Can the political left tackle anti-Semitism?

While I’ve never been a big fan of celebrity interventions in politics, I will concede that, on occasion, a big-screen actor or a rock star will achieve the kind of impact that mere mortals can only dream about.

Case in point: Maureen Lipman, a much-loved British Jewish actress whom American audiences will recognize from her role in Roman Polanski’s 2002 film about the Holocaust, “The Pianist,” in which she played the mother of the film’s main protagonist, Wladyslaw Szpilman. 

Last week, Lipman wrote an article for Standpoint, a British political magazine, entitled “Labour has Lost Me.” (She’s referring to the current opposition party in a country where they spell ‘labor’ with a ‘u.’) In that piece, she did two things. 

First, she relayed one of the best Jewish jokes I’ve encountered in a long time, about a rabbi so overcome with the desire to try a steamed pig’s head that he ventures in secret to a distant restaurant famed for this dish, only to have a congregant walk in on him as he’s poised for his first bite. The rabbi exclaims, “Can you believe this farshtinkener place? You ask for an apple and this is how they serve it!”

Second, so disillusioned is Lipman with the stance on Israel of current Labour leader Ed Miliband, who is also Jewish, that she will not, she wrote, vote for the Labour Party “for the first time in five generations.”

“Just when the virulence against a country defending itself, against 4,000 rockets and 32 tunnels inside its borders, as it has every right to do under the Geneva Convention, had been swept aside by the real pestilence of the Islamic State, in steps Mr. Miliband to demand that the government recognize the state of Palestine alongside the state of Israel,” Lipman thundered. She then told Miliband that his “timing sucked,” as he had turned on Israel when there were so many more pressing problems in the world, from the genocidal Islamist rampage to the machinations of Russian President Vladimir Putin. In her final flourish, Lipman declared that she’d only vote Labour once the party was again led by “mensches.”