“The first Jewish leader of the Labour Party.” It says something about me and about Britain that I am rarely described as such.
I am not religious. But I am Jewish. My relationship with my Jewishness is complex. But whose isn’t?
My family history often feels distant and far away. Yet the pain of this history is such that I feel a duty to remember, understand and discuss it – a duty that grows, rather than diminishes, over time.
As children we were only dimly aware of it but we caught glimpses. When I was seven, my family went to visit my grandmother in Tel Aviv. Pointing at a black-and-white photograph, I demanded to know who was “that man in the picture”. I remember being taken swiftly out of the room and then being told quietly that he was my grandfather David, who had died in Poland long before I was born. It was only some years later that I realised my mum’s father had died in a concentration camp, murdered by the Nazis for being Jewish. » | Ed Miliband* | Thursday, May 23, 2012
* Ed Miliband is the MP for Doncaster North and leader of the Labour Party.
