, people who hate Jews, and institutions that seem to have lost the confidence to defend the democratic values they depend on. Sadly the material keeps coming, one doesn’t have to look far for ever worsening examples. If I waited for a quiet week to write about the Jews and allies who give me strength, I could be waiting a very long time.
We went into Remembrance Sunday with the appalling spectacle of a “Palestine poppy” being marketed in the colours of the Palestinian flag. After all the pro-Palestinian marches we’ve seen on our streets, apparently even the poppy had to be pressed into service. We ask for two minutes to remember the people who gave their lives in service of this country. I find it extraordinary that anyone looked at those two minutes and saw a campaigning opportunity. This is straight out of a hateful playbook that Islamist activists and the progressive left have used against Jews for years and are now turning on the West more broadly. Take somebody else’s pain and put it to work for your own cause. They’ve done it with the Holocaust, with the word genocide, even with the day we set aside to remember the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis. Then comes the ugliest inversion of all, comparing the world’s only Jewish state to the Nazis themselves. After all that, is anyone surprised they thought the poppy was fair game?
That same Sunday, on the eve of the anniversary of Kristallnacht, activists pulled down Germany’s Flag of Unity outside the Reichstag and hoisted a Palestinian flag in its place. My grandmother fled Nazi Germany, many members of her family were murdered at Auschwitz. I looked at that flagpole and thought about what it meant to choose that building, and that date.
After Lucie Kon, an Oscar-winning producer and former BBC commissioning editor, went public with allegations of antisemitic harassment she says she experienced at the corporation, the BBC’s Jewish Staff Network sought a meeting with the new director-general, Matt Brittin. As I wrote last week, Brittin allegedly declined to meet them. His deputy, Rhodri Talfan Davies, met them instead and said publicly that he saw no need for an independent inquiry. The BBC says its internal process did not uphold Kon’s antisemitism complaints and now the people raising concerns are being asked to take the BBC’s word for how well it handles complaints about itself. That is precisely why it needs an independent inquiry and precisely why our national broadcaster faces an existential crisis to preserve its relevance and future.
In America, the midterms gave some of the left’s most hostile voices on Israel a route into power, while the loudest voices on the isolationist right keep telling us where they want to go. There’s your horseshoe, from opposite ends of American politics, you can hear the same appetite for dismantling one of the most important strategic relationships either country has.
I could spend another Friday writing about all of them. Instead I wanted to spend this one reminding myself who else is out there. The people who use their standing to open a door, who put a relationship back on the table, who turn up to play together and who get a film made when the easier decision, at every stage, would have been to walk away.
These are the people who remind me what courage looks like in practice, and why it’s worth talking about every bit as loudly as we talk about hate.
Shabbat Shalom to Lee Child.
If you write Jack Reacher, you can probably go the rest of your career without ever making a room full of literary agents uncomfortable. Lee Child chose to make one uncomfortable anyway.
Speaking at an event convened by the Jewish Publishing Circle and Index on Censorship, Child challenged an industry in which Israeli and Jewish writers are finding it harder to get a hearing. He talked about an Israeli crime writer who opposed Netanyahu’s government, but still found every door closed to him, simply because of his passport. Imagine writing a novel, sending it out into the world and discovering that people who haven’t read a page of it have already decided what you think.
Child had a simple test for Sally Rooney and her fellow signatories to the boycott of Israeli cultural institutions. Imagine a government Rooney despised came to power in Ireland and the world decided that Irish literary institutions should be shunned. How long before we got the essay about the vital independence of the Irish writer? Child had the moral backbone to defend that same independence for writers whose country of birth make them an easy target in his own industry.
Child has also joined the executive team at Neil Blair’s new publishing house, High Line Publishing Studio. That counts a great deal, because somewhere there’s a writer waiting for an agent, editor or publisher to return a call. Thanks to a left-wing witch hunt, the people who could get that book into readers’ hands have decided that the author’s heritage tells them everything they need to know. Someone with Lee Child’s standing can help change all that, he’s chosen to put that standing to work.
Shabbat Shalom to Lee Child and to everyone in publishing fighting back against one of the ugliest forms of cultural censorship. Judging which books deserve to be read by the nationality of the people who wrote them is a tactic fascist regimes perfected. To see it paraded now as a badge of anti-racism is a painful irony.
Shabbat Shalom to Raffy Lachter and the Barnet councillors who voted to reach out to Haifa.
A publishing door can close without anyone outside the industry hearing it. In Hackney, they took a vote, made a statement and revealed the true face of hate.
Under its Green leadership, Hackney ended a twinning relationship with Haifa that went back to 1968. Over the years, around 80 nurses from Homerton Hospital travelled to Haifa to learn from colleagues at Rambam Hospital, including in trauma care. Think about what those nurses brought home, and about the patients in east London who benefited from it. Then tell me what was achieved by tearing up that relationship.
The irony is that to my mind Haifa is Israel’s best example of what genuine coexistence between Jews and Muslims looks like. At Rambam, Jewish and Arab doctors and nurses work side by side, caring for whoever comes through the door. That was the hospital Hackney’s own nurses learned from. If you can look at a city doing the daily work of living together and decide it is the one you need to cut off, you’ve told us exactly how much you value peace when you see it in practice.
Last month, Conservative councillor Raffy Lachter brought a motion to explore twinning Barnet with Haifa. It passed with Conservative support, every Labour councillor abstained, the sole Green councillor voted against. All Labour had to do was agree to explore whether hospitals, universities and faith communities in two cities might have something to offer one another, but every one of them found a way to sit that out. The party that found the political will to recognise a Palestinian state, while placing sanctions on the only Jewish state, couldn’t muster a single vote in Barnet to start a conversation with an Israeli city. I find that shameful.
Shabbat Shalom to Raffy and the councillors who voted with him. I hope a nurse from Barnet gets to walk through the doors at Rambam and come home with something that helps save a life. That would be a fine answer to Hackney council and an incredibly unfair punishment for their constituents.
Shabbat Shalom to Marsha Lee and the musicians of Shesh Besh.
If you want to see what coexistence looks like before anyone puts it in a council motion, watch six people trying to make music together.
Shesh Besh brings together three Arab Israeli and three Jewish Israeli musicians. They play Western classical and traditional Middle Eastern music, and they bring Arab and Jewish schoolchildren together to hear and learn about each other’s musical traditions. Since 2022, around 2,000 pupils have attended their concerts. Marsha Lee chairs the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra Foundation UK, which brought their concert to the British Library this week, she has put years into making these encounters possible.
The Palestine Solidarity Campaign called for a boycott and urged protesters to gather outside. It said its objection was to the Israel Philharmonic rather than to the individual players. The event it asked people to boycott was an evening of Arab and Jewish musicians playing together.
If your idea of solidarity requires you to picket that room, what sort of peace are you asking anyone to believe in? What future are you offering the Arab and Jewish children who have sat together at one of these concerts? I hear people talk about two states and then watch them try to make it impossible for six musicians to share a stage. The politics of that boycott has room for an Israel to dismantle and very little room for one to live alongside.
Shabbat Shalom to Marsha, to every musician in Shesh Besh and to the people who backed them. Somewhere a child went home having heard something they’d never heard before. I hope they asked to hear it again and that the message of coexistence sounded the loudest note of the night.
Shabbat Shalom to Danielle Lauren and everyone who made the Terror on Bondi Beach documentary.
On the first night of Chanukah last year, families went to Bondi Beach to light candles. Fifteen people were killed when gunmen opened fire on the gathering, the youngest just ten. Last week came news that Eva Geller, a 90-year-old Holocaust survivor who was shot at Bondi, had died. She had lived long enough to see Jews gather openly to celebrate Chanukah on a beach in Sydney. That is where she was shot.
The attack was inspired by Islamic State, two gunmen opened fire on men, women and children celebrating Chanukah because they were Jews. That is the fact a documentary about Bondi has to be willing to say plainly.
I know from making We Will Dance Again how hard it can be to get a film about Jews murdered for being Jews made, let alone find someone willing to put it on television. Consider how insane that is, that the deadliest terror attack in Australia’s history, one of the deadliest antisemitic attacks outside Israel in our lifetime, requires explanation and justification to explain why there’s a film in it. Then you get it made and find yourself asking who will give it airtime, who will write about it and who will do the work of making sure an audience knows it exists.
Danielle Lauren and her team made a brilliant, painful, compelling film. The work asks something of everyone involved. A survivor has to sit down and tell you what happened, a family has to trust you with the memory of someone they love and then you have to take what they’ve entrusted to you into rooms where people can decide, in a matter of minutes, how much of a priority those lives are going to be.
Channel 4 is scheduled to show Terror on Bondi Beach on Thursday, November 19th. I’m grateful to them for giving it a home and I’m particularly grateful to Danielle and the whole team for getting it far enough that a broadcaster had a decision to make.
Shabbat Shalom to Danielle, to everyone who made the film, and above all to the families and survivors who trusted them with their stories. I wish you had been able to light your candles and go home.
A writer uses his name to make room for other writers, a councillor uses his vote to reopen a conversation, six musicians show what people can do together when someone gives them a room and a group of filmmakers make sure the world can hear from families who went to the beach to celebrate being Jewish and never came home.
I needed to write about these people this week. I’ve spent enough evenings putting my phone down angry and picking it back up ten minutes later to find something else to be angry about.
I want my children to know about the people who showed up. I want them to know that an ally can be the person who says something in a room where it would have been easier to keep quiet, and then puts their name to the work. I want them to see Jews making music, making films, looking out for each other and making a life here, loudly and proudly, in full view of the world.
These are the stories to tell your kids around the Shabbat table this Friday night, these are the people who inspire us to go again next week.
Shabbat Shalom.