From Jewish Currents
On September 26th, 2021, Leah Levane discovered that she’d been expelled from the British Labour party. A former Labour councilor from Hastings and Rye, in England’s southwest, Levane was attending the second day of Labour’s annual national conference in the city of Brighton when she was turned away at the door. She had missed the email, sent at 9:00 pm the night before, in which the party had notified her of her expulsion and, she said, offered no right to appeal. Levane’s offense, according to the party, was that more than a year earlier she had signed an open letter organized by Labour Against the Witchhunt (LAW), a group that protested stridently against the suspension of Labour members facing accusations of antisemitism; she had also appeared on a panel organized by the Labour in Exile Network (LIEN), a group comprised of suspended party members—including those sanctioned over allegations of antisemitism—and their supporters.