(JTA) — Tapped to become Britain’s new foreign secretary, Ed Miliband said he would strive to honor the memories of his Holocaust refugee parents.

“My parents came to Britain as Jewish refugees from the Nazis,” Miliband tweeted just hours after Prime Minister Andy Burnham named him to the post. “To them, Britain was both a sanctuary and a beacon of hope in the global fight against fascism. I will carry my parents’ faith in that spirit of Britain to my role representing our country.”

The appointment by the new prime minister positions Miliband as the highest-ranking Jewish official in the British government, assuming a role once held by his older brother David and at a time when questions of the country’s relationship to Israel are a pressing priority. Miliband has long decried antisemitism, including within his own party, and is also known as a critic of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Among the priorities facing the office is whether Britain should move forward with an effort to ban imports from West Bank settlements, which has support across the political spectrum, and how to handle surging anti-Israel and anti-Jewish violence that authorities say has been orchestrated by actors abroad.

Ed Miliband led the Labour Party when it was in opposition from 2010-2015; his brother was among the candidates he bested in the party’s 2010 leadership race.

He has said he has no Jewish practice or formal education and that his parents favored politics over religion. His mother, Marion Kozak, who died last month, was an early supporter of Jews for Justice for Palestinians, a British group, but ceased speaking out publicly as her sons ascended in British politics.

David Miliband, now the president of the International Rescue Committee, has also said his career choices stem from the suffering their parents endured as Jewish refugees.

Ed Milliband’s stances on Israel have caused consternation among British Jewish groups in the past. In 2014, he led his party in a symbolic vote to recognize a Palestinian state and also criticized the toll of Israel’s operations during that year’s Gaza war.

“I defend Israel’s right to defend itself against rocket attacks,” he said then. “But I cannot explain, justify or defend the horrifying deaths of hundreds of Palestinians, including children and innocent civilians.”

He also told the Jewish News at the time that he did not eschew the “Zionist” label.

“I am proud to be Jewish,” he said. “I’ve no issue with people calling me a Zionist.” He described Israel as “the homeland for the Jewish people.”

The Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Jewish Leadership Council said they recognized Miliband’s overall support of Israel, but also chided him for his comments about the Palestinian civilian death toll. “These comments regrettably ignore the ideology of Hamas, the psychology of Hamas, the actions of Hamas and thus the reality faced by Israel,” they said then in a joint statement at the time.

Miliband was succeeded as Labour Party leader by Jeremy Corbyn, whose strident pro-Palestinianism and perceived insensitivity to Jewish sensibilities marked the worst relations between the party and the Jewish community in decades.

Miliband was cautious about criticizing his successor but made clear his unhappiness with how Corbyn was handling the antisemitism charges in 2018 when he took the organized Jewish community’s side in lambasting the party leadership for rejecting a definition of antisemitism that includes some forms of anti-Israel rhetoric and activity.

“Labour should adopt the full IHRA definition,” he said then, referring to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. “The argument that it is somehow incompatible with criticizing the actions of the Israeli government is wrong. The views of the vast majority of the Jewish community are very clear.

Miliband condemned Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, but also persisted as one of Labour’s most forceful critics of Israel’s government.

During the 2024 general election campaign, he called Oct. 7 “an appalling terrorist atrocity,” saying, “We in the Labour leadership are completely committed to the security for the people and security for the state of Israel.”

However, he added that “the continuing Israeli action in Gaza is not either beneficial now for Israel, or for the people of Gaza.”

One of the first questions Miliband will face is how he will handle relations with U.S. President Donald Trump, who is famously averse to people who have criticized him in the past. “These are dark days for America and the world,” Miliband wrote in 2017, as Trump assumed his first term of office. The same year, Miliband also said Trump had “lowered the bar for idiocy.”

The post Ed Miliband, Britain’s new Jewish foreign secretary has a long history of support for — and disagreement with — British Jews appeared first on The Forward.

(JTA) — The manager of a movie theater in suburban Portland, Oregon, is defending a cryptic marquee message about Jews and “The Odyssey” by saying modern-day antisemitism is “exaggerated” to help Israel.

“Before there were the Jews, there was … ‘The Odyssey,’” said the marquee at the Lake Theater and Cafe in Lake Oswego.

Local Jewish clergy, as well as Portland’s Jewish federation, have sharply objected to the message even as many admitted that, initially, they didn’t understand its intention.

The manager, Jordan Perry, whose theater has a history of provocative messaging, didn’t respond to Jewish Telegraphic Agency requests for comment. He told the Portland Tribune he would remove the signage — and said he intended it as an “intentionally subtle” commentary on what he believes is an overemphasis on antisemitism.

“Through the media I consume, I believe modern-day antisemitism is exaggerated, mostly as a defense for Israel’s actions in the Middle East and its involvement in our politics,” Perry told the Tribune. “My intention in referencing Jewish people on the marquee was to prod at everything being seemingly antisemitic with a statement that couldn’t possibly be construed as antisemitic.”

Perry also said he wanted “to push back culturally back on what constitutes antisemitism, to signal, in solidarity, that it’s not about ‘the Jews,’ that it’s about Israel, and Palestine, and Lebanon, and Iran, and AIPAC,” the pro-Israel lobby that has become a flashpoint for political criticism of Israel.

Portland’s Jewish federation has received more than 40 complaints about the marquee, according to its chief community relations officer.

“Any reference to ‘the Jews’ at this point in time, with the climate of antisemitism, makes it suspect already, not to mention of course that it was historically inaccurate,” Bob Horenstein said in an interview. (Historical scholars have traced the Jewish community of Greece to ancient times, predating Homer’s authorship of “The Odyssey” in the eighth century BCE.)

Horenstein asked the theater to change the marquee; the reaction from local Jews, he said, was largely “unsettled” and “unnerved.” Perry ignored him, he said. “And our suspicions proved positive because he made it very clear what his intention was.”

Perry’s fuller comments were even more offensive, Horenstein said, particularly his assertion that claims of modern antisemitism are exaggerated. “It’s not for anyone outside of our community to tell us whether we’re overreacting to antisemitism,” the federation leader said.

The marquee was later reportedly altered, with a reference to the navigation app Waze replacing “The Jews” — a possible joke about the meandering nature of Odysseus’s journey, though Horenstein noted the app was also created by Israelis.

Eventually the messaging was removed altogether, replaced with a simple advertisement for the film.

Eve Posen, a rabbi at Conservative Congregation Neveh Shalom in Portland, wrote on Facebook before the revelation of Perry’s motives that the marquee had distressed her. She saw it as of a piece with the recent U.S. House of Representatives vote on ending military aid to Israel, which none of Oregon’s five Democratic members of Congress voted against, as well as a recent account of a local Jew whose car was recently been vandalized with swastikas.

“It raises a painful question: why invoke Jews at all?” Posen wrote. “In a moment when antisemitism is already at historic levels, casually inserting Jews into a narrative where we do not belong doesn’t feel harmless.”

The theater’s peculiar sense of humor has raised eyebrows in the past. Upon the recent release of the Michael Jackson biopic “Michael,” the marquee made a reference to the singer’s child sexual abuse allegations. And earlier this year a marquee message about the First Lady documentary “Melania” led that film’s distributor, Amazon Studios, to pull the film from the theater.

The post Portland theater owner who added ‘The Jews’ to ‘The Odyssey’ marquee says ‘antisemitism is exaggerated’ appeared first on The Forward.

As most of Israeli politics has moved to the right since the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack on Israel, one party is attempting to reverse that trend. Israel’s left-wing Democrats party held primaries Tuesday that elected peace activists, Arab-Israeli leaders and veterans of the anti-Netanyahu protest movement — offering a glimpse of how it hopes to rebuild Israel’s fractured left.

The effort is being led by an unlikely figure. Party leader Yair Golan is a former IDF major general who spent nearly four decades in the military before becoming one of Israel’s most outspoken left-wing politicians.

According to polls, the Democrats are now one of the most significant opposition parties trying to unseat Netanyahu, with polls projecting the party will win 10 to11 seats in the upcoming elections scheduled for Oct. 27. Though the next Prime Minister almost certainly won’t come from the Democrats, they are slated to provide the opposition with a meaningful bloc of seats, and if elected, several Israeli cabinet ministers could be plucked from its ranks.

Though the Democrats are one of the only political parties in Israel that hold primaries, the online primaries on Monday drew a massive turnout, with 86% of the party’s 112,376 registered party members casting their votes. Religious Zionism, the political party of Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, also holds a primary, which will take place on Sunday.

The Democrats formed in 2024 after Labor and Meretz — both left-leaning parties with dwindling constituencies — combined. The Labor party had enjoyed a long history in Israeli politics, and produced several former Israeli prime ministers, including the first, David Ben-Gurion. In 1992, the party, then headed by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, won 44 seats. But in Israel’s last elections in 2022, they secured only four.

Over the past several years, and particularly since the Oct. 7 attacks, the Israeli left has shrunk. The percentage of Israelis who define themselves as left-wing in 2025 was 12% compared to 20% in 2019 according to Democracy Institute (IDI) surveys.

In younger generations of Israelis, the trend is even clearer. According to a January 2023 study done by the Israel Democracy Institute, 73% of Israeli Jews between the ages of 15 and 24 self-identify as being on the right. In contrast, only 46% of Israelis over the age of 65 identify the same way.

But while Israel’s left has shrunk, its remaining supporters appear unusually committed. A July survey by the institute found that only one-third of Israelis believe there is a political party that closely represents their views. Among the Democrats’ voters, however, roughly 63% said the party closely represents their political beliefs.

Today, the Democrats are the most politically significant left-wing party in Israel (the Israeli-Palestinian peace group Standing Together launched a political party this summer called Makom Lekulanu, though it is doubtful they will secure enough votes to win even one Knesset seat). And though much attention has been given to what Israel’s future could look like if Netanyahu loses this fall, the current frontrunners of the opposition bloc seeking to unseat Netanyahu are not left-wing.

Former IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot, who among potential challengers to Netanyahu currently leads many polls, has been labeled as center-right. Former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, who trails behind him, identifies as right-wing, supports Israeli settlements in the West Bank and rejects a two-state solution.

In April, Bennett and centrist Yair Lapid announced that they would run in this year’s election in a shared party called Yachad, or Together — an alliance that further illustrates how the opposition’s center of gravity has moved away from the left.

But it is clear the Democrats’ leader Golan sees the party as critical to the survival of the left in Israel, even if Netanyahu is successfully dethroned.

On Monday, he said while unveiling the Knesset slate, “Without strong and influential Democrats in the next government, the entire bloc for change will very quickly slide to the right.”

Golan supports a two-state solution, opposes settlement expansion and has made a concerted effort to engage Arab citizens of Israel, frequently publishing campaign materials in Arabic and speaking directly to Arab voters.

Yet the very qualities that distinguish the Democrats could also complicate coalition-building. Their left-wing agenda differs sharply from that of staunchly right-wing opposition figures like current Knesset member Avigdor Lieberman, who is expected to play a key role in any post-Netanyahu government.

Golan’s criticism of Israel’s conduct during the war has also made him one of the country’s most polarizing opposition figures. In a May 2025 interview, he said of Israel becoming a pariah state, “A sane country does not wage war against civilians, does not kill babies as a hobby, and does not set for itself goals of population expulsion.” The comment sparked outrage, with several Israeli politicians criticizing him for spreading blood libel and betraying the IDF.

Following the remarks, Defense Minister Israel Katz banned Golan from serving reserve duty, wearing military uniforms and entering army bases.

Winners of the Democrats’ primaries include Naama Lazimi, a Knesset member who has been active in anti-Netanyahu protests, even facing clashes with police; Gilad Kariv, a Reform rabbi who led the efforts to establish an egalitarian praying platform at the Western Wall; Somaya Bashir, an Arab-Israeli coexistence leader, and several other left-wing activists who could be poised to become ministers if a new Israeli government is elected.

The post Does the left have a future in Israel? Israel’s Democrats say yes appeared first on The Forward.