David Hirsh
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David Hirsh

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Dec 5, 2019, 4:40 PM
Competing fears at the ballot box
Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn during the launch of his party's manifesto in Birmingham. (Credit: Joe Giddens/PA Wire via Jewish News)
Some people can’t imagine how anything but keeping Jeremy Corbyn out could even matter. The Labour leader is considered to be steeped in antisemitic politics, and his party has made an enemy of Britain’s Jews. Antisemitism is anti-democratic politics, not an add-on eccentricity. One could...
May 14, 2019, 2:38 PM
Why antisemitism and populism go hand-in-hand
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn giving his keynote speech at the party's annual conference, October 2018. (Stefan Rousseau/PA Wire via Jewish News)
Politics in our time is about defending democracy against an arrayed series of related attacks that we might call ‘populist’. Each populism is at heart an irrational conspiracy fantasy. Each insists that democracy is fake and each populism blames some group of our fellow citizens...
Apr 21, 2019, 8:09 PM
Labour’s intersection of antisemitism and misogyny
Ruth Smeeth (left) and Dame Margaret Hodge (right) have been at the forefront of the community's fight against antisemitism in Labour, and have suffered abuse, including death threats.
The Labour Party has finally suspended a member who abused two MPs, Ruth Smeeth and Dame Margaret Hodge, as ‘a couple of s**t-stirring c*m buckets bought and paid for by Israel’. Something happens at the intersection of antisemitism and misogyny which creates a fury greater...
Aug 23, 2018, 11:06 PM
Corbyn to Zionists: Even if you’ve lived here all your life, you don’t get the English
Jeremy Corbyn speaking at the 2013 meeting. Picture courtesy of the Daily Mail
At an event in 2013 to discuss the British legacy in Palestine, Jeremy Corbyn said the following: “The other evening we had a meeting in Parliament in which Manuel made an incredibly powerful and passionate and effective speech about the history of Palestine and the...
Jul 18, 2018, 11:56 AM
Understanding Labour’s disavowal of the IHRA definition
Britain's Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn during the Scottish Labour conference at Caird Hall in Dundee, Scotland, March 9, 2018. (Jane Barlow/PA via AP)
In September 2001 at the global conference against racism in Durban there was a campaign to construct Zionism as the key racism on the planet. Opposition to antisemitism was presented as incompatible with opposition to racism. Jews were said to be white, Israel racist, and...
Apr 23, 2018, 12:07 PM
The speech Jeremy Corbyn should make, but never will
I could write a lovely speech for Jeremy Corbyn. The speech would deal with the anti-Semitism issue and make it go away. He could re-vitalise his whole project, re-focus it on the core business of the Corbyn movement: liberating millions from unnecessary poverty and marginalisation,...
Oct 31, 2017, 11:28 PM
Corbyn’s office ‘glad’ that Machover’s expulsion has been rescinded
It would seem that Moshe Machover’s expulsion from the Labour Party has been rescinded, at least for the moment, and he reinstated as a member in good standing. Follow this link for the article that Moshe Machover wrote which was handed out as a leaflet...
May 3, 2017, 4:27 PM
Freer or Newmark? It’s an emancipating choice
The decision of the local Labour Party in Finchley and Golders Green to stand Jeremy Newmark against the Tory MP Mike Freer emancipates Jews, at least in this constituency, to vote as citizens. It relieves us from the humiliation of being forced to vote as...
Mar 30, 2017, 12:33 PM
Livingstone still refuses to believe anti-Semitism is possible on left
The charge made against Livingstone is that in a series of interviews he misrepresented incidents of anti-Semitism as mere ‘criticism of Israel’.  He wanted the public to believe that accusations were made in a disgraceful attempt to silence support for Palestinian rights and to smear...
Oct 27, 2016, 6:42 PM
Tolerating anti-Semitism could make Lib Dems the Corbyn-lite party
Lib Dem peer Baroness Jenny Tonge chaired an event on Tuesday 25 October, in the House of Lords to campaign for a British apology for the Balfour Declaration of 1917. A man made a speech from the floor saying that it was a Jewish boycott...
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About Me
David Hirsh, Sociology Lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London Author of the new book: 'Contemporary Left Antisemitism'.