Leo Pearlman is a London based producer and a loud and proud Zionist. His most recent film about the Oct 7 Nova Music Festival massacre, ‘We Will Dance Again’ has won the 2025 Emmy of the 46th Annual News & Documentary Awards for most ‘Outstanding Current Affairs Documentary’.
In 1936, Oswald Mosley wanted to march his Blackshirts through a Jewish neighbourhood to intimidate its inhabitants, demonise their community and demonstrate that organised hatred could claim the streets outside their homes.
Since October 7, 2023, we have watched that same intention manifest itself wherever demonstrators target Jewish neighbourhoods and places of worship, brand Zionists as enemies and seek to frighten Jews into silence. The banners have changed, the politics of those bringing hatred to our doors have crossed the aisle, the intimidation is horribly familiar.
A synagogue is no seat of government, a Jewish neighbourhood is no battlefield. Those bringing their fury to these places have chosen Jews as their audience and Jewish fear as their instrument. They want us to understand the consequences of refusing to disappear.
The difference should shame this country. In 1936, Jews and their allies stopped the march. Ninety years later, we have endured wave after wave of intimidation, while being asked to accept its repetition as an ordinary feature of British public life.
Our ancestors built barricades against hate, we are told to make allowances for it.
Now, approaching Cable Street’s ninetieth anniversary, people claiming its legacy are demanding that Zionist Jews be excluded from its commemoration. The International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network published a statement this week headed “ZIONISTS OUT OF CABLE STREET 90!" It equates Zionism with fascism while claiming the inheritance of the Jews who fought Mosley.
Here is the desecration laid bare: celebrate Jewish courage, then demand that living Jews surrender their convictions before they may honour it. Our ancestors are useful to them dead, we are inconvenient to them alive.
On October 4, 1936, the Jews of London’s East End refused to remain the targets Mosley had chosen. Home Secretary John Simon refused to ban the march, the Board of Deputies opposed counter-demonstrations, the Jewish Chronicle warned Jews to keep away. Keep your heads down, trust the institutions, do not invite trouble, all so very familiar.
But our ancestors understood the humiliation implicit in that advice. Mosley would claim the streets, the people he threatened would retreat from them. Young Jews, working-class Jews, people whose experience of antisemitism was brutally direct, refused. Their lives could not be entrusted to the good intentions of people who would not stop the march. They organised, mobilized, forced back the police and the fascists and diverted Mosley’s march.
Jews were central to Cable Street: its organisation, its resistance and the danger that made resistance necessary. The intended targets became the authors of their own resistance. Irish dockers, communists, trade unionists and other neighbours stood beside them. Those allies deserve enduring honour because they recognised the threat to Jews and made opposing it their own responsibility.
Their solidarity sets a demanding standard, one that today’s left fails miserably to meet. You cannot claim their inheritance simply because you belong to a trade union, call yourself progressive or carry an anti-fascist banner. You must stand beside threatened Jews whose convictions you may dislike, challenge the antisemite within your own movement, risk the disapproval of people whose approval matters to you. Otherwise, the anniversary and your involvement in it is nothing but cosplay.
When Unite announced its anniversary event in June, Jewish activists challenged the omission of the Jewish community and antisemitism from its account. Jews had to ask to be put back into Cable Street. The targeted community had become an optional detail in a celebration of those who defended it.
“Zionists out" takes that exclusion further. A Jew may enter the story provided that Jew accepts someone else’s political judgement. Jewish identity is tolerated, but Jewish self-determination unequivocably condemned. The ancestors may be commemorated, but their descendants must be vetted.
I am a Zionist. I believe the Jewish people have the right to national self-determination in our ancestral homeland. That conviction belongs to my understanding of our history, survival and future. I will not discard it to make someone else comfortable. I will not accept a political test at the entrance to my own people’s history.
Cable Street’s allies faced down men seeking to intimidate Jews. Its self-appointed heirs are deciding which Jews should be permitted to appear. That is a betrayal which reaches beyond one anniversary. Too many institutions advertising their opposition to racism treat Jewish fear as something to interrogate before acknowledging it. Our grief requires a disclaimer, our attachment to Israel invites suspicion, our complaints about antisemitism undergo political examination by people who would regard such treatment of another minority as disgraceful.
The progressive left have found common cause with Islamist movements whose hostility to Jewish sovereignty is fundamental. The former supplies the language of liberation; the latter finds its hatred excused within it. Hostility towards Jews acquires the appearance of moral purpose. Judge this politics by what it does, who it excludes, whose intimidation it excuses, whose right to exist it questions.
Cable Street’s defenders did not wait for Mosley to achieve his ambitions before taking his intentions seriously. We must learn from this, stop waiting for those who despise us to become more powerful before believing them and that starts with the Green Party. A proposed conference motion would treat Zionism as racism through the party’s procedures. The threat is clear, Jewish communal affiliation could become grounds for a disciplinary complaint. A synagogue, a community, an attachment to the world’s only Jewish state, ordinary features of Jewish life placed under suspicion by people congratulating themselves on their anti-racism.
Jewish members are being told their welcome is conditional.
I condemn this party of hate, which seeks to turn Jewish national identity into an accusation of racism and expects Jews to be reassured by declarations of inclusion.
Nor is this rhetoric confined to the margins. Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband invokes his Jewish family history while lending his office’s authority to escalating denunciation. He has invoked “ethnic cleansing" and described suffering in a war begun by Hamas as inflicted by the Netanyahu government, calling Israel's existential war “a stain on the conscience of the world". Addressing those outraged by Palestinian Arab suffering at Labour’s conference, he told them: “You were right."
These words enter an atmosphere in which Zionist Jews are branded racists and told to keep out of a commemoration of Jewish resistance. They are heard by people eager to interpret official denunciation as confirmation of their contempt. Miliband must answer for the judgement behind that language.
A government cannot intensify its moral denunciation of Israel and treat the consequences for British Jews as somebody else’s problem. It cannot congratulate a movement without confronting the hatred operating within it. Where is the comparable force directed at those excluding Zionist Jews? Where is the unmistakable warning to institutions turning Jewish belonging into a political offence? We need the defence of Jewish life delivered with the same conviction as the denunciation of Israel.
Jewish ancestry confers no exemption from that responsibility, Ed.
Cable Street also confronts our own leadership and asks the question, at what point does caution become surrender?
A community can become so accustomed to explaining itself that it forgets to insist upon decent treatment, so fearful of provoking hostility that hostility determines the boundaries of its life. We must never repeat the instruction to say less, conceal more, avoid the argument, wait for the atmosphere to improve. Our ancestors refused to make their own disappearance the solution. That refusal must become ours.
We cannot negotiate away antisemitism by becoming less Jewish. We must not secure acceptance by teaching our children to be ashamed of Israel. We will not build a future upon the hope that those who hate us will appreciate how carefully we avoided offending them.
I think about this as a father. I will not teach my children that Jewish life must be practiced quietly while we wait for the world to become tolerant. I want them to inherit Cable Street’s courage, defiance and conviction that Jews have a right to occupy the streets where they live. They deserve the learning, laughter, arguments and festivals of Jewish life, more than instructions for avoiding hostility. They deserve adults prepared to confront it.
That means teaching Cable Street with Jews restored to its center. Listening to young Jews describing what they face, rather than asking them to soften their accounts for our comfort. Using the voices and influence our ancestors could scarcely have imagined to defend the belonging they fought for.
On Sunday, Jewish activists plan to carry photographs of Cable Street’s participants through the East End, returning their faces to the streets where they stood. My grandmother escaped Nazi Germany, members of my family were murdered in Auschwitz. Their lives place an obligation upon mine: defend what hatred sought to destroy.
Let those seeking to erase us hear this clearly. You will not take our ancestors’ courage and use it to exclude their descendants. You will not claim Jewish resistance while demanding Jewish submission. You will not turn our history into another place from which Jews must be driven.
We were the intended targets at Cable Street. We stood up.
That history is ours. These streets are ours. Our place in this country will not be surrendered to those who hate us.
We will not bow our heads, hide our Jewishness or teach our children to ask permission to belong.