Hope Not Hate comes out of the group Searchlight, founded by Jewish communists in Britain.
Searchlight will be known to some of you as a well-researched and professionally produced magazine specialising in exposés of racism, fascism and antisemitism.
Next month, it will be hosting a one-day conference advertised as the curtain-raiser for its 50th anniversary celebrations planned for next year. Searchlight was not established with a specifically Jewish agenda. But its foundations were certainly built upon Jewish roots.
It was launched on the initiative, in part, of a group of left-wing Jewish adherents of the Labour movement — pre-eminently the late Reg Freeson, a child of the Norwood Orphanage who was elected MP for East Willesden in 1964; the late Maurice Ludmer, an active communist who was prominent in the foundation of the Anti-Nazi League, and — above all — the indefatigable Gerry Gable, who started out as Searchlight’s research director but who has been editing the publication for well over 30 years.
Freeson was a prominent member of Poale Zion, the Jewish Labour organisation whose affiliation to the British Labour Party (1920) was to be an important catalyst assisting in the conversion of Labour to an overtly Zionist stance in the early decades of the last century. Gable, too, was once a card-carrying communist but broke with the CP on the issue of its opposition to Zionism.
