In recent years, controversy around antisemitism has dogged progressive leaders around the world, from Jean-Luc Melénchon to Bernie Sanders — and none more so, perhaps, than the former leader of the British Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn. After Corbyn achieved Labour’s biggest increase in the popular vote since 1945 in the 2017 general election, Labour’s antisemitism “crisis” became a sustained feature in UK politics and part of the mainstream news agenda, with allegations of antisemitism increasingly leveled at Corbyn himself.

It was against this backdrop that the BBC broadcast a highly controversial current-affairs program in its long-established Panorama slot in July 2019, with the title “Is Labour Antisemitic?” A procession of former Labour officials accused Corbyn and his associates of thwarting their efforts to take disciplinary action against party members guilty of antisemitism. Some even claimed to have been driven to the brink of suicide by an organizational culture that Corbyn had permitted to take root.

It would be difficult to overstate the impact of this documentary, presented by veteran BBC journalist John Ware. It inspired an entire cycle of news coverage in its own right, including symposiums in the liberal press. For Corbyn’s opponents, the Panorama broadcast summed up everything that was wrong with his leadership of the Labour Party in an hour of gripping television.