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.”