‘I Just Couldn’t Take It’: How a Jewish Politician Decided to Confront Left-Wing Antisemitism

It is a torturous time to be a Jewish political leader. The savage Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7 left deep wounds in the Jewish community everywhere. Now, acts of antisemitism and anti-Jewish rhetoric are proliferating across the United States and Europe as the Israel-Hamas war intensifies and Israeli military forces prosecute a bloody campaign in Gaza.

To explore this challenging moment, POLITICO Magazine interviewed Dame Margaret Hodge, a member of the British Parliament affiliated with the Labour Party. Hodge, who is Jewish, has been an outspoken voice against antisemitism and was a leading critic of Jeremy Corbyn, the far-left former Labour leader who was expelled from the party for his persistent refusal to confront the problem of anti-Jewish bigotry within Labour.

Hodge recently wrote a column for The Guardian that described her experience last February visiting a kibbutz, Kfar Aza, which later became a target of Hamas’ massacre. In the piece, Hodge wrote that her guide on the visit, a “brilliant young woman,” had been missing since the attack. Speaking with POLITICO Magazine, Hodge said her guide had since been found alive but that her family had experienced unspeakable tragedy.

In the interview, Hodge, 79, described how the Israel-Hamas war had created political divisions in her parliamentary constituency and even within her granddaughters’ school. And as she looked back at the Labour Party’s recent battle with antisemitism, she said, it’s clear that a “single-minded” effort is needed to roll back hateful forces once they’ve entered the political mainstream.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Burns: I want to ask you about how you’ve processed the last month — what your experience is as a Jew and as a Jewish leader in politics and what the atmosphere is like right now.

Hodge: Just as a little background on myself: I am Jewish, I’m a refugee. I’m an immigrant into the U.K., so my parents were refugees from two places. But they were very much assimilators. We didn’t have a traditional Jewish upbringing in any way. We never belonged to a synagogue. We never kept any of the festivals or anything like that. Although, what I always say, interestingly enough, all our family friends were Jewish refugees. So, culturally, we were completely Jewish.

Really, my Jewish identity was never part of my politics, all through my life, until Corbyn. My jokey thing that I always say is that my dad tried to make me a better Jew and failed and the rabbi tried to make me a better Jew and failed. And then I went to the LSE [London School of Economics], which when I was there in the ’60s was very — there were a lot of Jews there, we laughingly called it the London Shul of Economics. They tried to make me a good Jew and they failed. And it took Jeremy Corbyn to make me a Jew, really.

Burns: So, he has that one accomplishment.

Hodge: I remember waking up to the news, actually, on Saturday — on the Sabbath I couldn’t quite believe it. I was quite surprised by my own reaction, which was very visceral. It was such a sadistic massacre. A pogrom. I call it a pogrom of Jews.

It goes back to my dad saying to me — he always used to say he wanted us to be accepted by British society and he thought that Jewish identity probably impeded that. He was a German and my mother was an Austrian, and they’d been very much assimilators in Germany and Austria. But he always said: Keep a suitcase by the door. And it sort of made me feel that. I had a very, very visceral reaction.

Burns: You said you were surprised by your own reaction. Why was it surprising to you?

Hodge: How strong it was. How immediate it felt to me. How I identified with it.

I’ve had an ambivalent relationship with Israel, to say the least, through the years. I’m very old, so I went there in the ’60s and I thought I was in heaven. I went and spent three or four months on a kibbutz and you tilled the soil from 3:30 to 10 o’clock, then you stuck around the swimming pool talking about Marx and Rousseau. So it was absolute heaven to me.

And then, when I was at LSE, I did have an Israeli boyfriend, and I went back with him to Israel right after the Six Day War and I just couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t stomach it. I’ve always believed in the right of Israel to exist, so I should preface it with that. But I’ve always felt uncomfortable there, in a sense. In ’67, it felt very imperialist, a very undeveloped, very poor Arab state. Everywhere you went in Jerusalem, there were hovels on the Arab side and neon lights on the Israeli side. That’s how I’d describe it. And the hovels had sort of torn-up white shirts on top of poles. It felt awful.

Then, when I got involved in the antisemitism row [with Corbyn] and re-found my Jewish identity, I went back this February and I went with two organizations. I went with an organization called Labour Friends of Israel — I did half with them and the other half with an organization called One Israel Fund, which raises money among Jews and then funds grassroots work that brings the Arabs and the Jews together, so building social cohesion from the bottom up. I like what they do and it fits with my values. I met some stunningly wonderful people on this trip, so I’ve come back with a very different take on it this time.

We went to one of the kibbutz that was attacked. Have you seen the bit I wrote about that?

Burns: I want to come back to that.

Hodge: I think that was another reason that I felt so visceral about it all. When I wrote it, we hadn’t heard from the people who took us around. We have, since, that the parents were both killed and her brother was shot and injured and lay under the bodies of the dead parents for seven hours until he was rescued.

Burns: Your host, is she —

Hodge: She’s alive. She’s alive. She’s not in a fit state to talk yet. But the parents are dead and the brother — God knows what that does to you. I have no idea.

Burns: In your political capacity, how much do you feel the atmosphere of antisemitic backlash in this moment?

Hodge: I feel it both politically and personally. Let me describe the personal at the moment.

Personally, two of my granddaughters are of secondary school age, so they go to a single-sex girls secondary school. And because it’s single-sex, there’s a very large Muslim population there. The school originally put up some sort of display where they had an Israeli flag and a Palestinian flag. Good stuff. But the Muslim girls tore down the Israeli flag and replaced it with another Palestinian flag. So, only two Palestinian flags.

The girls came home — they live next door to me — and they said, “We’re not going to tell anybody we’re Jewish.” So then we had a bit of a discussion about that. They went back the next day and the one who is — she’s just 12 — some of these Muslim girls came up to her and said: “Are you Jewish?” So she says, “Yes. So they said, “Which side are you on?” Terrible. So she sort of said, “I’m not on either side,” and then they started poking her with a Palestinian flag.

So that’s on the personal level.

On the political level, it’s a mix. When it all blew, we were at Labour Party Conference. I’m the only Jewish woman. I’m the only Jewish woman left, Labour MP, and there are three Jewish male Labour MPs, but they’re much more reluctant to say anything publicly. They don’t really do a lot about their identity in their politics, whereas I do because that role has been put upon me because of the antisemitism.

So I did one interview, which went fine. And then I did another one on Sky and they brought on a journalist from The Guardian who was absolutely — I hope it’s not too strong a word — I think he’s fanatically pro-Palestinian. I know him and I’ve worked with him, and I’ve done interviews with him down the years. He walked over the pogrom and straight into: This is terrible for the Palestinians, and blah blah blah into the whole debate of “Free Palestine.” I just couldn’t take it. It wasn’t the best of my interviews.

Anyway, the interview went viral among the Muslim community. I have lots of mosques in my constituency, I’ve got about 15 percent Muslim constituents, and I’ve worked really hard from Day One in supporting the Muslim community. And indeed, in 2010, I fought — British National Party [an extreme-right minor party], does that mean anything to you?

Burns: Yes.

Hodge: [BNP Leader] Nick Griffin, he was there challenging us not because of the Jewish community but because of the Muslim community. There isn’t really a Jewish community in my patch.

Anyway, I rang up, said I’d like to come to the mosque on Friday. And he said, “No, you can’t, they’d absolutely go for you.” Which I was upset about. Then I said, “But I’m doing a meeting in the road where this big mosque is.” I’ve got, I think, probably 20 mosques, but this is the big one. I do a lot of community-based street meetings, and this was about some trees that had been chopped down and people were angry. He says, “Oh, you can’t come and do that meeting, Margaret.”

I got off the phone and decided I wasn’t going to have this no-go area. So I did go ahead with the meeting. And it was fine. It was about 20, 25 people there, mostly Muslims. And they wanted to talk about trees. That was what they wanted to talk about. Nothing hostile at all.

But I’m now trying the local councilors, I think, are they refusing to meet me?

[Hodge’s aide reads a note from local officials declining her request to meet with them and telling her: “Now is not the right time to arrange a meeting.”]

Burns: These are local officials within your constituency?

Hodge: These are local councilors who are Muslim.

Burns: And did you want to meet with them specifically to discuss the war or —

Hodge: Yeah, yeah. That is outrageous. I’ll have to think how I deal with that. But I just literally got that back this afternoon. There we are. It’s literally hot off the press. So, that’s it politically.

Within the Parliamentary Labour Party, it’s different. I do a lot of supporting of younger MPs now, at this stage of my life. And I’ve supported particularly the Muslim young women MPs. We talk a lot. We may not be entirely in the same place at this moment. I’m trying really hard to see whether we can’t get to a position where we put out a joint statement. I’ve had sort of two-hour conversations with most of them and we’re absolutely determined to maintain our friendship, even if we end up in a different place.

Burns: I thought you were going to say there’s a difference between that and where the party would have been three or four years ago, right?

Hodge: Oh, yeah, there’s all that as well. Three or four years ago, God knows. God knows where we’d have been.

Burns: But let me invite you to go further on that. In a Jeremy Corbyn world, where would Labour be now — if you did not have a different leader who had cracked down on antisemitism in the party? What do you imagine this would have been like, this moment?

Hodge: I wouldn’t have been there.

Burns: I wonder what your perception is of the dynamic in the United States, from the outside in. How concerned are you by the discourse that you follow here around Israel and around antisemitism?

Hodge: I’m not that connected to it, if I’m honest. I’ve seen a couple of demonstrations, you know, I don't know whether I’ve seen them on social media or where. One of radical Jews, pro-Palestine. That was the one which seemed like a big, hefty demonstration, actually. You’ll find different views within — I visited a breakfast meeting this morning with a bunch of Jews and an organization called Yachad, which also tries to build bridges with the Palestinian community. People are very conflicted. You get that in the Jewish community as well as outside it.

Now that you jog my memory, there has been some pretty vile antisemitic stuff in the States as well. But it’s sort of merged, with me, with the antisemitism here in the U.K. and in France.

Burns: I’m Jewish as well, and I do think there certainly is a feeling of conflict in the Jewish community about how to process this moment and what to think of Israel’s response to the attack. I don’t think there’s much ambivalence about how to feel about the Oct. 7 attack itself. I think that something that can at least give the feeling of having a clarifying effect is when you feel, as a Jew, that people have forgotten what actually happened on Oct. 7, right? The speed with which certain elites, certain activist groups, have moved on from the horror of the initial attack to a kind of discourse that makes Israel purely an aggressor. That is pretty unsettling stuff to process.

Hodge: Yeah, I think that’s the same here in the U.K. And I agree with you. It is very, very unsettling.

Burns: There’s this temptation, I think, in the States, to view antisemitism and sort of loud antisemitism as a real minority, far more of a fringe force. I wonder, looking back on the Corbyn experience, what’s the point where it tips over from being confined to hard-line activists, a force that’s anchored really only in a few kinds of constituencies and communities, to a real mainstream threat to center-left politics?

Hodge: Even the term antisemitism is a difficult term. It’s not really understood. I often used to just talk about Jew hatred. The term itself is sort of — those that are in the game understand it, I don’t think it’s understood by the general population. So that’s the first thing to say. During our battle against it, I would always try and use the word ‘Jew hate’ if I wanted to reach a wider audience.

It’s always been on the fringes of left politics. When I now look back at some of my experiences in the ’80s, Ken Livingstone — do you know [left-wing former London Mayor] Ken Livingstone? — I used to have a lot of interaction with him when I was in local government before I became a member of Parliament. My maiden name is Oppenheimer, so it’s a pretty Jewish name. I used to go to these meetings, and he would start sneering about my name and sneering about money. Then I’d come home and I’d say, “I think he’s being antisemitic.” And then I’d say, “It can’t be, because he’s anti-racist.” You know, they portray themselves as anti-racist but this is the only racism that is acceptable.

It was always dealt with on the fringes. It’s when it moved to the mainstream, that came with Corbyn. It was an issue you couldn’t ignore. I wasn’t involved in any of the Jewish parliamentary group groups until I saw what happened in 2016 [with Corbyn]. I started just getting an avalanche of antisemitic social media postings. I thought, I just I can’t be dealing with this. I talked to a colleague of mine who said, “Come along to a meeting.” They were already meeting about it as a Jewish Labour movement. And that’s how it all started. It came at me. I just thought I couldn’t tolerate it.

To be honest, Corbyn was so unacceptably awful. He was so awful that he did loads of stuff which inevitably got him onto the front page of the papers and therefore it spread. Interestingly enough, in my own patch, which is a working-class patch without a Jewish community, by 2019 it had hit them. When I was on the doorstep, you would quite often get — “nasty party,” “Jew hate.”

Burns: What you were getting on the doorstep were expressions of bigotry or —

Hodge: No, no, no.

Burns: That people think that’s Labour?

Hodge: Yup, “That’s Labour.”

Burns: It seems to me, and this is as an outsider looking at U.K. politics — it does seem to me that a lesson for center-left or left politics here in the United States, or anywhere, from the Corbyn experience is that once those forces do move into the mainstream it’s awfully hard to get them out.

Hodge: All credit to [current Labour leader] Keir Starmer — I thought it would take five years, eight years. He has been so single-minded and actually totally, totally focused, we got rid of it very quickly.

They’ve introduced a much, much better and faster complaints mechanism for dealing with allegations of antisemitism, which operates in a fair way and uninfluenced by politics. People are just shoved out. For people who hold office, there’s much, much tougher vetting under Keir.

Burns: Before I let you go, I do just want to return to the personal. When your granddaughters tell you what happened at their school, the flag being torn down then being asked which side they’re on — what do you tell them?

Hodge: Stand up for their identity. But it’s hard. The girls said to their mum, “We don’t want you to take it up because they’ll only be nastier.” So she has, of course, taken it up. I think schools don’t know how to deal with it.

I mean, it’s unacceptable. All the time. It’s unacceptable. Their mother now has taken it up. They’re probably a bit pissed off with her.