Gerald Kaufman Labour MP, author 21 June, 1930–26 February, 2017
As a newly elected 40-year-old MP in 1970, Gerald Kaufman could scarcely have dreamt that, 45 years later, he would be named Father of the House— an honour reserved for Britain’s most senior parliamentarians. Nor, as a proud Jew, might he have foreseen being castigated as a self-hater for his pronouncements against Israel’s policies.
Yet neither of these attributes gives the full measure of the man. Kaufman, who has died aged 86, was a brilliant constituency Labour MP who worked extra hours for those in need. He often spoke up for refugees in Parliament and championed the rights of his many Muslim and Asian constituents. Kaufman had a famously sharp wit: in 1983 he called Labour’s 39-page election manifesto “the longest suicide note in history”. But his views arguably barred him from higher office: as when he called Barack Obama a “smug windbag” and the “puppet of AIPAC”, or when, in 2010, he claimed that “right-wing Jewish millionaires” were using their wealth to skew Conservative policies.
The son of a tailor, Kaufman displayed sartorial elegance with his purple shirt and dashing ties enlivening an otherwise grey House of Commons. His official posts included environment undersecretary in the mid-1970s, then from 1983 to 1992 shadow environment secretary, shadow home secretary and shadow foreign secretary. He sat on the Parliamentary Labour Party committee (1980–92) and chaired the Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee (1992–95). But when Labour won power in 1997 he preferred the freedom of remaining a backbencher.
In 2004 Kaufman was knighted for “services to Parliament” —a tribute to an often maverick lawmaker who twice defied the party whip over matters of principle. As recently as July 2015 he opposed a Labour-backed bill entailing £12bn in welfare cuts. He helped draft Labour’s 1987 election manifesto following his criticism of Michael Foot’s doomed 1983 version. Kaufman counted Tony Blair as a friend, as well as current leader, Jeremy Corbyn, who called him an “iconic and irascible figure” who he would miss “deeply”.
Gerald Bernard Kaufman was the youngest of seven children born in 1930 in Leeds to traditional Jewish parents who fled Polish pogroms after World War One. He matriculated from Leeds Grammar School and read Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Queen’s College, Oxford. Between the mid-1950s and 1965 he was a leader writer for the Daily Mirror, assistant general secretary of the Fabian Society and a journalist for the New Statesman. Kaufman’s ready wit found a natural home writing for the BBC television satirical programme, That Was The Week That Was (1962–3). Having unsuccessfully stood for Parliament in 1955 and 1959, he was made Labour’s parliamentary press liaison officer in 1965, before being elected MP for Manchester Ardwick in 1970. During those interim years he was part of Harold Wilson’s “kitchen cabinet”. Kaufman then became MP for Manchester Gorton in 1983, serving in that post until his death.
Gerald Kaufman’s views on Israel were conflicted, to say the least. A long-time member of the Jewish Labour Movement, he seemed to turn after Likud won power in 1977. After that, Kaufman championed sanctions and arms bans, likened Hamas to Jewish resistance in wartime Poland and compared Israel to apartheid South Africa. He first angered the Board of Deputies in 1988 when he shared a platform with a PLO delegate. During Israel’s Operation Defensive Shield offensive in 2002 he called then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon a “blustering bully [and] war criminal” whose “repulsive actions are staining the Star of David with blood”. In 2009 he said his grandmother, killed by the Nazis, “did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza.” He called Israel a state “born out of Jewish terrorism”. Nor were such comments his only flirtation with controversy. In 2009 he was accused of fiddling expenses though escaped serious censure.
Beyond politics stood an aficionado of Sondheim musicals who would unnervingly burst into song, and a cinema devotee whose St John’s Wood flat was festooned with movie posters. His 1985 memoir was titled My Life in the Silver Screen; he also wrote the semi-satirical How to be a Minister. In 1999 he chaired the Man Booker Prize committee.
Despite Kaufman’s mining of tropes, Judaism remained a lodestar. In Parliament he defended the right of Christians to down tools on Sunday, citing the repose that Sabbath brought his Orthodox Jewish parents. Kaufman would skip Labour conferences to daven at St John’s Wood Synagogue on Yom Kippur. On one occasion fellow congregants berated him, only to be told off by the rabbi. His friend, Manchester lawyer Andrew Rosemarine notes: “Whilst I disagree with the vehemence with which he attacked the Israeli government, it was sad to see Anglo-Jewry ostracising him for it”. Labour mayoral candidate Andy Burnham likened Kaufman to Manchester itself: “He had a style—and he pulled it off”. He is survived by two nieces and four nephews.
By Lawrence Joffe
Lionel Blue Rabbi, journalist and broadcaster 6 February, 1930–19 December, 2016
Lionel Blue was a religious sentimentalist, pragmatist and mythographer. He spoke of his God as a friend, a conversation partner, a voice that did not always tell him what he wanted to hear but was available if he allowed himself to listen.
Lionel’s God accompanied him throughout his life: comforting him, provoking him, giving him perspective and helping him to understand how something that seemed important in the heat of the moment could turn out to be trivial in the larger scheme of things.
On the surface, this might seem twee, or flaky, but Lionel had a first-class mind. He read History at Oxford, and Semitics at London University. You may not have realised that, if you only heard his often whimsical contributions to BBC Radio 4’s Thought for the Day. He recognised that he could not rely on intellect alone to get through life. To be Jewish meant trusting in the spirit.
Born into the harsh realities of the East End of London—he was the grandson of Russian Jewish immigrants and the only child of Harry, a tailor, and Hetty, a legal secretary—he witnessed first-hand the resistance to Mosely’s Blackshirts in the 1930s, and became immune to any idealisation about the Jewish past. But he was also a sentimentalist: he believed in simple truths about the goodness of the human heart, and that a good story (or tune) could go a long way in helping to overcome fears and problems.
Lionel went through Marxist, atheist and Christian phases as a young man, and yet was led back to Judaism after attending a Quaker meeting. One of the first graduates of the Leo Baeck College (1960)—and later the first openly gay rabbi in the UK—his post-Shoah theology was rooted in the spirituality of everyday life. For Lionel, the cooking and sharing of food was a primary medium for spiritual self-expression. He built much of his Jewish thinking around the kitchen. He taught how cupboards and drawers contained the artefacts of Jewish spirituality: the candlesticks, bread covers and wine cups for Shabbat—neglected during the week—could transform secular time into holy living when the hour was right.
Indeed, for Lionel, any gathering of convivial souls where food was honoured, was a form of secular transubstantiation. God was made present through the bonds of family, friends and guests brought together to celebrate the joys of hospitality, intimacy and laughter.
Like many people who have pockets of pain tucked away, Lionel used laughter in his teaching. Humour was an essential ingredient in his repertoire, though could transition from lightness to seriousness in the blink of an eye.
The pioneering work he did in rebuilding European Jewish life in the 1960s and fostering ties between Jews, Christians and Muslims in the 1970s, was not often acknowledged. Yet as his career developed, he rarely addressed the large themes that rabbis often find themselves speaking about: politics, the environment, social justice, Israel.
He usually focused on the local, the personal, on individual acts of kindness and generosity he’d witnessed, on people’s relationship to animals, to their neighbours, to the everyday joys and sadnesses of family life. His was a piety both simple and profound.
In spite of a stint as head of the Reform Beth Din, Lionel didn’t have much time for the Jewish religious establishment —“too much role playing”, he’d say. He was a liturgist for whom synagogue services were a turn-off. He thought that the only parts of religious tradition worth saving were the parts that worked for you. If you thought the rest of it was mumbo-jumbo, well, you should just ditch it and find something else—a Quaker meeting, a Buddhist meditation technique—that worked for you. That is part of what made him a much-loved figure. He could see the value in other religious traditions and didn’t feel the need to claim that his own was any better, or more truthful.
Lionel’s partner Jim Cummings died in 2014. He leaves no other relatives.
By Howard Cooper
Fig 3. Meir Banai Israeli musician, singer and songwriter 5 July, 1961–12 January, 2017
Meir Banai Rock fans in Israel were hit hard by the death of singer Meir Banai at the age of 55, after a year’s struggle with cancer. Banai, a talented musician from the famously artistic Banai family, left behind a wife, two children and dozens of hit songs that marked a generation.
Meir Banai was born in Jerusalem to Judge Itzhak Banai and his wife Simha, and grew up in the middle-class village of Omer, in the south of Israel, attending school in Be’er Sheva.
The Banai family was already known in show business: his uncle Yossi Banai was a famous folk singer and his uncles Haim and Yaakov Banai were renowned actors. Another uncle Gavriel (Gavri) Banai was a member of Israel’s most famous comedy trio Hagashash Hakhiver (The Pale Scout).
Meir’s great grandfather Eliahu Yaacov Bana migrated to Palestine from the Persian city Shiraz, via India, in the early 1880s. Bana was translated into the Hebrew Banai with the same meaning, “builder”. The family owned a vegetable stall in Tel Aviv’s Mahne Yehuda market, but artists were its main fruit.
Meir was the first of his generation of Banais to acheive fame as an artist in the mid 1980s. He was followed by his cousin Yuval Banai who led the pop band Machina; another cousin Ehud, a popular musician; his sister Orna, a celebrated comedian and his brother Evyatar, a rock singer.
His first album, Meir Banai, in 1984 garnered some chart success. But his real leap into the public eye was in 1984 with Avi Nesher’s film Shovrim (Breaking). A box office disaster, the film’s theme tune, sang by Banai, “Shafshaf’s song” —arguably a parody on popular Middle Eastern music in Israel —was a big hit and prepared the ground for his second album Geshem (Rain), which emerged the next year.
Geshem was a typical product of Israel’s late 1980s rock industry— bombastic, rich in sound effects, personal in content, dark in a rather European way. But it stood out because of its quality, its multiple chart hits and the interest in Banai himself, with his shy, angry young man’s charm. Journalist Uri Misgav wrote about the album: “It takes you by the hand on a nocturnal, wintery journey drenched in smoke and alcohol.” Those attributes, typical for a British album of the time, were almost revolutionary in 1980s Israel.
Geshem features many hymns of loneliness and pain, but Banai balanced these with humour, with songs like “Oh God, Her Nose is Long”, joining “Shafshaf’s song” in his little pantheon of musical comedy.
Banai kept recording throughout the 1990s, making albums and touring with other Israeli musicians, including his cousins Yuval and Ehud Banai, and singer-songwriter Arkadi Duchin.
During the 2000s, Meir Banai became increasingly religious. The first public manifestation of this change came in 2007 with the album Hear My Voice —a collection of old Jewish hymns and prayers by great Sephardi writers like Rabbi Shalom Shabazi of Yemen and Rabbi Shlomo Ibn Gabirol of Spain. He may have followed his cousin, Ehud Banai, who became religious a few years earlier, and was himself joined by his brother Evyatar.
Meir Banai was diagnosed with throat cancer in early 2016. He told his family of his illness but kept it away from the public. His sister Orna said that he loved life and nature and believed to his very last day that a miracle would happen and his life would be saved. He was buried in Jerusalem’s main cemetery, Har Hamenuchot, in the presence of senior politicians, major artists, and hundreds of members of the public. Israel’s culture minister, Miri Regev, said in her eulogy: “May the Gate of Mercy, about which you sang so beautifully, take you in.”
By Daphna Baram