British Lawmakers Elect First Jewish Speaker
NEWS ITEM: For the first time in its long history, the British parliament elected a Jewish speaker of the House of Commons. He is John Bercow, 46, the son of a taxi driver. The leader of Bercow’s Conservative Party, David Cameron, hailed the historic occasion: “I would also like to put on record an historical first that you have achieved which is to be the first person of the Jewish faith to occupy the office of speaker of the House of Commons and it is a milestone that we should mark.”
The House of Commons now admits
A Hebe as speaker! Up with Brits!
Significant is this ascent,
This Jewish voice in Parliament!
No doubt of Yiddish accent free,
And quite adept linguistic’ly
He’ll certainly not ever say
In public utterance, “oy vey.”
Stiff upper lip he will display,
That hallmark of the British way.
There’s unanimity that he’ll
Bring to the Commons commonweal.
Conforming to the English tone
Can he suppress a kvetch or moan?
No snide remarks, no vulgar joke,
Expect from this Hebraic bloke!
Perhaps he’ll bridge some verbal breach
With echoes of bar-mitzvah speech?
Suggestive quips won’t pass his lips,
His phrasing will be free of blips,
Although in them indeed one might
Find echoes, faint, of Yiddishkeit.
The speaker’s post has come to be,
In politics, epitome.
We’re curious about this Jew:
Does he speak mameloshn too?
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO