The Guardian reported this week that Rabbi Charley Baginsky, co-leader of Progressive Judaism, was met with audible boos when she addressed last weekend’s central London rally against antisemitism — while Reform politicians on the same stage drew cheers from the same crowd. The reporting, published Thursday, describes a gathering that had been framed as a broad solidarity event but functioned, in practice, as a platform where the politics of who gets to define Jewish safety were contested loudly and in public.
That scene — a minority community’s civil-rights language captured, rebranded, and wielded against the very progressive wing of that community — is not a peculiarity of British Jewish politics. It is a template. The organized right has spent the better part of a decade perfecting the art of stepping into solidarity spaces, hoisting the symbols, and then using the credibility those symbols confer to marginalize the left flank of any coalition it enters. The London rally is simply the latest and most legible case study.
The Playbook Has a History
Students of labor history will recognize the structure immediately. When Marvin Miller built the MLB Players Association into the most effective sports union in American history, the ownership class did not attack collective bargaining directly — it attacked the messengers, funding rival narratives about player greed and fan abandonment to erode public sympathy. The same inversion happened in real time after Colin Kaepernick’s 2016 kneeling protests: within eighteen months, conservative politicians and several NFL owners had reframed a worker’s act of conscience as a threat to the very patriotism it was invoking. The flag — a symbol of the constitutional rights Kaepernick was exercising — became, in their framing, the thing he was desecrating. Solidarity language was not abandoned; it was repossessed.
The Pride-washing variant followed the same logic. Leagues and corporate sponsors spent years draping themselves in rainbow branding during June while simultaneously donating to politicians who sponsored anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, a pattern documented repeatedly by The Guardian and The Nation. The effect was not to advance queer inclusion — it was to neutralize the NWSL Players Association and allied athlete-advocates who had spent years building genuine cross-movement solidarity. Once the league owned the rainbow, the activists inside it looked like they were complaining about a progressive institution.
When the right learns to speak solidarity’s language fluently, the left’s most powerful coalitions become the first casualties.
What the Jewish Left’s Isolation Reveals About 2026
The booing of progressive rabbis in central London is not merely a story about intra-Jewish political tension. It is a data point in a broader pattern of democratic-coalition stress fractures that has accelerated this year. Across Western democracies, the right has identified a reliable pressure point: find a cause where the left has been slow, clumsy, or genuinely divided — antisemitism activism fits that description after years of documented failures on parts of the British and European left — and occupy it. Plant your flag. Then define the cause’s terms so that the left’s most credible voices on the subject are cast as interlopers.
The result, as The Guardian’s reporting makes plain, is that figures like Baginsky — whose communities have spent decades building alliances with Muslim neighbors, trade unions, and racial-justice organizers — now find themselves booed by crowds nominally assembled in defense of people like her. The longstanding alliances that progressive Jewish organizations have cultivated are suddenly liabilities in spaces where Reform politicians are the applause line.
This is precisely what happened to the NFLPA’s racial-justice working groups after the league’s 2020 “Inspire Change” campaign absorbed the iconography of player protest without the substance. Athletes who had built genuine community relationships found their messaging drowned out by league-produced content that used their faces and their causes to sell the shield. The union’s leverage — moral authority built over years of organizing — was diluted the moment the front office learned to mime it.
For progressive coalitions in 2026, the London rally is a warning that should be read structurally, not just sympathetically. When a solidarity space is successfully colonized by actors who oppose the organizing principles that created it, the solution is rarely to argue harder from within that space. Curt Flood did not win free agency by asking ownership to reconsider the reserve clause more politely. He filed. He built. He accepted the short-term cost of being called ungrateful so that the long-term architecture could hold.
Progressive Jewish organizations, athlete-labor advocates, and LGBTQ+ sports inclusion campaigns are all currently navigating versions of the same question: how do you defend a symbol when your opponents have learned to wear it better than you? The answer, historically, has never been found at the rally. It has been found in the bylaws, the coalition agreements, and the unglamorous work of counting who actually shows up when the cameras leave.
What nobody at the Reform party’s communications shop wanted noticed: the rabbis being booed have been doing antisemitism work in their communities for decades longer than the politicians being cheered have been doing it at all.
Damon Reilly covers sports the way a labor reporter covers any other industry: by reading the collective-bargaining agreement before the box score. He follows the contract clauses, the ownership groups, the broadcast rights deals, and the slow politics of who is allowed to play and on what terms. He has been at this long enough to remember when Curt Flood was a recent memory.
