The tables have turned for Labour's anti-Semite in chief 

Four days before Pesach 2018, an unprecedented scene took place outside Parliament in London.

In the evening sunshine stood hundreds of British Jews, ranging from the secular to the chassidic, together with the community’s senior lay leadership and Labour Party MPs, carrying signs reading “Dayenu” and chanting “Enough is Enough,” demanding an end to anti-Semitism.

For a normally low-profile community, the scene was unfathomable. For four hundred years, British Jewry had dealt with communal problems through discreet representations to the authorities; yet here were large crowds protesting to the sound of massed telephoto lenses. More troubling was their target: It was Jeremy Corbyn, head of the Labour Party, political home of the Jews for the best part of a century. The Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition, no less, stood accused of being the “figurehead for an anti-Semitic political culture.”

Fast-forward two and a half years, during which Corbyn’s Labour were routed in a national election and the far-left leader lost power. The bigotry at the heart of Corbyn’s Labour Party has now been exposed. Last week, a report by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) — a legal body ironically founded by Labour themselves — found the party guilty of breaking the law through political interference in anti-Semitism complaints and harassment of whistleblowers.

Corbyn’s final and dizzying fall from grace came within hours. Having rejected the report, saying that “the scale” of Labour anti-Semitism was “dramatically overstated for political reasons,” Jeremy Corbyn was gone. Just three years after being hailed by young left-wing groupies at the Glastonbury Festival with an “Oooh, Jeremy Corbyn” chant, he was suspended from the Labour Party by his successor, Sir Keir Starmer.

In one way, Corbyn’s sacking feels cathartic to many left-leaning British Jews.

“Where to draw the line and leave was a question that all of us, from Jewish MPs like Luciana Berger to teenage members, struggled with,” Mike Katz, chairman of the Jewish Labour Movement, the Labour Party’s official Jewish affiliate, told Mishpacha. “And we’ve told Keir Starmer that the distrust in the Jewish community is so great that repairing the relationship will be a long and difficult road.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 834)