Celebrating Jewish antifascism Together

Photo, left to right: Michael Rosen, Kevin Courtney, Apsana Begum MP and David Rosenberg

Greetings from the Jewish Socialists Group and the Jewish Bloc.

It was Malcolm X who said: “History is a people’s memory”. Our people’s memories are those of being migrants and refugees. We remember the Aliens Act passed by a Tory government in 1905 to stem the flow of Jewish refugees fleeing pogroms in the Tsarist Russian Empire. That Aliens Act, which created immigration officers and gave powers of deportation, was the foundation of every piece of repressive immigration and refugee legislation in Britain since.

We are one world. The world is our border. People need the right to cross borders when they want to and when they need to.

Our group includes migrants, and daughters and sons of refugees. Many of our members had relatives who died in the Holocaust because the British government, along with other western nations, did not offer sufficient sanctuary. Britain rejected so many asylum applications from Jews under Nazi rule and took in far fewer Jewish refugees here, after the Holocaust, than many other countries.

So, we absolutely respect, support and give solidarity to refugees and migrants today in their daily struggles for justice, and against state racism, institutional racism, and harassment, hate and violence from the far right.

And if history is “a people’s memory”, then we also remember and celebrate our Jewish anti-racist and anti-fascist traditions, from the Battle of Cable Street in 1936 against Mosley’s fascists and the police, and the Jews who went to Spain to fight with the international Brigade against Franco, to the anti-Nazi resisters of the Warsaw Ghetto. From the Jewish ANC members like Ruth First, Joe Slovo, Ben Turok, Hilda Bernstein and others, who played such an important role in the Black-led struggle against Apartheid in South Africa, to the Jews in Argentina late 1970s – 1% of the population but 12% of those who were "disappeared" by the fascist Junta. And those Jews who are joining with other communities right now on the streets in many cities in America today, under the banners of "Jews against ICE", against Donald Trump’s fascist ICE agents

In so many of these struggles, it is a memory also of uniting together with other groups across the divisions fostered by our enemies. But our motto, based on the words of the Warsaw Ghetto fighter, Marek Edelman, is that we will always be with the oppressed, never with the oppressors.

Always antifascist, always antiracist! No to Genocide and War! Far a besere un shenere velt – for a better and more beautiful world. No Pasaran!