Thank you for downloading this podcast from the BBC, and welcome to the briefing room with David Aronovich.

Labor activists, councillors, an MP, and even a former mayor of London have been suspended for comments which many regard as anti-Jewish.

So this week we ask, why might a left-of-center, progressive pro-minority party have a problem with anti-Semitism?

Good evening. In recent weeks, the Labour Party has been convulsed by an unlikely series of accusations.

These are that the party, which for decades now has seen itself as the champion of minorities and the downtrodden,

has become infected by anti-Semitism, anti-Jewish racism.

The claims and the subsequent rebuttals are varied and very confusing.

So step with me, David Aronovich, over the threshold of the briefing room,

and let's try to work out exactly what's going on.

To begin our journey of clarification on this issue of how a party of the left can contain people who apparently hold bigoted views about a minority, I have with me, David Hirsch.

David, you're Jewish, you're an academic in London, you're a man of the left yourself,

and for a few years now you've been increasingly bothered about what you see as a growing

anti-Semitism of the left. Why? Well, for all my political life, there have been people on the

left and people in my political world who have a

kind of obsessive hatred of Israel and who pick up on all sorts of connections between Israel and

Nazis and apartheid and Jews and all of that stuff. What I'm worried about at this moment is that

that kind of visceral hostility and anger with Israel, which spills over, is in the leadership

of the Labour Party, is in the leadership of the National Union students, is arguably in the

leadership of the big unions. So what we used to see on the cranky corners of the Stalinist left,

we're now seeing right at the top of the Labour movement.

That's your perception.

Not so very long ago,

...