Before the Holocaust – three events of 1936

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Talk given on the panel of the online Stand Up To Racism event marking Holocaust Memorial Day, 2026. The panel included Rabbi Herschel Gluck, two Roma speakers, and two co-convenors of Stand Up To Racism

Painting by Staciek Brunstein, Es Brent (it is burning), from the song by Mordkhe Gebirtig about a pogrom in 1930s Poland

This week we marked the 81st anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945 by the Red Army. My starting point though is 90 years ago, in 1936. There are important 90th anniversaries we must mark this year, which are so pertinent now in a world where racism, fascism, ultra-nationalism are alive, kicking and murdering in many countries.

Ninety years ago, in Spain, in July 1936, General Franco launched a civil war against a democratically elected government, against ordinary people of Spain, in order to establish an ultra-right wing dictatorship over them. The already established fascist regimes – Italy and Germany – gave him  political and military support. The Spanish people fought back in an uneven battle, but they were boosted by the solidarity of 35,000 mainly working class activists from more than 50 countries who came to Spain through the International Brigades to fight against Franco. As a Jewish anti-fascist, I’m proud that 15% or more of those that went were Jewish  – many from countries where Jews were 1% or less of the population.

On 10th October 1936, one of Franco’s generals – General de Llano did a radio broadcast: He said  “Our war is not a Spanish Civil War but a war of western civilization against the Jews of the entire world.” While we remember victims of the Holocaust, let’s also remember the tens of thousands of Spanish civilians killed, and fighters both Spanish and international Brigadistas against fascism, whose bodies lay in Spanish soil – some in mass graves

Some 2,000 anti-fascists went to Spain from Britain, 200 of them from London’s East End. Many volunteers there were inspired by taking part in the Battle of Cable Street in October 1936 against Mosley’s fascists, and against the police facilitating their attempted invasion of the East End’s Jewish streets. From autumn 1934 Mosley’s movement made antisemitism the main plank of their fascist ideology, saying the battle ahead pitted “the great cleansing spirit of fascism” against “organised Jewry … an unclean, alien influence in our national and imperial life”. Mosley’s all-embracing antisemitic vision won him support among sections of every social class. Fascism did not just happen on the continent– it happened here. Just like today, the Far Right movements we confront are home-grown.

In October, when we celebrate the 90th anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street, I will be remembering Charlie Goodman, who spoke at several Jewish Socialist events. He was arrested that day, abused and beaten by the police, then imprisoned for 3 months. But by February 1937 he was fighting fascists in Spain, before he returned wounded after the Battle of Jarama  

He gave me a handwritten list of 36 East Enders (half of them Jewish) killed in the Spanish Civil War, detailing where they died, and in which battle.  Charlie’s parents came here from Poland, and when he was around 9 or 10 years old he went to Poland for a year and met many family members there – most of whom would later perish in the Holocaust.

Which takes us to Poland. In March 1936, the small Polish town of Pzrytryk had its Cable Street, a vicious pogrom stirred up by militant far-right antisemites, in a town that was nearly 80% Jewish. Two Jews – a father and son – were killed and many wounded. One of the progromists died too. Eleven Jews received prison sentences despite acting in self-defence; 39 pogromists were jailed too. There were many further acts of antisemitic violence by the Polish far right, well before the Nazi invasion of September 1939.

In Krakow South Poland a Jewish carpenter, poet, songwriter, and anti-fascist called Mordkhe Gebirtig wrote a frighteningly prescient song in Yiddish after the Przytyk pogrom. It was called Es Brent – it’s burning. One verse says: “God forbid, the moment will come when our town will be engulfed by flames, reduced to ash, black and empty walls remaining, like after a battle.”

The final verse is a call to action:

“It is burning brothers, it’s burning

The remedy depends on you alone

If your town is dear to you

Take what you need to put the fire out

Douse it with your own blood

Show you can do this!

Gebirtig was killed in a shooting spree by Nazis in the Krakow Ghetto in June 1942, but his song continued to be sung in many ghettoes. I first heard that song, sung live, by a survivor whom I only knew as Mr Dzikowcki, at the first Holocaust commemoration I went to, early 1980s, organised by the Friends of Yiddish in Whitechapel. Such commemorations had taken place every year from the mid-1940s, long before Britain’s state-sponsored Holocaust Memorial Day was created in 2001.

And they didn’t take place in January, but on 19 April, when the Warsaw Ghetto uprising began. A date focusing not on death but resistance; on empowerment, that gave dignity back to the people who found so many ways to resist oppression in the ghettoes, not just physical ones, but cultural, educational, artistic resistance, that made them feel human amid the destruction.

News of the Warsaw Ghetto resistance inspired uprisings and major acts of resistance in other ghettoes, even in concentration camps and death camps

Of the 6 million Jews murdered, 3 million were Polish Jews, ghettoised, enslaved and starved before being deported to death camps where they were gassed to a death in a modern industrial process, designed in Germany by educated architects, scientists, and engineers. In late 1930s Germany they started testing mass killing methods on disabled people.Polish Jews in the death camps were joined by other Jews captured and transported there from other countries the nazis occupied. And Roma joined them too.

We must not forget though, that most of the other Jews were murdered in traditional ways, shot en masse as the Nazis swept through the Soviet lands, and buried in mass graves. The  Nazis found many willing local collaborators to help them identify and hunt down Jews. And yet, nearly every Holocaust survivor I’ve met, survived because of selfless non-Jews who took great risks to hide them.

And if Jews and Roma were marked for complete extermination – many groups – gays, trade unionists, communists, socialists, Jehova’s Witnesses, Soviet prisoners of war, died too –  from mistreatment, starvation and slavery.

The chair of the Friends of Yiddish, Majer Bogdanski, was a tailor, a socialist, an opponent of all racism. Every year he wrote a new speech, but it always ended with the same three statements. He honoured Roma Gypsies who, he declared, “died in exactly the same way as the Jews for exactly the same reasons”. He railed against the lie taught in Israeli schools, especially in the 1960s, that diaspora Jews went “like lambs to the slaughter”; and he railed against those who denied the Holocaust.

Sadly the numbers who deny, downplay or trivialise the Holocaust, are growing again. We live in terrible times. The fascists are having their heyday in Trump’s America, Orban’s Hungary, Netanyahu’s Israel, Modi’s India… and here Farage and Robinson are licking their lips in anticipation

The Holocaust was neither the only, nor the last, genocide. Each genocide, including the one enacted in Gaza, should be remembered in its own right, by all, not just the direct targets. Yet, even on the Left there are those who pit the experiences of groups targeted in genocides against each other in an Oppression Olympics. If we do that we all lose.

We need mutual empathy and solidarity. When people ask me what solidarity looks like, I think of Donald Kenrick, born to Polish Jewish immigrants in Hackney in 1929. He joined the Jewish Socialists’ Group early 1980s. By his mid-20s, he spoke more than 25 languages fluently. One was Romani. Several others were dialects of Romani. He co-wrote a book on Gypsy Holocaust experience and worked on Roma rights for decades. Until his dying days in his mid-80s, he was translating and assisting Roma asylum-seekers fighting their cases. He taught our group about our shared Jewish/Roma Holocaust histories and the importance of supporting Roma rights campaigns. I am very glad to share this platform with Roma representatives.

Humanising the victims and learning from their countless acts of personal and collective courage

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Talk given to a panel on anti-racism and anti-fascism at the Morning Star Conference on 14 June 2025, in central London

Julia Bard at the start of a walk through the trail of Jewish martyrdom in the Warsaw Ghetto that started at the Rapoport Monument to the ghetto fighters and ended at the Umschlagplatz (deportation point)

Last month I spent a week in Poland with a group of trade unionists from Britain as part of an incredibly inspiring anti-racist, anti-fascist programme. I think it has lessons for us all.

We arrived in the middle of Poland’s presidential election, narrowly won in the second round by a right wing nationalist over a centrist who tried to outdo his opponent by promising to be just as tough against immigrants.

In the country where invading Nazis had built six death camps primarily for Jews and Roma, but also imprisoned, enslaved and killed many non-Jewish Polish political prisoners, leading politicians there today squabble over who can be harsher towards migrants, who can seal the borders against Muslim refugees more efficiently…sounds familiar, yes?

In the first round there were 10 candidates. The two candidates finally facing off had won around 30% each in a first round where two far-right candidates amassed more than 21% between them.

Among 18-30 year old voters, the far right were winning nearly 35%. When I read that I thought about the inroads here, that Farage’s Reform UK is making both among alienated, angry, frustrated young people and also among more stable young people, groomed by media racism, especially Islamophobia, and the toxic messaging of far right influencers.

Polish friends told us that analysis of first round voting from Polish citizens abroad showed many far right votes coming in from Poles working in Britain.

The trade unionists we worked with on this programme were teachers, from the National Education  Union, potentially in a position to strongly influence opinions, especially locally, but operating in a climate now where they worry about being exposed for expressing political views. Increasingly, they have to be brave and find smart ways to use their influence. After this trip, though, I’m sure they will.

We were there to explore a horrific and painful slice of history with distinct echoes today: the Holocaust, and the decades preceding it. We did this in the locations where the brutality and exterminations took place.  At the outset we said our approach would be multi-dimensional and multidirectional going beyond the standard national curriculum fare that concentrates on how the Nazis achieved power, what they did, and the numbers of victims.

Our emphasis [as co-ordinators of the education programme on this visit] was on life before death, especially the countless acts, large and small of personal and collective courage; acts of passive resistance as well as those overtly risky that culminated in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. We put some names and faces to the largely faceless victims, celebrating their cultural creativity before their lives were cruelly cut short. We explored what motivated people to continue resisting even when all seemed hopeless.  

Two interactive workshops and a walk through a trail of poignant monuments, in part of the former Warsaw Ghetto, in our first 24 hours, had already opened up new ways of seeing and reflecting. That expanded further each day. We were fortunate to have a very cooperative, open-minded group, eager to explore challenging ideas about how to understand and undermine ultra-nationalism today.

There were barriers to overcome. Not so long ago, anti-fascists would spread knowledge of the Holocaust far and wide – an essential part of our armoury in persuading others why they should actively be anti-racist and oppose fascism, wherever it reared its head, whoever its immediate targets.

But we are in a period when that history has been abused and weaponised by pro-Zionist propagandists, attempting to justify another genocide, that is not history but can be witnessed today, live-streamed from Gaza. A genocide that is even being perpetrated, in part, by descendants of Holocaust survivors. These factors contribute to growing cynicism about the Nazi Holocaust, reluctance to hear about it, and a lack of empathy with Jews who reach back to that earlier historical episode to make valid comments about their sense of identity and sense of being in the world today.

Among the points we sought to convey were: that the Holocaust did not come from nowhere. It was a product of ultra-nationalism and capitalism, combining with wilder forms of antisemitism with deep roots in Western culture. That antisemitism also flourished in 1920s and 1930s Poland at both political and street level, well before the Nazis invaded. And the end of the Holocaust was not the end of antisemitism.

We showed how antisemitism continues to exist and interact with other forms of racism; that fascists don’t replace targets they accumulate them. That despite sections of the far right, especially in northern and western Europe, draping themselves in Israeli flags or feigning support for Jews by supporting the most Islamophobic Zionists, fascists across the globe are united by adherence to the Great Replacement Theory – a theory that posits a conspiracy to flood the west with Muslim migrants and refugees, and usually accuses Jews as heading that conspiracy. That theory combines antisemitism and Islamophobia, right here, right now.

We also demonstrated through interactive sessions and visits to museums and memorials the overlapping experiences of racism suffered by different groups before during and after the Holocaust: processes of marginalisation, discrimination, exclusion and repression, and the extensive use, in the middle of the 20th century, of slavery using Jews, Roma, Polish political prisoners and other groups branded inferior.

Through individual and group conversations it was clear that these teachers had internalised a deep understanding of how life was experienced from inside the world of the victims. They grasped how diverse and culturally rich that world was, and the extent to which left wing, universalist, anti-nationalist perspectives, such as those of the Jewish Workers’ Bund, played an inspirational role in firing the resistance. Their legacy finds expression today in the profusion of anti-nationalist, radical, diasporist Jewish groups who reject Zionism and support justice for Palestine.

They also appreciated how Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, from different and competing ideologies, found enough common ground to form a united resistance organisation that saw its struggle above all as a struggle for dignity and freedom.

The point at which we knew that the programme had made a real and positive difference was the feedback session after visiting Auschwitz. Several participants explained how they expected to come out of Auschwitz feeling really sad and devastated but they actually felt angry and determined. Angry that the world allowed this to happen, and determined to turn that anger into activism against the likes of Robinson and Farage today, those spivs and charlatans who hold the torch for Britain’s far right, and with the help of feeble and spineless centrists, are winning new adherents every day.

No simple blueprints, no quick fixes, but we can defeat the Far Right!

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Talk by David Rosenberg on 1 March 2025 at the Trade Union conference of Stand Up To Racism

I want to start by telling you about a trade unionist I knew personally, called Max Levitas, a shop steward in the Tailors and Garment Workers’ Union for many years; a fighter for better housing who co-led a four-month rent strike when he was in his mid-20s; a co-organiser of an occupation of the bomb shelter at the Savoy Hotel during the Blitz, to protest about the lack of such shelters where he lived in London’s East End.  He was also a local councillor for the Communist Party, taking up all kinds of issues across Tower Hamlets. He worked until he was 80, and in retirement remained active in pensioners campaigns. When he was 101 he became the world’s oldest Dementia Friend – helping individuals suffering that condition. And he was a brave fighter against racism and fascism his whole life.

Max at 100

You cannot emulate a life like that – he was extraordinary – but you can take one key idea from that biography which is that these spheres in which he was active are all inter-connected. The connections though are not always immediately obvious. We cannot serve the anti-fascists and anti-racist movement if we focus on them in isolation, or do so simply as moral condemnation – “racism is bad”, “racism is evil”.

Racism and fascism ruin lives and we need to tell how they ruin lives. It is through understanding, articulating and acting on those kinds of connections that we will enhance our work against racism and fascism and build a better world.

But if you asked Max to name the proudest day of his life – he would tell you immediately – 4th October 1936 – the Battle of Cable Street. The iconic clash of fascism and anti-fascism in Britain in the 20th century. The day when thousands of foot-soldiers, in black military uniforms and jackboots, of Oswald Mosley’s deeply antisemitic British Union of fascists, were blocked from invading the most heavily Jewish-populated East End streets by my favourite “Prevent Strategy” of them all: blockades, barricades, and masses of working class activists working in unison across ethnic and religious divides.

That day remained a touchstone for Max and it should still be for all of us. But by 1936 the fascist forces had already recruited many thousands across Britain to their ideology, across classes and generations.

Mosley placed a particular emphasis on youth, saying: “We are a party of action based on youth that will mobilise energy, vitality and manhood to save and rebuild the nation.” He claimed that his fascist party were the only party that offered young people a chance to play their part for the nation in peace-time not just in war. Incredibly powerful and compelling stuff when so many working class families lost sons in the first World War.

But never forget that fascism was, and is, a project of the elite. Mosley and his elite friends were especially focused on the fascist student branches they formed in 20 public schools. [the schools of the privileged classes]

But by 1936, anti-fascists were attracting large numbers too. We need to understand how their numbers and resistance were built and what that knowledge can mean for us in the different – but not completely different – world of 2025. Before I leave Max, though – here is my favourite Max story:

September 1934, a few days before Mosley’s British Union of Fascists will hold a major rally in Hyde Park, Max and his friend Jack are in Trafalgar Square late at night. They want to mobilise resistance, and paint a slogan, “All out on September 9th to fight fascism”, across the plinth of Nelson’s Column. Their only mistake was to come back a couple of hours later to admire their handiwork. A policemen approaches, sees paint on their shoes, finds a wet paintbrush in Max’s pocket. Max admits that he came there intending to daub something, but he says someone else got there first! The policeman didn’t believe him. Neither did the magistrate.

We are not living in 1934 but we do live in incredibly dangerous times. Across Europe, in America, In India, in Israel – the far right are growing, and brimming with confidence. I recently shared a platform with a Bangladeshi veteran of the struggles in the East End of the 1970s, which closely paralleled those of the 1930s. He remarked how, despite all our efforts, once again people are no longer ashamed to use racist rhetoric in Britain; that openly racist politics has been made acceptable, popular and respectable again.

In the 1930s, far right movements were growing rapidly across Europe – not just in Italy and Germany. In the 1970s it was different. The National Front had to look much further afield to find their ideological allies – in apartheid South Africa, in Pinochet’s Chile or the junta in Argentina.

But look at Europe today, the far right are rising and networking internationally. Everywhere where they are growing, their path is paved by centrist politicians who have ceded so much ground to the agendas of the far right.

in the 1930s the context was a massive economic crash which brought mass unemployment, hunger and frustration. Confidence in mainstream politicians, then, was at rock bottom – it is not much higher now! In that vacuum, smart well-heeled individuals could pose as saviours, and rebuilders of their nation and promise to restore people’s pride, restore jobs, make their country great again.

The same month in 1932 when Mosley launched his British Union of Fascists, there was a conference abut unemployment in the East End  organised by a local churchman Father Groser, a left-wing Labour Party member. He highlighted the effects of unemployment: “Frustration of personality, loss of self-respect, the creation of an embittered and hopeless section of the community.”

Father Groser was unconsciously describing precisely the mindset that the fascists would prey on: a mindset aggravated by people’s sense that their situation was rapidly deteriorating and no one was on their side. It also describes many of the people flocking to Tommy Robinson’s flag today.

Mosley’s movement mobilised through simple, memorable propaganda messaging; through posters and having their own media – a weekly newspaper; by establishing an iconic clothing style; by portraying themselves as powerful, united, invincible; and by looking for wedge issues such as housing.

From late 1934 Mosley’s movement set its sights on building a working class fascist base in a few key inner city areas – especially the East End. They used housing to divide the area’s two impoverished minorities, Irish and Jewish, telling the Irish that they had bad housing because the Jews had good housing, that Irish people had bad jobs because the Jews had the good jobs. A Jewish anti-fascist called Solly Kaye described this as false propaganda to elicit “envy and fear”, that was believed “even though,” he said, “we were living in bloody poverty with bugs crawling all over us in the night.”

We must not, though, be mesmerised by, or trapped within, mythologised versions of the past. Cable Street was an immensely important day. But it was one day, one battle, albeit on an enormous scale.  Fascism in 1930s Britain was disrupted, resisted and ultimately defeated in several battles and campaigns over several years, around the country – Stockton, Leeds, Manchester, Liverpool, Bristol are a few of them – and they have the scars to prove it. Trade unionists should be very proud of their role in these physical confrontations, but there were other ways that fascism was challenged and undermined between these dramatic events.

That was through more mundane but absolutely vital work of educating, sharing information, analysing, building shared understandings, arguing, persuading, and changing hearts and minds. Our counterparts in the 1930s understood that fascism, rather than individual fascists, was the problem, and that beyond the hard core Nazi-types there are lots of angry, frustrated and people who get nothing from mainstream politicians, and are being attracted by far right talking points. No doubt you have some of these people in your workplaces. We need to spend more time talking to them and less time talking to each other in safe spaces.

Six weeks before the battle of Cable Street, a grassroots conference created the Jewish People’s Council Against Fascism and Antisemitism. It set itself two tasks: one – to mobilise the whole Jewish community of the East End, pro-actively, to combat fascism and antisemitism; the other: to make links with local non-Jewish anti-fascists (especially through Trade Unions) in order to build an anti-fascist majority in the locality. Those things took time and effort but their approach was crucial not only to the success on the day of Cable Street, but in decisively defeating fascists at the ballot box in local elections in the East End five months after Cable Street. And that spirit was carried through to the struggles for unity between Jews and non-Jews against landlords and fascists in 1938/39 through a local mass movement the Stepney Tenants’ Defence League.

In the 1930s a sufficient number of anti-fascists understood there was no quick fix. Alongside physical defence of their communities, the more strategic activists recognised this problem needed patient work, making real improvements to people’s lives and restoring hope to them that they could achieve these things.

We need to learn how different communities have dealt with the threats of racism and fascism in different generations, not to use them as simple blueprints, but to take whatever ideas, understandings and strategies they used then into the new and different contexts we face today in 2025, and marry them with our own new insights. We have defeated them in the past. And we can defeat them again. But it is not certain. What is certain is that it won’t happen in on one single day, in one major confrontation. We need courage, patience and unity. And remember, as the anti-fascists in the 1930s declared. “They have the millionaires but we have the millions”!

Expose the Robinsons and Farages as the groomers of capitalism’s victims

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Anti-racists anti fascists mobilised in London yesterday to ensure that thousands of supporters of the far right agitator Tommy Robinson did not have the freedom of the streets. I was proud to be the first platform speaker, representing the Jewish Socialists’ Group, at the rally before our very upbeat and spirited march to Whitehall where we held another rally. These were my words

Moments of truth are rare in politics today. Sometimes actions speak louder than words. Especially if your name is Elon Musk! His Nazi salute at Trump’s inauguration, clear as day to every anti-racist and anti-fascist, and almost everyone else – revealed the disturbing truth: that we are again in terrifying times that resemble the 1930s, when democracy was dismantled, sometimes quietly, sometimes loudly, and replaced with authoritarianism; when ultra-nationalist hatreds, especially antisemitism, were rampant across Europe, when people lost faith in conventional politicians and flocked in desperation to figures who promised to stand up for them, restore their pride, and address their grievances, instead of ignoring them; when far right forces across Europe were rapidly growing.

Those who ran to the flags of the far right, then, included many who needed basic things that would make their uncertain, precarious lives better. They became easy prey for demagogues and wannabee dictators only in it for themselves, to increase their own wealth and power. Those demagogues diverted their followers on to a path of hate, while feeble centrist politicians conceded ground to the racists and fascist every day.

We have a job to do – not just defending every minority that will pay with its blood, as victims of the racist and fascist hate of today’s Far Right; we also have to expose the Robinsons and Farages to their own supporters as the self-centred grifters and exploiters they are. They are the groomers – the groomers of capitalism’s victims, the ignored, the hopeless and embittered.

One group among several, that was pivotal in challenging fascism in 1930s London, was a grassroots campaign in the East End called the Jewish People’s Council. In order to defeat fascism, It said, we must build solid anti-fascist majorities in our local areas that can unite the very groups they try to set against each other.

We won’t achieve that simply by saying racism is “bad”, or screaming “Nazi” at them. But by showing how racism ruins and destroys lives, how fascism exploits everyone for the benefit of an elite. We have to offer a better vision of how people can take power and control for the benefit of all, and how we can solve daily economic problems in our lives together, not at the expense of each other.

I’ll close with a 1930s warning to the likes of Robinson, Farage, Musk and Trump. Its time has come again:

‘They have the millionaires – but we have the millions.’

Let’s build that! Let’s show that. No Pasaran!”

Honour their memory: among the best

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At the party on 22 December 2024, to celebrate Chanukah and 50 years of the Jewish Socialists’ Group (JSG), I spoke about a number of individuals who are no longer alive who were very influential on the development of the politics and outlook of the JSG. We have sadly lost several more but I chose this group as representative of theirs and other’s contributions

I’m really honoured to speak to you be here today as the longest-standing JSG member, often mistakenly described as the JSG’s founder. I wasn’t. I joined 48 years ago – when I was 18 in my first year at Leeds University, when I struggled to find two matching socks each morning, never mind create a new political group.

I want to tell you about some amazing individuals I met through the JSG who are no longer alive. Each one influenced our politics significantly.

I discovered the group by accident, one weekend, while visiting friends at Manchester University. At a party I got talking to a young Jewish woman with similar political badges to me. One was “Chile Fights!” (just three years after Piniochet’s coup.) I regaled her with a depressing incident of antisemitism in a far left group I joined in Leeds. I used to a wear a mogen dovid (star of David) as a symbol of my Jewish identity. This group got one of their members – a very assimilated Jew – to tell me that when I worked on their bookstall I shouldn’t wear my mogen dovid because it “might offend Palestinian comrades.” – as if expressions of Jewish identity and support for Palestinians are incompatible.

The young woman in Manchester said to me: “You should speak to my mum – she’s in the Jewish Socialists Group.” I soon visited Manchester again, for a JSG meeting. I met the founders, Aubrey Lewis and Joe Garman, two proudly working class Jews who had joined the Young Communist League in Cheetham Hill in the 1930s to fight poverty and fascism and build socialism.

In the late 1970s we established a JSG branch in London. At an open meeting for people interested in the group we met Michael Safier and Charlie Pottins for the first time.

Michael, who died just a few weeks ago, was hugely influential in establishing the JSG’s commitment to a progressive diasporic Jewish future, as we rejected Zionism, both for its brutal daily oppression of the Palestinians, but also the immense harm it did to Jewish life.

He was a brilliant chair of meetings, not only ours but campaigns we were part of, including the first public meeting in Britain with an Israeli peace activist and a prominent member of the PLO, and the founding conference mid-1980s of Anti-Fascist Action.

Charlie, from a working-class Manchester Jewish family, was an incredibly hard-working member, editing the JSGs internal bulletin for many years, always willing to carry the banner on demos. A brave anti-fascist, and true internationalist. In the early 1980s he was beaten up by fascists (Jewish fascists who attacked a Palestine solidarity meeting in Lambeth that he was helping to steward). In the Yugoslav Wars in the 1990s Charlie took part in a convey that brought Workers Aid to Tuzla in Bosnia. He died in 2015.

Two people who joined us in the early 1980s definitely broadened our horizons of solidarity. Donald Kenrick who grew up near here (in Highbury), was amazing at learning languages. He graduated from SOAS with a first in Hebrew and Arabic, by his mid-20s he already spoke 20 languages, which included a lot of knowledge of Yiddish, but his main languages were Romani and dialects of it. His main political activity was fighting alongside Roma for their rights. He educated us about shared Jewish and Roma histories of persecution – especially in the Holocaust – and strongly influenced our continuing  work in solidarity with Roma.

The second individual was an Indian Jewish member, Shalom Charikar, from the Bene Israel community in Mumbai. When he and his wife Rachel arrived in Britain in the early 1960s. The main racism they suffered here was anti-Asian racism. In the mid 1980s when we had GLC funding for a JSG project called JCARP (Jewish Cultural and Anti-Racist Project), which organised a series of public meetings in local areas with joint platforms of Jewish and other minority speakers, Shalom frequently spoke for us and was very active in the project management group of JCARP. In the late 1980s he co-founded a campaign supporting the South African anti-apartheid movement here, called Jews against Apartheid, which held two memorable open-air passover seders on the pavement outside South Africa House.

By the mid-1980s our group had a firmly embedded Bundist perspective. We recruited a member of the Bund, Majer Bogdanski, a Polish Jewish refugee who had been a Jewish Socialist Bund activist in 1930s’ Poland. He gave an electrifying talk to our group in 1985 that described the world of activism that the Bund created in semi-fascist 1930s Poland. He often spoke at our Warsaw Ghetto memorial meetings, and always honoured Roma as well as Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Another person who also spoke at many of these, a great friend of the group, was Esther Brunstein, who grew up in a Bundist family, and survived the Lodz ghetto, Auschwitz and Belsen. The late Chaim Neslen, a JSG member for several years who grew up in a Bundist family in Canada, sang at our ghetto memorial events and also co-organised a fantastic weekly Yiddish folksong workshop for the JCARP project.

It was in the 1980s – an incredibly exciting and productive period for the JSG – that we first met the last three people I want to tell you about. Neil Collins, who died in January 2023, was a mental health social worker in Hackney who lived in Walthamstow He suffered very debilitating physical health in his later years. He also suffered as a lifelong Leyton Orient Football fan.

The great Neil Collins JSG moment happened before we even knew his name – at a JCARP public meeting in Stamford Hill in 1885 with Black activist Paul Boateng, Steve Ogin from the JSG, and a lively crowd including a couple of hecklers. When Steve spoke about fighting racism by positively promoting minorities’ cultures – including Yiddish culture, the two hecklers shouted, “What’s all this Yiddish? Nobody speaks Yiddish these days!” Before Steve could respond, This man we didn’t know, turned round and shouted “shut up you potz!” in perfect Yiddish (it means prick/idiot).  Lots of laughter, the meeting continued, and the hecklers kept shtum after that. That man was Neil Collins, a dedicated anarchist who joined the JSG soon after and remained a member until he died.

In the late 1980s Bernard Misrahi, joined the JSG. Bernard was born in Malta, inheriting his name from his father’s Turkish Sephardi family. Bernard became politically active in his teens through the Schools Action Union. By the time he joined the JSG he was known as a very determined grassroots anti-racist and anti-deportations campaigner. He brought that knowledge and experience into the JSG. He died from cancer in 2003 aged just 50. In subsequent years, his daughter Esther and wife Lesley also died from different cancers, leaving their son Adam, who lives in Leipzig the sole survivor of his immediate family. We stay in touch with Adam and we are very pleased that his aunt Rita is here with her son at our event today.

Finally I want to mention David Kessel who started coming to JSG meetings intermittently in the mid-1980s. He had been a very dedicated doctor in the East End who had to give up practicing relatively young  after being diagnosed as schizophrenic. He was a talented poet who lived in the East End and published his poems (some in Jewish Socialist) while working and campaigning in mental health survivors groups. At JSG meetings he would usually sit quietly through the speaker and discussion with great concentration, then gingerly put his hand up and come out with devastating one liners. At a JSG meeting in the mid-1980s about Zionism, a few non-JSG members there included a couple of UJS students who tried not very subtly to sow dissent among us and our particular rejection of Zionism. When David Kessel spoke, he said six words. “Zionism is the enemy of mankind.”

Don’t we know it. And womenkind and childkind. But for us in the JSG – rejection of Zionism has never been enough – we also need a progressive alternative future not only in Palestine/Israel but here and now in the diaspora as Jews who reject Zionism and all nationalism, who reject the coercion of religious orthodoxy and the smugness of those who falsely claim to speak for all Jews. In these bleak times we are proud of the JSG’s involvement in the Jewish Bloc for Palestine, proud to campaign for a progressive and liberatory present and future as Jews. In the words of two Bundists Marek Edelman and Emanuel Scherer, we will “always be with the oppressed never with the oppressors”. We fight for “rights and justice for Jews everywhere, without wrongs and injustice to other people anywhere.”

Recognising truths for today about anti-fascism in the 1930s

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Talk on workshop panel on “Return to the 1930s? the changing face of fascism and how to fight it” at the International Summit organised by Stand Up To Racism, 16 November, 2024

Every five years there’s a big celebration of the Battle of Cable Street – the iconic clash in the 1930s between fascism and anti-fascism in Britain, which took place in East London.

That day – when the British state was determined to protect free speech and free movement for Oswald Mosley’s deeply antisemitic British Union of fascists – thousands of his foot-soldiers in jackboots and black uniforms were blocked from invading the most highly Jewish-populated East End streets by my favourite prevent strategy of them all: blockades, barricades, and masses of working-class activists working in unison across ethnic and religious divides.

Mosley had assumed he could turn another impoverished minority – local Irish Catholics – against the Jews. The western end of Cable Street was almost entirely Jewish (including my grandfather’s cousin’s shop at number 27, which his cousins lived above). The remarkable moment was when Irish people started to arrive from their eastern end of Cable Street to help Jews build the barricades.

Mosley’s first East End branch, in Bow, had held its initial march on 4 October 1934, from Bow to Stepney Green. They described it in their newspaper, the Blackshirt:

“The Blackshirts marched in procession from Bow Branch premises… into Stepney Green, where a large crowd of… people had gathered which later increased to well over 1,500. The Blackshirts had a very noisy reception as the larger part of the audience were aliens who resented British people holding a meeting in what they considered to be their own territory”.

On 4 October 1936, after two years of vilification, dehumanisation and intimidation, whipping up hatred against Jews among the surrounding population, Mosley attempted a massive invasion of the Jewish areas of the East End. But despite thousands of police trying to clear the way, his Blackshirts were stopped. This failure haunted him the rest of his life.

That didn’t happen by accident – it took enormous amounts of preparation and organisation. It also took unity in action by different movements: the Communist Party, Independent Labour Party, Labour League of Youth, and a local grassroots coalition – the Jewish People’s Council against Racism and Fascism. They didn’t need to agree on every political detail to do what was necessary together.

It is important to know our history – not simply to honour those who campaigned against racism and fascism before us, but to inspire us and pass on ideas for challenging the far right today. And if we are truly to understand and use that experience against Mosley’s political descendants, then we have to do some myth-busting and recognise certain truths.

It was an immensely important day – but it was one day, one battle, albeit on an enormous scale. Fascism in 1930s Britain was disrupted, resisted and ultimately defeated in several battles and campaigns around the country over several years, and not always so dramatically.

I am passionate about east London, where it took place, but also pleased that I’ve been invited to talk about it at events in Stockton in the North-East, where there was a smaller version in 1933, when around 100 of Mosley’s foot-soldiers came to the town trying to recruit in an area suffering from very high unemployment. Local trade unionists and left-wing campaigners, especially communists, got wind of their plan and gave them the kind of welcome that required bandages afterwards.

I’ve also spoken about Cable Street in Leeds, where the Battle of Holbeck Moor happened just a week before Cable Street. Mosley had planned to march 1,000 fascists through the Leylands, a Jewish working class area of Leeds. The previous night, fascists daubed swastikas and slogans on doors and windows. As a result the police diverted the march the next day, away from the Leylands, towards Holbeck Moor, where Mosley and his 1,000 fascists were met by 30,000 counter-protesters – a humiliation for Mosley and his movement.

Local anti-racists and anti-fascists have recently unveiled a plaque there to commemorate that event. Richard Burgon, the Independent MP for Leeds East, has written a beautiful account of the commemoration in the new issue of Jewish Socialist magazine, expressing pride that his grandad, Tommy Burgon, an active member of the Tailor and Garment Workers Union in Leeds, just 22 years old at the time, was one of those 30,000 anti-fascists.

There were similar anti-fascist mobilisations in Manchester, Liverpool, Bristol, and elsewhere. But between these dramatic events there was the more mundane but vital work of educating and sharing information, analysing, building shared understandings, arguing, persuading, convincing, changing hearts and minds.

In nearly nine decades since Cable Street, our need to do that patient, consistent work has not diminished. In a world saturated with social media memes, tik-tok, 250-character tweets – instant ways of conveying ideas – we need to use that technology not only to share our insights but to make them sustainable elements of our longer-term campaigns to defeat the racists and fascists today.

When the Jewish People’s Council was established in July 1936, it set itself two ambitious tasks: one, to mobilise the whole Jewish community of the East End proactively to combat fascism and antisemitism; the other, to make links with local non-Jewish anti-fascists (especially through Trade Unions) to build a local anti-fascist majority. That took time and effort but it was crucial, not only to the success on the day of Cable Street, but in decisively defeating fascists in local elections in the East End five months later. This continued through to forging unity between Jews and non-Jews in struggles against landlords and fascists in 1938/39 through the Stepney Tenants Defence League

People say that history repeats itself, and conclude that we simply have to do today what was done yesterday. I prefer Mark Twain’s take: “History doesn’t repeat itself but it rhymes.” In that spirit, we can hear echoes and rhymes in the battles waged by Bengalis, especially the youth movements, in organising, gaining self-confidence, and building alliances to confront the National Front in London’s East End in the 1970s.

I was a volunteer on a recent oral history project where we interviewed individuals who had been part of those youth movements in their teenage years or early 20s. It was enlightening to hear them describe their daily experience of institutional racism and individual acts of prejudice, abuse and violence. In the youth movements, they not only learnt self-defence but created dramas from their own experiences, using them to raise consciousness about their situation and how to change things. That work was just as significant as the weekly skirmishes to defend Brick Lane from the fascists who gathered there in force every Sunday morning.

We need to learn how different communities have dealt with the threats of racism and fascism in different generations, not to use them as blueprints but to bring their ideas and strategies into the different contexts we face today, and marry them with our own new insights.

We have defeated them in the past. And we can defeat them again. But that is not certain. What is certain is that it won’t happen on one day, in one major confrontation. We need courage, patience and unity. No Pasaran!

Rosa in London

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I was very pleased to be asked to give the main speech at the unveiling of a plaque for the courageous revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg at a block of flats in Hackney, this afternoon, to celebrate her time in London, especially in 1907. This is what I said:

Thanks for inviting me to speak at the unveiling of a plaque to Rosa Luxemburg, a revolutionary socialist and internationalist. She was born in Zamosc, Poland, in 1871, into a secular Jewish family, then raised in Warsaw.

She expressed her internationalism by saying “I am at home in the entire world, where there are clouds and birds and human tears.”

A political activist from her early teens, she lived her revolutionary life in Warsaw, Geneva and Berlin, and spent time in prisons in both Poland and Germany. In Berlin’s revolutionary upheavals in 1919 she was murdered, aged 47, and her body dumped in a canal.

She came to London at least three times – for seven days in 1896 for an International Socialist and Trade Unionists congress, two days in December 1913 at a meeting of the International Socialist Bureau, but her longest stay was in 1907, for nearly three weeks, as a delegate to the 5th congress of the Russian Revolutionary Party.  That congress was held in the Brotherhood Church, a radical socialist church that stood on this site until 1934.

Because of repression, arrests and imprisonment of revolutionaries in Russia itself, several of their congresses were held in exile, three in London in 1903, 1905, 1907. By far the largest of those London congresses was in 1907, with around 340 delegates including not only Rosa Luxemburg but other figures such as Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin. The 1903 and 1907 congresses had the most fiery factional debates. In 1907, Rosa Luxemburg contributed three powerful speeches and intervened in several debates.

She engaged in that factionalism herself but was true to her beliefs. She sided with the Bolsheviks against the Mensheviks and was negative about the Bund – a Jewish socialist movement with 57 delegates at that 1907 Congress, whose politics I admire. In later years she was increasingly critical of Lenin over the national question (she was instinctively much more anti-nationalist) and critical too of his centralist tendencies, reminding us that “Freedom is always the freedom of the one who thinks differently”. She emphasised the importance of “unrestricted freedom of the press and assembly and the free struggle of opinions.”

We don’t know where Rosa stayed in London in 1907 but I’ve deduced it was somewhere central from her description of travelling to the registration centre for the !907 Congress, housed in a Jewish socialist club in Whitechapel. She wrote:

“I’m sitting in the middle of the famous Whitechapel district…In a foul mood I travelled through the endless stations of the Dark Underground and emerged both depressed and lost in a strange and wild part of the city. It’s dark and dirty here. A dim streetlight is flickering and is reflected in puddles and pools. (It’s been raining the whole day.)”

Especially from the 1880s until the first world war, two significant cosmopolitan centres of exiled revolutionaries were Geneva and London. As we mark Rosa Luxemburg’s presence here through this plaque, we should note that many other radicals and revolutionaries passed through here: some for days and weeks others for months and years. From 1902-3 Lenin and his close associates edited the Russian revolutionary newspaper ISKRA (the Spark) in London. It was smuggled into Russia, reproduced by clandestine printers, then left in batches in the middle of the night in places where workers would pass by in the morning. Think of it like the Metro with revolutionary content.

Radicals and revolutionaries in London in 2024 are of course engaged with the fight for a better future, but we must also be engaged with the fight for a better past and put up plaques and murals to remember the radical legacy of our city.

I’ll finish with one more quote from Rosa Luxemburg, very pertinent to politics in Britain today: “The most revolutionary thing one can do is always to proclaim loudly what is happening.”

Poverty and fascist deceptions in dangerous times

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David Rosenberg’s speech in Whitehall at the protest by Stand Up To Racism and allies against the march and rally in Parliament Square by Tommy Robinson and far-right supporters

Greetings from the Jewish Socialists Group (JSG), a group founded in the 1970s when the National Front were growing rapidly and holding provocative and intimidating marches through inner-city areas where Caribbean and Asian immigrants were eking a living in the face of widespread discrimination.

Those who founded the JSG had cut their teeth politically as teenagers in working class Jewish communities in the 1930s battling the twin evils of poverty and fascism.

They, and we who are active in the JSG today, have always understood that link between poverty and fascism – how fascism offers the most false, deceptive and crude answers to ordinary working class people who are genuinely struggling. Fascism promises to restore people’s pride in who they are, offering them ultra-nationalism, a flag, and someone to hate, in place of food on the table, a secure and well-paid job, good quality secure housing in the homes they need, and a better standard of living for all.

And when you look at things this way you can see how useful are the pathetic individuals who become figureheads of far-right movements, to those who want to maintain a capitalist economy where the rich increase their wealth by keeping the poor, poor.

It’s all too easy to focus excessively on those figureheads who become leaders of far-right movements, though you do wonder who staffs their quality-control departments. But it is much more important to understand the economic and political role that these movements play, whether they call themselves British Union of Fascists, National Front, British Movement, BNP, Britain First, EDL or anything else, when their honest name is UND – Ultra-Nationalist Dupes – who help maintain capitalism and misery.

Anti-fascism is part of our group’s DNA and it will always be central to our work. Because Jewish people had long experience of combating fascism through the 20th century, we know that every far-right movement in Britain through that century, and in this one, has won support from at least two classes, recruiting foot-soldiers from the more impoverished classes but financed by a much more comfortable class. Every prominent fascist movement in Britain or indeed in Germany, in Spain, in Chile, has been partly or significantly enabled by right-wing mainstream capitalist interests.

When the BNP had their temporary breakthrough in Barking and Dagenham between 2006 and 2010, winning 12 local councillors overnight, and then putting up more than 400 candidates nationally in the 2010 General Election, that work wasn’t financed by the struggling poor in Barking and Dagenham.

So we focus our anti-fascist work, not just on combating them on the streets when they show themselves, but by working to bring together the range of communities threatened by the fascists in a common struggle against them. And at the same time we challenge the economic and political conditions that give rise to them. We seek to build anti-fascist majorities in local areas around the country, and that means bringing together a movement of black and white, cross generational, a movement committed to challenging racism and bigotry in every form, and refusing to let our enemies divide us.

Every effort is being made to divide us. Not least when the execrable Suella Braverman was Home Secretary, trying to prove she could be more hard-line than Priti Patel, by encouraging Tommy Robinson and his rag-bag of followers to invade central London to intimidate the vibrant, multi-cultural movement that has been holding powerful marches against the genocide in Gaza and the British Government’s complicity in it. Our group is proud to be part of the Jewish Bloc that has been a significant presence on every one of those national marches, supporting justice for Palestine and visibly giving the lie to those who say central London is unsafe for Jews.

But anti-fascists live in dangerous times. Look across Europe – where there will be elections to the European Parliament in a few days. The forecast is that far-right parties (who combine their ultra-nationalism with Islamophobia, anti-Black and anti-Roma racism, antisemitism and anti-migrant, anti-refugee sentiment), will grow in strength and influence. A new united far-right bloc led by Meloni and le Pen is likely to emerge as one of the biggest blocs.

Look across the water to America where Donald Trump despite his setback could win power again. Trump has spent most of his life steeped in close friendships with white supremacists and antisemites. He is a rabid Islamophobe. And yet, in recent days, we have heard both Keir Starmer and David Lammy calmly say they would be happy to sit down with him if, as expected, Labour will be in government.

We know that the Tories have had many, many decades of deepening and finessing their racist nationalism. It is galling to see the Labour Party – who still have many good anti-racists at the grassroots, being led by people so committed to Atlanticism, whichever far-right jerk may be running America. It is galling to see them pushing the most vacuous Union-Jack-waving nationalism here, while trying to oust black and brown left wingers in the party, and to see how they have cheapened the fight against real antisemitism by using false accusations as a political football in a factional fight against the left. And it is galling to find them just as wedded to the Tories’ crude “Stop the Boats” slogan that shamefully treats refugees as a problem rather than assets to our society.

As Jewish socialists we stand with all victims of racism and we are mightily glad that Diane Abbott and Faiza Shaheen are fighting back! And we take inspiration from all who are fighting back against racism, against nationalism, against fascism, across the globe, for a world without borders, a world based on humanity, equality and solidarity. No Pasaran!

Not just the usual suspects…

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David Rosenberg talk for Tower Hamlets Stand Up To Racism meeting on 3 March 2024

Many thanks for inviting me. Greetings from the Jewish Socialists Group. We are five minutes walk from Approach Road where my mum grew up with her Jewish immigrant parents in the 1930s. She was born nearer to the main Jewish area of Brick Lane but when she was young her parents rented part of a house near here. They lived there through the 1930s, when Oswald Mosley’s Fascists were stirring up virulent and violent antisemitism in the area. They used to have a weekly march in Blackshirt uniforms to their local Bethnal Green HQ .

My mum went to Bonner Street school where there were other Jews in the school but she was the only Jew in her class. Other children let her know that every day. She grew up grew up fearing and experiencing  antisemitic bullying.

Mosley’s 1930s fascists won some support in every class of British society. Here they tried to build a working class base, but you could also find political antisemitism elsewhere, for example in the mainstream press, especially in the Daily Mail. You could hear poisonous antisemitic statements made by Conservative politicians in parliament. They would have looked down at the working class fascists in Bethnal Green as uncouth, but they mouthed the same antisemitic lies and slanders, painting Jews as an alien undesirable element, who didn’t belong here.

For most of the last 60 years, though, there was a clear distance between conventional Conservative, right wing views and those of ultra nationalist Far-Right groups like the NF and the British Movement founded in the 1960s and ‘70s, but, in the last five years, there seems to be deliberate attempts to blur the lines between the Tory Right and the Fascist Far-Right. Their sharpest arrows today are aimed at Muslims and refugees, and especially those who are both.

But they don’t forget their older enemies – this Government presided over the continuing Windrush Scandal that devastated the lives of many Caribbean families. And the Tories closest allies in Europe show us the murky waters in which they swim. Britain left the EU but the Tories still lead a bloc of hard right and far-right parties in the Council of Europe, where it is allied with some of the most Islamophobic, antisemitic, anti-Roma, anti-refugee and anti-LGBT political parties, such as Le Pen’s National Rally in France, AfD in Germany, Meloni’s Brothers of Italy and the Freedom Party in Austria both of whom have explicitly fascist roots, and of course Orban’s Party in Hungary which in 2018 won the election there with an openly antisemitic campaign using classic conspiracy theories targeting Hungarian Jew George Soros.

Victor Orban believes in the Great Replacement Theory that says Muslim migrants and refugees are replacing White Christians in the West. He paints Hungary as the last line of defence of White Christian Europe. He blames Jews like Soros for enabling Muslim infiltration. 

Back in Britain there is a lot of explicit racist hate around. It is vital that there is maximum solidarity between minorities who are suffering from abuse and hate and we don’t allow anyone to divide us. Recent detailed reports show us that both Islamophobia and antisemitism are on the rise in terms of threats and violence, abuse, stereotyping and blame for problems in society. But it is complicated – a number of those threats and acts of antisemitic violence, have come not just from the usual far-right suspects but from people who themselves face racism.

The government, far-right and right wing media condemn legitimate protests for justice for Palestine to stir up racist divisions. They describe them as “hate marches” by an “extremist mob”, motivated by religious fanaticism that turn central London into a no-go area for Jewish people, when in reality they are people, across all religions and none, across London’s ethnicities, uniting to stand up for justice for Palestine.

In truth, the protests do not break down on religious lines. They regularly include large numbers of Jewish groups who have formed a Jewish bloc. We are greeted on those marches with absolute warmth and friendship. 

The terrible destruction in Palestine is being done by an Israeli government armed to the teeth by America, Britain, Germany and Modi’s India. That is where anger should be directed. It is not the responsibility of Jewish people here, who have as much right as anyone to live lives free from racist harassment. And we should also support those in Israel who are protesting against the war and their government every week.

Many random attacks, though, on Jews here, are happening far from the marches, carried out by people who blur the distinctions between Jews and the Israeli government. They are being fed by antisemites who spread lies, hate and antisemitic conspiracy theories on social media.

I have been shocked to see in recent days and weeks materials/videos from hard-line Nazis being shared on social media by some supporters of the Palestinian cause. We all have a responsibility as anti-racists and anti-fascists to expose this and persuade people not to fall for conspiracy theories. The only  people who benefit from this situation are the fascists.

We also need to remind ourselves of all the forms of antisemitism and Islamophobia that have flourished before October 7. 

I want to close with what is for me a very significant act of solidarity that took place in the East End In 1970,  and the lessons we can all draw form that. The most well known racist murder locally that decade was of course Altab Ali, a young Bengali clothing worker in 1978 attacked and stabbed as he was walking home form work. But there was an earlier murder in April 1970, when 50 year old Tosir  Ali a kitchen porter at a west End Wimpy Bar, returned late at night, to his flat near Bromley-by-Bow station.

A few minutes after midnight he was attacked by two 18-year-olds, they slashed him with a knife they ran off. The motive was not robbery. His wallet containing £10 was found with his dead body.

An Irish neighbour raised the alarm after she heard a horrific scream. Ali was rushed to Hospital but died soon afterwards.

At one of several Asian community meetings, a veteran local political figure spoke up. Solly Kaye, a Jew, was a Communist Party councillor in Stepney. He had already experienced this situation as a young activist in the 1930s East End where the East European Jewish immigrant community he was born into faced ideological and violent physical attacks from fascists and other antisemites. He joined the Communist Party in 1934, took part in the Battle of Cable Street, and spoke on many indoor and outdoor platforms against fascists.

Solly Kaye

In this community meeting in 1970s he gave his condolences and solidarity and said this: “the purveyors of racialism can be defeated by united action… it would be the greatest error and worse, if the struggle were left to the immigrant organisations to bear the brunt of the fight… the fight against racial discrimination and violence is part of the fight for a new and better society.”

Those few lines contains important principles that we need right now.

• The responses to outbursts of hate must always be wider than the community directly attacked. We all need to react to expressions of hate against  any minority by saying “their fight is our fight”, and support each other unconditionally against racist attacks.

Minorities often do support each other, but for Solly Kaye the onus was also on majority communities. Solidarity was the responsibility of all who want a better society. The fight against racism could not be delayed. It is always the right time to combat racism.

Kaye’s intervention implored people to be not bystanders but upstanders when others were attacked. But his statement also coupled the violence the Asian community endured with the everyday discrimination they suffered. They were intimately linked.

And in that spirit I want to emphasise that the fight against racism is not a pic ‘n’ choose activity. If you fight antisemitism but ignore Islamophobia – that is not antiracism. And if you fight Islamophobia but ignore antisemitism that is not anti-racism

We must fight ALL racism with the same determination. Solidarity!

The political power of murals

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Last night I was privileged to be part of a panel at the Tate Modern holding a discussion with each other and the audience on “What can murals do?”. Each panelist gave a 5 minute presentation. This was mine.

I’Il tell you what I don’t like. I don’t like statues. They literally place one person on a pedestal for achievements of the many. But I love murals as a beautiful expressive form to celebrate collective struggles. They use the everyday urban fabric to remind us: something momentous happened here. They summon us to action today.

Three examples are especially meaningful for me, but I hope they will resonate with you too, in these times. They are about courageous uprisings from below – the dignity of resistance against oppressors, persecutors, exploiters and fascists.

The first commemorates  the iconic clash of fascism and anti-fascism on 4 October 1936, when thousands of uniformed, jackbooted fascists, inciting violence and hatred, sought to invade the streets where tens of thousands of working class Jews eked a living, They tried to win the local Irish Catholic community against the Jews. On the day the most bloody clashes were in Cable Street, where many Irish united with Jews to build barricades, to physically stop them. The fighting was with the police, ordered by the Home Secretary to facilitate the fascists free speech and movement.

The mural graces the side wall of St Georges Town Hall on Cable Street.  It was commissioned In 1976 after a campaign by local writers, poets, artists who hatched their cultural creations in the basement of that building.

Every 5 years there is a memorial march. In 2016 I was convenor of Cable Street 80. We marched from Altab Ali park in Whitechapel – named for a young Bengali sweatshop worker murdered in a racist attack in 1978 – to a rally near the mural. The artwork is so dramatic, you can almost hear it. One commentator wrote: “Every space has action, perspective is a whirlpool.” For me It is a clarion call for resistance today.

Also in 1976, when work began in Cable Street, an industrial dispute broke out in a photo processing factory in Willesden, mostly staffed by poorly paid “citizens of Empire – South Asian migrant women plus Irish and Caribbean workers. When one worker was dismissed for allegedly working too slowly, some fellow workers immediately came out in solidarity.  When a  manager compared workers to “chattering monkeys”, Jayaben Desai  replied ‘What you are running here is not a factory, it is a zoo.  In a zoo, there are many types of animals.  Some are monkeys that dance on your fingertips, others are lions who can bite your head off.  We are the lions, Mr. Manager’. She led a walk out of 137 workers. An uprising.

Union groups across Britain came to the picket lines – the most remarkable, miners from Yorkshire’s white monocultural pit villages gave solidarity to Asian women migrant workers. Postal workers boycotted the company. Students came too. I nursed a large bump below my knee on the way back to Leeds Uni after a policemen kicked me. This fight for union recognition won great community support.

In difficult times, economically, the two year strike ultimately failed but inspired campaigns for change. It is celebrated in two murals unveiled in 2017 – one in a small backstreet opposite the factory site, now converted into flats. But on the main road, Dudden Hill Lane, is a stunning 28metre-long mural created in community workshops facilitated by artist Ann Ferrie. Participants  included families of the strikers and schoolchildren. Archive photographs from the strike became stencils that were screenprinted, photographed, then digitally composited into artwork and printed on to boards. People of all artistic abilities saw their work in the final piece.

We travel eastwards for my third example in the heart of what was the Warsaw Ghetto from 1940-43. A mural on a school building by, Dariusz Paczkowski, depicts a defiant Marek Edelman, a daffodil in his fist, and a brick wall. Edelman, a Jewish marxist, and anti-nationalist, was Second in Command in the three-week uprising of a few hundred starved combatants with improvised weapons against  the armed might of the Nazis. He wrote a searing memoir called The Ghetto Fights and always stressed it was a collective uprising whose participant had already survived two and a half years in the  ghetto through a culture of mutual aid and countless quiet acts of daily resistance by so many.

I met him briefly in 1997. Last year I was in Warsaw for the 80th anniversary of the ghetto uprising. I took part in the alternative ceremony led by grassroots anti-racist and anti-fascists, in contrast to the militaristic official ceremony, brimming with Polish and Israeli flags.

Edelman died in 2009. He pioneered these alternative ceremonies, knowing that this history belonged neither to Polish nor Israeli nationalists. He said “we fought for dignity and freedom not for territory nor for a national identity.”

The words in Polish on this mural could not be more apt today. “Hatred is easy. Love requires effort and sacrifice.”