Thanks to Corbyn, the Labour party is expanding, attracting many leftists who would previously have rejected it or been rejected by it. Among those a… - Jonathan Freedland

Whether it was his refusal to see what was wrong in a mural depicting Jews as hooked-nosed bankers making money off the backs of the poor; his suggestion that Jews might be born in this country but would never quite grasp "English irony"; his praise for a book that blamed 19th-century imperialism on finance houses run by "a single and peculiar race"; his warm embrace of a man who had repeated the ancient lie that Jews consume the blood of gentile children – pick your example – it was Corbyn who made British Jews feel an anxiety they had not known for the best part of a century. It was he who acted as a magnet, drawing in assorted cranks and bigots to join a party whose great name they soiled by their very presence.

[On his play Jews. In Their Own Words compiled from the testimonies of 12 people] The result is, I hope, a mix of stories and perspectives that will never have been heard before on the London stage. Among them is the first-hand testimony of an ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jew, recalling the day he was violently beaten on an English street. Or the odyssey of Edwin Shuker, who fled to this country in 1971 as a refugee from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Or the former MP Luciana Berger giving the most complete account yet of the journey she made from young Labour idealist to the target of a daily onslaught of racist, misogynistic and mortally threatening abuse, before losing the job she "lived and breathed and loved". ...
The 12 conversations yielded all kinds of surprises. I did not ask every interviewee the same questions, except one. I wanted each of them to tell me where their grandparents or great-grandparents came from. The answers – Belarus, Ukraine, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Holland, Russia, Iraq and more – confirmed how much British Jewry remains a community of immigrants or the descendants of immigrants. When I put that question to [Margaret] Hodge, it elicited a family story that forms what might be one of the most moving passages in the play. After you have heard it, you will understand why Hodge’s father advised her always to keep a packed suitcase by the front door – and you might shudder when you remember the way that formative experience of hers was mocked when she recalled it during an especially rancorous phase in Labour’s civil war.

When it comes to Diane Abbott, two important things need to be said first. One is that as the first black woman elected to parliament, she will always have an important place in the political history of this country. The other is that, according to one study, she receives more abuse, both racist and sexist, than any other woman in parliament, and by some distance.
Yet both of those facts only make her letter all the more dispiriting, even baffling. How could someone with such direct experience of racism show such little understanding of how it works for people who are not the same as her?