Mike Leigh was born in 1943, the son of a Jewish doctor whose father had come to London from Russia. All of Leigh's grandparents were Yiddish-speaking immigrants (he even had a great-grandfather who was editor of a Zionist newspaper before World War I), and Leigh is both proud and critical of his Jewish background. However, it has only been in recent years that he has begun to talk openly about his ethnic past and been a member of a socialist Zionist youth group, Habonim. However, after visiting Israel under Habonim's auspices in the summer of 1960, he became disillusioned with Israel's policies toward the Arabs and dropped out of the movement. It wasn't until 1991 that he was willing to go back to Israel, accepting an invitation to attend the Jerusalem Film Festival, which was showing Life Is Sweet.

Leigh's family kept a kosher home and were active Zionists, but neither has he been traditionally religious nor, as an adult, shown any interest in or formal identification with Jewish communal and cultural organizations. Despite these feelings, his Jewish roots are an undeniable part of who Leigh is, though they are a private rather than public aspect of his life. Those roots are also a factor that, he admits, have contributed to his being an outsider and rebel. Jewishness, however, has never been the subject of his art (excepting the unpleasant, middle-class Jewish characters in Hard Labour, who live in a house only two doors from where he grew up), though he has talked vaguely of making a film about the world of his parents and grandparents.