Leo Baeck College student chairs a panel at the RMCFestival

Current mechina, and incoming first-year rabbinic student Richard Allen Greene, who is a former Jerusalem Bureau Chief for CNN, chaired a panel discussion at the Religion Media Centre’s RMCFestival, focusing on ‘British Media and British Jews’.

 

The creation of a single Progressive Judaism is a ‘real moment of optimism in what is a fairly fractured and broken world’, Rabbi Charley Baginsky, the co-lead of the new movement, told a packed hall at the Religion Media Festival at Methodist Central Hall Westminster on Monday June 9.

‘It’s really unusal that religious movements actually come together rather than split up,’ she said. Baginsky was one of four panellists speaking about British Jews and British media at the day-long conference run by the Religion Media Centre, which aims to improve the way journalists cover religion in UK.

Appearing with her were Phil Rosenberg, the president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews; Jonathan Boyd, the executive director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research; and Jenni Frazer, a former assistant editor of the Jewish Chronicle and now a freelance journalist.

Leo Baeck College student rabbi Richard Allen Greene, a former journalist who was CNN Jerusalem bureau chief during the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on Israel, moderated the panel.

Rosenberg addressed the controversy around the so-called ‘FT36’ deputies who signed an open letter to the Financial Time critical of Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza. They now face potential disciplinary action.

Rosenberg defended the investigation into their letter, denying it was because they had condemned the Israeli government.

‘If a group of 36 deputies had written something say we support the unilateral annexation of the West Bank and Gaza, and we think [far-right government ministers] Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir are fantastic – which are not positions that we hold at all – and they seem to be speaking in our name, we’d be in the same situation. The panel is investigating whether they did speak on their own behalf, which they’re entitled to do, or did they in some ways speak on our behalf, and in so doing, bring us into disrepute,’ Rosenberg said.

The position of the FT36 – all of whom come from Reform, Liberal or Masorti synagogues – is consistent with Progressive Jewish opinion, Boyd said. ‘Jews who are modern Orthodox to strictly Orthodox tend to be more right-leaning, more hawkish on Israel. People who are more secular or Progressive tend to be more dovish, more left-leaning. There’s a very clear divide along those lines,’ he said.

Across the board, he said, support for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was very low among British Jews, who gave the Israeli leader an approval rating of about 12%. ‘British Jews are pretty critical of the current government’, he said, but still support Israel itself. ‘The fundamental level of support for Israel – people’s feelings of emotional attachment, the place of Israel in people’s identity – we actually saw increases in those measures post October 7’, Boyd said of research his think tank carried out last summer.

Boyd also attempted to unpick the complex knot of antisemitism and anti-Zionism, or criticism of Israel.

‘It’s entirely possible to be anti-Israel without being anti-Jewish’, he said JPR findings showed. ‘But it’s also equally possible, in fact more possible, for the two to correlate together’, he said.

Rosenberg said context was important.

‘Saying Free Palestine or holding a poster up at an event or demonstration is not at all anti-Semitic. But writing it on a synagogue is, in just the same way as saying “I’m against terrorism” is not an anti-Muslim. Writing that on a mosque would be Islamophobic and should be condemned’, he argued.
Frazer – who responded to a question from the floor by saying she did not know who owned the Jewish Chronicle, and that at least some senior journalists at the world’s oldest Jewish newspaper did not know who owned it – said it was important for Jewish journalists to prioritise being journalists.
‘It’s very important that we are journalists who happen to be Jewish rather than Jews who are dabbling in journalism. I think it’s important that we are professional and that we are offering a professional, informaed take to the readers. Whether the readers like that or not is their choice’, she said.
All four panellists answered a simple final question – ‘Are the Jews OK?’ – in the negative.
Boyd cited data about anxiety levels, Frazer lamented the rise of antisemitic rhetoric that would not have been been voiced a decade ago, Rosenberg talked about the need to focus on Jewish joy in addition to Jewish pain, and Baginsky put the question in the broadest possible context.
‘I’d say none of us are OK right now. I don’t think this is just a Jewish problem. We are feeling fractured and polarised in all sorts of ways and at the same time we’re also thriving in many ways’, she said. ‘We’ve got a better, more caring and thriving population, and perhaps it’s that inner conflict between what should be good and what feels fractured that mean that none of us are OK.’
– Written by Richard Allen Greene
June 12, 2025 | Blog . Uncategorized |