Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
News

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

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.