Jonathan Rosenhead
- Emeritus Professor of Operational Research, London School of Economics Students' Union
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Articles by Jonathan Rosenhead
New UK Policing Bill is a threat to right to protest for Palestine
UK government amendments to the Crime & Policing Bill will strengthen draconian anti-protest laws & the criminalisation of solidarity, argues J. Rosenhead. The London Metropolitan Police detain protesters during a demonstration to protest the ban on the activist group Palestine Action at Trafalgar Square in London, United Kingdom on April 11, 2026. [GETTY] When I was a kid my parents made me and my brother go to shul (synagogue) every Saturday morning, even though they didn’t go themselves.
New UK Policing Bill is a threat to right to protest for Palestine
The London Metropolitan Police detain protesters during a demonstration to protest the ban on the activist group Palestine Action at Trafalgar Square in London, United Kingdom on April 11, 2026. [GETTY] When I was a kid my parents made me and my brother go to shul (synagogue) every Saturday morning, even though they didn’t go themselves.
The ambiguous loss of Jewish unity
It is erev Yom Kippur, and I am sitting pondering the situation that we find ourselves in on a Jewish-national level, and I wonder how we should be approaching the current fast day on the back of what has been one of the most trying periods in recent Jewish history. Yes, certainly, we have suffered numerous tragedies over the years and have been subjugated to many attacks and been ridiculed and criticised on multiple occasions by other nations.
Letter: Steven Rose obituary
In 1968 Steven Rose and his wife Hilary founded the British Society for Social Responsibility (BSSRS). Early on in its two decades of work it challenged the use of CS gas in Bogside, Derry. The pair had key roles in 2005 in setting up Bricup (British Committee for the Universities of Palestine), in response to the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement.
2021, the year of Israeli apartheid – Mondoweiss
Activism More than 1000 academics, artists and intellectuals have signed a "Declaration on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid in Historic Palestine," in a sign of the growing acceptance of the term in the west.
ANOTHER COP-OUT! — Labour Briefing
Jonathan Rosenhead, Hackney South CLP executive committee member, looks back in anger at an incredible decision by Labour’s front bench Covert human intelligence sources. That’s the almost unintelligible title of a parliamentary bill, the one which in mid-October 35 Labour MPs voted against and defied a party whip to abstain on.
We should praise Hawking's boycott of Israeli meeting
Stephen Hawking's considered decision to support an academic boycott of Israeli institutions should not be derided, says a supporter of Palestinian universities | Comment 12 June 2013 By Jonathan Rosenhead (Image: Andrzej Krauze) THEORETICAL physicist Stephen Hawking must be the most recognised contemporary scientist in the world. Many millions of people know what he looks and sounds like.
I'm a British Jew, and I don't fear a Corbyn victory. I'd welcome it
The caricature of Jeremy Corbyn as a tool of Trotskyites, a lover of dictators and a shill of anti-Semites is unhinged and wrong
Royaume-Uni. Jeremy Corbyn, un homme à abattre
Récemment, le leader du parti travailliste britannique a été décrit comme « un antisémite et un putain de raciste » par Margaret Hodge, une députée travailliste de longue date, de confession juive.
A new Jewish voice for Labour
Two of the most spectacular standing ovations at Labour’s Annual Conference at Brighton, only exceeded by those in Jeremy Corbyn’s closing address, were for podium speeches of just 3 and 5 minutes duration. The speakers were two Jewish delegates, Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi and Leah Levene, both members of an organisation that only launched itself on the second day of conference. That organisation was Jewish Voice for Labour (JVL), set up for Jewish members of the Labour Party.
I'm a British Jew, and I don't fear a Corbyn victory - I'd welcome it - Opinion - Israel News
The caricature of Jeremy Corbyn as a tool of Trotskyites, a lover of dictators and a shill of anti-Semites is unhinged and wrong
In defense of Ken Livingstone
Ken Livingstone, enfant terrible of the British political left, was arraigned before a Labour Party tribunal last week for things he said in a radio interview in April last year. (He has been suspended from membership since that time.) The outcome of the hearing has produced a mighty uproar.
In defense of Ken Livingstone - Opinion - Israel News
Quoting historical facts can hardly be anti-Semitic, which is presumably why the Labour Party didn’t even charge Livingstone with it
We need to talk about how we talk about Prevent
The UK government's Prevent strategy can be improved through discussion, debate and greater engagement from all sides. However, before the strategy can be improved, we need to reform the way we talk about it. Efforts to prevent vulnerable individuals from getting radicalised to an extremist ideology must be viewed as safeguarding. Radicalisation poses a modern threat to society and the people who are most likely to be targeted and fall victim to it deserve to be offered protection.
Bans on Holocaust denial don’t help Jews
When the silencing of debate about free speech follows from the spirit of Holocaust commemoration, then something has gone wrong. ‘I’d rather not think about how horrible Germany would be’, exclaimed Stephan J. Kramer, General Secretary of Germany’s Central Council of Jews, ‘if Holocaust denial were lawful’. What else could he say? The Holocaust had almost extinguished Germany’s Jewish community. Numbers have revived since the fall of the Berlin Wall, but remain tiny.
The antisemitism reports: against a zero-sum reading
The meaning of texts resides in how they are read, not in the texts themselves. Apply this lesson of post-modernism to the reading of the Chakrabarti and Home Affairs Committee antisemtism reports, and you start to see political possibilities Where is the meaning? From Sources of Spinoza's Metaphysics Back in June, I wrote a piece for the Guardian, commenting on Shami Chakrabarti’s report on antisemitism in the Labour Party. It was an incredibly fraught time.
Crying wolf? | openDemocracy
The latest report by the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee (HAC) Antisemitism in the UK Tenth Report of Session 2016–17 , was released to great fanfare on Sunday 16 October.
FP October 21 | openDemocracy
Democracy is constantly evolving. If it were to stop doing so, it would no longer be democracy. According to Pia Mancini, it is up to our generation to update it. Interview. Español Português
FP October 20 | openDemocracy
Children seeking asylum in the UK are regularly disbelieved about how old they are and can end up facing harmful, protracted disputes. The culture of disbelief so often criticised in the Home Office has now seeped into some local authorities.
FP October 18 | openDemocracy
Rely on the UK media for your information about Syria, and you probably think it was Russia and Assad. Here is what goes unreported.
Jackie Walker: a suspense mystery
Like all great mysteries, the defenestration of Jackie Walker from the Vice-Chair-ship of Momentum, and her renewed suspension from the Labour Party, has quite a back story. Where to begin? In 1954 when she was born? On May 14, 1948, Israel’s birth date? On 12 September 2016, when Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader of the Labour Party? In 1920 when the organisation Poale Zion affiliated to the UK Labour Party, or in 2004 when it was re-launched as the Jewish Labour Movement?
One Israeli Zionist response to Mary Davis and Jonathan Rosenhead
I am a Jewish, Israeli Zionist. I live on a farm in the Negev region of Israel. I have a master's degree in politial science and international relations and am a retired English teacher in several Israeli high schools including two years at a Bedouin high school. I have been and remain a farmer for the past 42 years. I have been following the interchange between Mary Davis and Jonathan Rosenhead.
Israel’s right to exist
First a mea culpa. Mary Davis accuses me of making an ‘incorrect and snide’ assertion that she wrote her first piece to support the Jewish establishment’s attack on Corbyn. I see how it can be read that way. What I wrote was “The issue is: just why Mary Davis is writing this piece now?” and went on to detail the coordinated, no-holds barred onslaught alleging that antisemitism that has been taking place.
Reply to Jonathan Rosenhead: ‘Is Zionist a rude word?’
There is much in Jonathan Rosenhead’s reply to my article (The Contestation between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism; openDemocracy, 27 July 2016) with which I agree, albeit he accuses me of wrestling with a straw person. Given that Rosenhead appears, wilfully or not, to misunderstand the main purport of my argument, I am inclined to throw the ‘straw person’ metaphor back at him. I do not argue that, to quote him, ‘criticism of Zionism as a whole should be off limits’.
Mon 5 Sept FP | openDemocracy
“How are we to understand the amazing increase in rhetoric about antisemitism, quite divorced from any actually discernible increase in antisemitism itself?”
Is Zionist a rude word?
Words trail meanings beyond their formal definitions. Raymond Williams in his Key Words leads us through the dizzying journeys that words we thought we knew well have taken over their history. For example, who nowadays brings to mind what ‘Protestants’ were protesting about? Or take ‘fascism’. This theory and practice of authoritarian politics is now so entangled with its delivery of the holocaust that outside academia it is used as a swear word plain and simple.
Artists for Palestine UK Respond to JJ Charlesworth's Criticism of the Cultural Boycott of Israel | Artnet News
In answering JJ Charlesworth’s broadside against the Artists Pledge for Palestine, now signed by over 1000 British artists, we should start by recalling what the pledge actually says. Those thousand artists, and more coming in all the time, say they will not accept professional invitations to Israel, nor funding, from any institutions linked to Israel’s government. This is not an act of “moral condescension by the self-righteous and self-regarding,” as Charlesworth alleges.
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