It was with great sadness that I learnt from my mother last weekend of the death of Mike Goodman, the former Director of Release and leader of Hammersmith and Fulham Council. Mikes death at just 54 is so untimely. Mike lived just around the corner from my house in Dunbabin Road, Childwall, Liverpool, the heart of the once large and vibrant Liverpool Jewish community.

We first met in 1964 at what was then known as the Delamere Forest Jewish School for Delicate Children. Mike was anything but delicate! We shared a room and even then Mike was a flamboyant and unforgettable character. I left to begin secondary education at Liverpool’s King David Jewish School and Mike joined me a couple of years later. The school still exists but most of its children are not Jewish.

The school was then a bilateral grant-maintained school and Mike was classified as educationally backward and put in the secondary modern stream. Mike was a living example of how working class children were written off as incapable of academic achievements but Mike, by dint of his own natural ability, as well as hard work and determination, nonetheless gained the necessary qualifications to go to Brunel University.

I was expelled from the King David in 1970. My offence was a compound one of going on the anti-Springbok demonstrations against the South African rugby team despite the headmaster, Jonathan Beebe’s strict instructions. For that I was suspended, caned and forced to see an educational psychologist, since Beebe was of the view that anyone who challenged his authority must be mentally deranged. The psychologist however was of the opinion that my headmaster was more in need of his attention! After another fight with the head, after 3 of us had been caned for throwing stink bombs at Speech Day in the Philharmonic Hall, the guest of honour being the Israeli Ambassador, I was eventually expelled. The reason I mention this is that Mike made a point, years later, of telling me how appalled he had been at my treatment and expulsion and what it said about the kind of education that the King David provided.

In 1969 both of us went on a Zionist Federation sponsored school trip to Israel. This was two years after the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and our hosts were at pains to persuade us how Arabs were treated equally in Israel. Although Mike didn’t become a vociferous anti-Zionist like myself he saw through the lies and self-serving justifications we were offered and was appalled, even then, at the fact that Israel had become for a second time the colonial occupier of others’ lands. This was a time when it was widely believed that in 1947-8 the Arabs of Palestine had left of their own accord rather than being expelled.

Zionism was for the Jewish conformists, the good boys and girls of an insufferably middle-class Jewish community that has long since withered on the vine.

We attended a number of National Union of Students conferences together and in Easter 1979 we both stood on a joint ticket for NUS Executive. Mike was elected Vice President Education but I wasn’t. Mike’s great passion, even then, was the legalisation of cannabis and he didn’t only take an academic interest in it! Many a conference we spent getting stoned in the balcony.

Mike was also President of Brunel University Student Union and I remember the nights we spent getting stoned when I stayed in the guest rooms of the President, who had an extra flat to himself.

Mike represented the best of diaspora Jewry – always critical, always intolerant of the machers and the Jewish chauvinists, the Zionist conformers who accepted their propaganda on a plate and never sought to question anything. Despite his health problems, Mike lived a full life and was someone who was never at home with the stultifying conformism and state worship of modern day Anglo-Jewry. To the end he was a dedicated anti-racist, the type of person who no longer has a home in the Labour Party.

Tony Greenstein

For further appreciations and a moving obituary and tribute.