Britain’s Jewish community, facing internal and external pressure in the wake of the October 2023 Hamas attacks, may soon be pursuing a different, more challenging direction, according to leaders of the Jewish Leadership Council.
Keith Black, the JLC chair, and Claudia Mendoza, its chief executive, launched their blueprint “Forge the Future” scheme in March 2024. Now, one year on, the pair are assessing how many of the plan’s aims have been achieved — and, importantly, according to Black, how best to harness the “huge energy” emanating from “individuals and grassroot groups who want to make a contribution”.
JLC chair Keith Black
He said that the JLC had encountered “new people who have never been part of the community and who have come to the fore, new funders, initiatives — a huge surge of energy which we should be very proud of. It’s not like people are sitting back and just cowering — far from it.”
One of the first, most practical moves has been the hiring, on a full-time basis, of experienced lawyer David Toube as the JLC’s legal counsel. Mendoza told JN: “From Day One we were being inundated with legal issues, everything from employment issues to people feeling they had been discriminated against. We can’t deal with every individual matter, but what we can do is take a load of issues which are of strategic importance to the community, and to which we can offer our muscle.”
Bringing in Toube has enabled the JLC to “look at what we have done, what needs
David Toube
to be done, and map all the existing issues that are coming our way.” Mendoza says they may include “everything from protest law to criminal activity, private prosecutions or NHS work guidelines, etc.” She added that there was “a huge amount of goodwill in the community — the number of lawyers that have made contact and offered to help. We needed to work out how to make that goodwill a reality ; now we have David on board, we might be able to form groups of these people, perhaps offering pro bono support, or gather certain lawyers together with different discipline expertise”.
Black adds: “We recognise that we need to defend ourselves through regulatory activity — ensuring that government and the civil service understand the law as it was designed, rather than as they choose to interpret it. It’s a subtle approach, but it’s critical.”
Mendoza knows that there is a difficult path to follow on the legal advocacy front. She says: “We do work with the Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA) and UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI). I would consider CAA more of a campaigning organisation, which is really important; what we have had to decide, and the direction of travel that we are going to go in, is, are we [the JLC] a campaigning organisation — are we on the defence or offence? I think it’s quite difficult to do both.
“For example, in relations with the police: you’ve got to find the right balance between defence and offence, because if you go too much on the offensive, you are essentially closing the door to those who can help you. So CAA’s approach isn’t necessarily one that we would take, but that’s not to say there isn’t a place for the role that they play.”
Black agrees, and adds that the JLC is more than willing to collaborate with the CAA, a collaboration which he says is “deeply within the DNA of the JLC”.
Collaboration, Black says, is also part and parcel of his organisation’s relationship with the Board of Deputies. This time last year Black told JN that “it was no secret” that the JLC was rethinking its relationship with the Board. Now, he is at pains to clarify that “we don’t have a relationship with the deputies — but we have a very close relationship with [Board executives] Phil (Rosenberg)and Adrian (Cohen) and Andrew (Gilbert), and Claudia speaks regularly to Michael Wegier and other Board professionals. We work really well together — the relationship has never been as good”.
In respect of Forge the Future, Mendoza says the JLC and the Board are working closely on several areas, one being to reinforce positive images of Jews, such as a planned Jewish Culture Month. “We also partnered with the Board and Work Avenue on a survey of antisemitism in the workplace”.
Both Black and Mendoza are reluctant to comment on the recent political row inside the Board of Deputies, culminating in a controversial letter published in the Financial Times which criticised actions taken by the Israeli government. Black says that political polarity, whether from the left or the right, is not the JLC’s remit. “We are not a representative body: we are very practical, action-based and focused on getting the job done. Forge the Future is a road map for us: the issues that we identified 12 months ago are still the issues we are dealing with today, and the community is happy to support what we are doing.”
Eddie at the march against antisemitism last November
Antisemitism, observes Black, “is not a war that we are going to win. But the fact that we are there on the battlefield, politically, legally, media-wise, working with our students, the next generation, supporting and strengthening our community… I would give us high marks for that activity, but it is hard to correlate into success.”
Mendoza acknowledges that the JLC has not solved all of the issues identified in Forge the Future, but says that they knew that would be the case even as they were writing the document. One of the trickiest areas, she says, has been how to approach social media and how to improve Jewish content “while ensuring people in the community know how to tackle social media so that they are shielding themselves from the toxicity out there.”
She says that someone described British Jews as “a community going through a form of PTSD — they feel constantly under attack, in the news. But out there, in wider society, among the general public, we are not even a fleeting thought to many people…there needs to be an adjustment in people’s heads about what’s real, versus what’s amplified.”
One of the JLC’s jobs, says Black, “is to enable the communaity to develop resilience and toughness. We’ve had it kind of easy for the last 80 years, the golden years. Now it’s got tough, and we are not used to that. There is a change process going through the community, and our role is bolstering that change process.”
Over the last 12 months, says Black, “we have described this as the fight of our lives.” He believes that they are making “slow progress” — but Mendoza points out that “if we are really honest, not enough people have come forward. There hasn’t been a ‘BLM’ [Black Lives Matter] moment. Wider society should care about this harming of a community, because ultimately we recognise that the issues which are affecting us are also going to affect them, further down the line.”
