In 2017 Manchester University Forced Her to Change the Title of a Talk ‘You're doing to the Palestinians what the Nazis did to me’ after Israel’s Ambassador Mark Regev Lobbied Them
Manchester University thought it a good idea to frame the Palestinian experience of apartheid and genocide as a religious one
Born in
Budapest, Marika Sherwood (8 November 1937 – 16 February 2025) was the
daughter of Hungarian-Jewish parents, Laszlo (Laci) Fenyő and Magda. Laci
survived Hungary’s Jewish Labour Service, but many relatives died in the
Holocaust. Magda secured false Christian identity papers for her and Marika,
and they survived the Nazi occupation, reuniting with Laci after the war.
Marika survived the Budapest Ghetto that was established under the fascist Arrow Cross government that the Nazis installed in October 1944. Marika, who remembered having to wear a Yellow Star and witnessing many atrocities, later spoke of the impact of these wartime experiences in shaping her very public support of the Palestinian cause.
Marika
Sherwood emigrated with her family to Australia in 1948 and then to Britain in
1965. As a teacher in London she witnessed the discrimination that Black
students experienced and the absence of Black history from the curriculum.
Marika was shocked by the racism many of her pupils experienced.
It was this that led to her becoming interested in learning about their
Caribbean heritage.
This led to Marika
becoming a pioneer in the field of Black and Caribbean history and the co-founder
of the Black & Asian Studies Association with Hakim Adi, Britain’s first
Black Professor of History.
Her writings
include After Abolition: Britain and the
Slave Trade Since 1807, Origins of
Pan-Africanism: Henry Sylvester Williams and Africa and the African Diaspora.
Marika published
13 books about slavery, colonialism and the history of African and Caribbean
people Britain in a long and distinguished career as a teacher, writer, and
social campaigner. She was at the forefront of attempts to diversify
the curriculum across schools and higher education.
With her
BASA colleagues, Marika designed and wrote a GCSE module and textbook on migration to Britain (2016).
In 1990 Marika was appointed a research fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth
Studies and began organising history seminars there. Marika’s
extensive publications are listed on the ICWS Research website.
Many Struggles: West Indian Workers
and Service Personnel in Britain (1939-45), published in
1985 was one of the first publications to highlight “the racism meted out to Black people by the British state” during
the second world war, and to demonstrate that those from the Caribbean were an
integral part of the war effort. Over the next 40 years she would produce more
than 20 books and almost 100 articles.
Her books covered a vast variety of topics. In After Abolition: Britain and the Slave Trade Since 1807, she reminded
people, during the bicentennial commemoration of the Abolition Act, that
Britain’s involvement in human trafficking continued long after 1807.
In much of her work she provided in-depth histories centred on key
figures and organisations in Britain, including Kwame Nkrumah:
The Years Abroad 1935-1947; Claudia
Jones: A Life in Exile; Origins of
Pan-Africanism: Henry Sylvester Williams, Africa and the African Diaspora; Malcolm X: Visits Abroad and Kwame Nkrumah and the Dawn of the Cold War:
The West African National Secretariat 1945-48.
In October
2022 Marika was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of History at the University of
Chichester. When receiving the award she said:
I am honoured to accept this award and am
extremely grateful to Professor Adi. I hope that I can inspire more students to
research areas that universities have not been not looking at – the working
classes, colonialisation, and the history of black people in the UK, which
largely remains unexplored.
Prof Adi , whose latest book is African and Caribbean People in Britain,
said:
I am delighted to present Marika with an honorary
doctorate for her contributions to history. We first met in 1987 when I was a
PhD student and she came to a seminar at which I was speaking. We have been
friends and colleagues since, working and writing together as well as jointly
launching BASA. This award is greatly deserved and long overdue.
In 2010, Marika was invited to
contribute to the Kwame Nkrumah Centenary Colloquium in Accra. She wrote nine entries in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography on the
following: Dusé
Mohamed, a journalist and playwright; Peter McFarren Blackman, a
political activist; Robert Broadhurst, a
pan-African nationalist leader; William Davidson, George Daniel Ekarte, minister and community worker; Nathaniel Akinremi Fadipe
writer and anti-colonialist; Claudia Jones, communist and
journalist; Ras
Tomasa Makonnen, political activist and Henry Sylvester Williams pan-Africanist.
Manchester
University Censored Marika Sherwood’s Talk
In March 2017 Marika was invited by students at Manchester University to
give a talk, as part of Israel Apartheid
Week. Marika chose the title, “A Holocaust survivor’s
story and the Balfour declaration: You’re doing to the Palestinians what the
Nazis did to me.” In the light of Gaza it is prescient.
The Zionist
lobby and Israeli politicians don’t like to be reminded that their chants of Death to the Arabs, their apartheid
policies and talk of extermination mirror what the Nazis did to the Jews. For
them the Holocaust is sui generis.
The Jewish News reported that
Manchester University had
censored the title of a talk in March by
Holocaust survivor Marika Sherwood, ....
The subhead of the title was dropped and the
university said it would record the speech after a visit to the university by
Mark Regev, the Israeli ambassador, and his civil affairs attaché, Michael
Freeman.
Following his
visit, Freeman sent an email to Manchester University’s head of student
experience, Tim Westlake, which thanked him for discussing the “difficult issues that we face”.
Freeman also said in the
email that the title of Sherwood’s talk violates the International Holocaust
Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism,
and criticised another speaker as anti-Semitic.
Both of these events will to [sic] cause Jewish
students to feel uncomfortable on campus and that they are being targeted and
harassed for their identity as a people and connection to the Jewish state of
Israel. I would be grateful if you could look into these events and take the
appropriate action,” Freeman wrote to Westlake.
This idea
that anti-Zionist critiques of Israel, because it challenges some Jewish students
identification with Israel, is a form of
harassment is profoundly undemocratic and a recipe for the abolition of free
speech. Would British universities have prevented anti-Nazi meetings on
campuses in the 30s for fear that German students would feel
uncomfortable? Would they have banned anti-Apartheid meetings in the 70s and 80s because White students from South
Africa would object?
The email also
said:
We welcome debate and discussion and see it
as an essential part of a healthy democracy and open society. In the case of
these two particular events, we feel that this is not legitimate criticism but
has rather crossed the line into hate speech.
What we had is racists deciding what is and is not legitimate and Manchester University going along with them in this.
The Guardian got access to the email after the Information Commissioner’s Office told the University to disclose “all correspondence between the University of Manchester and the Israeli lobby” between February 1 and March 3.
Marika Sherwood
said that:
I was just speaking of my experience of what
the Nazis were doing to me as a Jewish child. I had to move away from where I
was living, because Jews couldn’t live there. I couldn’t go to school. I would
have died were it not for the Christians who baptised us and shared papers with
us to save us
Sherwood told The
Guardian. “I can’t say I’m a Palestinian,
but my experiences as a child are not dissimilar to what Palestinian children
are experiencing now.”
A spokesman for the Israeli embassy was quoted in Ha’aretz as saying:
Comparing Israel to the Nazi regime could
reasonably be considered anti-Semitic, given the context, according to the
[International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's] working definition of
antisemitism, which is accepted by the British government, the Labour Party,
the NUS [National Union of Students] and most British universities.
In other words the IHRA misdefinition of anti-Semitism directly led to
the censorship of Marika’s talk.
Manchester University said a free
speech code applied to all campus events involving outside speakers and ‘controversial
topics’ and that the university also consulted “relevant laws, including the Equality
Act 2010,” in setting the guidelines for the event.
This is just verbal flatulence. The Equality Act has nothing to say
about freedom of speech nor Jewish identity come to that.
On January 13 I was part of a delegation which met Manchester
University’s Vice Chancellor Duncan Iveson and its Vice-President for Social
Responsibility, Prof. NalinThakkar. Representatives also came from UK Jewish Academic Network, Jewish Voice for Labour (JVL) Greater
Manchester, Jewish Action for Palestine Manchester, Na’amod NorthWest and
Manchester Jewish Students’ Kehillah. I represented Jewish Network for
Palestine.
The delegation arose out of a ‘debate’ held as part of the Whitworth debate series on
October 31 2024. The title of this debate was “Is
antizionism antisemitism?”.
In an Open Letter to
Iveson the 6 Jewish organisations wrote on 27 November that:
Not only is this question absurd to any
serious historian of zionism, but the presentation of the debate framed as one
to be argued on a religious basis - that is, as a dispute between Muslims and
Jews - could do nothing other than result in an event of intellectual vacuity,
while – as some wrote to the organisers asking them to change this framing -
needlessly inflaming intercommunal tensions and exacerbating both islamophobia
and antisemitism. This is indeed what happened on October 31st,
just as many had warned the organisers.
The letter went on to say that:
it seems extraordinary to us that an event
billed as relevant to the current horror in Gaza, which a large number of the
world’s most respected institutions are now referring to as a genocide, should
have included no academic specialist in either Palestinian or Jewish history.
Indeed we can only sympathise with the enraged despair of the brave young
Palestinian woman who shouted out during the debate to ask why, while her
people were being massacred by zionists, there was not even a Palestinian voice
on the stage. She was forcibly dragged out of the hall by burly university
security men, but her quintessential question still reverberates unanswerably
around the world. The root cause of the century old conflict is the struggle
for self-determination of the Palestinian people in the face of a settler
colonial enterprise in which the UK has played a significant role. Attempts to
portray this instead as a religious war are ahistorical, inflammatory and
deeply divisive.
This resulted in our meeting. However it was clear that nothing that we
had said about alternative Jewish voices to Zionism and support for Israel was
being taken seriously. Manchester University, like most academic institutions,
is too much a part of the British state to ever break free of the imperialist
paradigm.
That is most evident in its support for the IHRA misdefinition of
anti-Semitism which is not about anti-Semitism but the conflation of
anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. Stephen Sedley, a Jewish former Court of Appeal
Judge wrote that the
IHRA
fails the first test of any definition: it is
indefinite. ‘A certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred’
invites a string of questions. Is anti-Semitism solely a matter of perception?
What about discriminatory practices and policies? What about perceptions of
Jews that are expressed otherwise than as hatred?
There are many similar critiques of the IHRA including legal opinions
from Hugh Tomlinson KC
who warned that it had
a potential chilling effect on public bodies
which, in the absence of definitional clarity, may seek to sanction or prohibit
any conduct which has been labelled by third parties as antisemitic without
applying any clear criterion of assessment.
Which is
exactly what happened at Manchester University. Human rights lawyer Geoffrey
Robertson KC wrote that:
There is one
aspect which I find remarkable, ... Despite its imprecision, it [the IHRA] does
pivot upon manifestations of “hatred towards Jews.” As I point out in paragraph
2 above, “hatred” is a very strong word. It is the emotion that can be deduced
in those who daub abhorrent slogans on tombstones and Synagogues, but it falls
short of capturing those who express only hostility or prejudice, or who
practice discrimination... This consideration, above all others, convinces me
that the definition is not fit for purpose, or any purpose that relies upon it
to identify anti-Semitism accurately.
There are also Zionists such as Professor Geoffrey Alderman who are
highly critical of what he called ‘a flawed and faulty definition of antisemitism’. David Feldman, Director of Birkbeck's Institute for the Study of Anti-Semitism asked
So does the IHRA definition that Britain has
adopted provide the answer [to the problem of anti-Semitism]? I am sceptical.
Here is the definition’s key passage: “Antisemitism is a certain perception of
Jews, which may be expressed as hatred towards Jews.” This is bewilderingly
imprecise.
The text also carries dangers. It trails a
list of 11 examples. Seven deal with criticism of Israel. Some of the points
are sensible, some are not. Crucially, there is a danger that the overall
effect will place the onus on Israel’s critics to demonstrate they are not
antisemitic. The home affairs committee advised that the definition required
qualification “to ensure that freedom of speech is maintained in the context of
discourse on Israel and Palestine”. It was ignored.
And what of Kenneth Stern, the American academic who was the principal drafter of the IHRA. In an article I drafted the definition of antisemitism. Rightwing Jews are weaponizing it Stern wrote that:
Fifteen years ago, as the American Jewish
Committee’s antisemitism expert, I was the lead drafter of what was then called
the “working definition of antisemitism”. It was created primarily so that
European data collectors could know what to include and exclude. That way
antisemitism could be monitored better over time and across borders.
It was never intended to be a campus hate
speech code, but that’s what Donald Trump’s executive order accomplished this
week. This order is an attack on academic freedom and free speech, and will
harm not only pro-Palestinian advocates, but also Jewish students and faculty,
and the academy itself.
Yet that is what the IHRA has become.
A hate speech code.
On 29 January 2025,
Trump issued an Executive
Order (the Antisemitism EO) entitled “Additional Measures to Combat
Anti-Semitism.” This built on an order that Trump signed during his first term—EO
13899—that required federal agencies to consider the IHRA definition
of antisemitism and its accompanying examples when enforcing Title VI of the
Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VI).
Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964
prohibits discrimination based on race, color, or national origin in programs
and activities receiving federal financial assistance
Trump’s EO
states that it is intended to address the “barrage
of discrimination” that Jewish students have faced “in our schools and on our campuses” since October 7, 2023, such as
“denial
of access to campus common areas and facilities, including libraries and
classrooms; and intimidation, harassment, and physical threats and assault.”
The obvious question to ask is why Trump, a racist
extraordinaire, who spoke of
neo-Nazis at Charlottesville as ‘some
very fine people’ and who has targeted migrants of colour as rapists and
criminals, whilst offering asylum to
White Afrikaaners is concerned with ‘anti-Semitism’? It is proof positive that the ‘anti-Semitism’ he is
concerned with is nothing more than anti-Palestinian racism.
Leaving
aside the litany of lies about Jewish students being denied access to campus
facilities etc. when it is common knowledge that it is pro-Palestinian
protesters who have been harassed, beaten and attacked, what does this say
about the IHRA that an open racist and bigot endorses it?
We only have
to turn to Ken Stern’s testimony to Congress of November 7, 2017. Referring to the use of the IHRA in Britain
Stern wrote:
The
EUMC’s “working definition” was recently adopted in the United Kingdom and
applied to campus. An “Israel Apartheid Week” event was cancelled as violating
the definition. A Holocaust survivor [Marika Sherwood] was required to change
the title of a campus talk, and the university mandated it be recorded, after
an Israeli diplomat complained that the title violated the definition.
Perhaps most egregious, an off-campus group [Campaign Against Anti-Semitism’s] citing the definition called on a university to conduct an inquiry of a professor (who received her PhD from Columbia) for antisemitism, based on an article she had written years before. The university then conducted the inquiry. And while it ultimately found no basis to discipline the professor, the exercise itself was chilling and McCarthy-like.’
I mention this because Professor Nalin Thakkar sent an email to the 6 Jewish representatives
that he met in January defending Manchester University’s continued use of the
IHRA. Thakkar wrote:
In line
with the majority (100) of UK higher education institutions (along with UK
national government, devolved governments in Wales and Scotland, many local
authorities including GMCA, College of Policing), and UK government policy ... the
University adopted the IHRA working definition of antisemitism in June 2020.
The
University adopted the definition as guidance, which I have attached, and has
due regard to the definition when interpreting and understanding antisemitism
if and when raised in the University context….
our
approach to the IHRA definition does not affect the application of equality law
and the rights it affords to members of our community, or our commitment
to provide an environment free from harassment and discrimination.
It
also does not affect our legal obligations and the legal rights of our staff
and students in relation to freedom of speech and expression, including to
discuss and question difficult and sensitive topics, views and opinions,
provided that is done responsibly, with respect for others, and within the law.
Thakkar seems to be saying that because most universities
had caved in, under threat of defunding by former Education Secretary and
toilet salesman, Gavin Williamson, Manchester University should do likewise.
This is institutional cowardice.
I have responded with a letter (copied
below) on behalf of Jewish Network for
Palestine. It is plain as a
pikestaff that ‘anti-Semitism’ is being weaponised to defend Israel and its
imperialist backers. No one seriously thinks that a racist like Trump is losing
sleep over the ‘suffering’ of Jewish students.
The real
question is why Manchester University is not willing to ditch a ‘definition of
anti-Semitism’ that is deeply racist by defining Palestinian’s experience of
racism as a form of anti-Semitism and thus making them invisible. In the IHRA’s
eyes to call Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians racist is to be anti-Semitic.
Yet there are a thousand reasons why Israel is racist. It is time that Manchester University
and other academic institutions stopped
dissembling.
That the IHRA was used to prevent a holocaust survivor Marika Sherwood from explaining why her treatment by the Nazis was similar to that of Palestinians by the Israelis is reason enough to get rid of it.
Tony
Greenstein
See also
Marika Sherwood obituary - Guardian
UK university censors title of Holocaust
survivor's speech criticising Israel – Guardian Education
