I don't want to be an activist

But then my synagogue was attacked

(Movement for Reform Judaism)

It always used to bother me. How when a celebrity died, my social media feed would groan under the weight of pictures of people with said celebrity. Why are you inserting yourself into this story? It isn’t about you!

But then my synagogue — the place where I have personally thrown teenage temper tantrums, where my mom volunteers and my dad was chairman (the man can’t read Hebrew but likes to be involved) — was subject to a petrol bomb attack.

I could tell you all the good things that Finchley Reform Synagogue (FRS) does for the community — the whole community. The nursery it provides, the charities it supports, the way it opened its doors and its heart to the local Somali Bravanese community after their place of worship suffered an arson attack in 2013.

But it’s futile. First, because many readers of this newsletter are themselves members of the synagogue and know the story. And second, FRS could be the meanest, crotchetiest, most Disney villain shul in all of North London, and it would still be bad to try to set it on fire. I’m fairly certain of this.

I hope you know by now that I don’t enjoy writing about this. Partly, because it means something bad has probably happened. But mainly because I’d much rather drone on about Veblen goods, Air New Zealand’s new bunk beds, even Arsenal’s faltering title bid. It’s why, for instance, I resisted opining on Kanye West, and how Wireless Festival would never have invited him had he been quite so gleefully racist against any other minority.

I really don’t want to be an activist — I mean, have you ever met a happy one?

Professionally speaking, there’s definitely a bit of scar tissue from the week after October 7. Writing in my old newsletter, West End Final, when I suggested something provocative like “It’s bad to murder Israelis”, I was inundated with angry emails saying “actually it isn’t” and variations thereof. One correspondent became something of an online stalker, whose harassment only ceased months later when my employer threatened to go to the police.

Then and now

It’s strange, but seeing private security guards and high fences around synagogues and Jewish schools doesn’t bother me, yet police cars and temporary concrete barriers knock me sideways each and every time. Why, when they’re both there for the same reason?

You can tell this is a very old photo (2006) because there are no high fences and the car park gates are open! (Credit: Martin Addison)

The obvious answer is that private security and metal fences are “normal”, or at least priced into my emotional market. Whereas police cars and crash barriers, at least in Britain and Australia, are very much a post-October 7 phenomenon.

Don’t get me wrong, if I were a regular synagogue attender, the visible presence of the state would make me feel safer. And perhaps one day we will elect governments who do not consider Jewish safety to be a worthwhile endeavour. As it is, they just make me sad. A visible manifestation that the rest of society is perfectly content with this new equilibrium for their tiny Jewish minority.

The playbook

With every violent attack, we get the same set piece responses. Pick your fighter:

• Tough-sounding words from politicians, who self-evidently do not mean it when they declare that this hatred will not be tolerated.

• Otherwise kind and supportive people who, for whatever reason, feel the need to caveat their condemnation with denunciations of Israel or Netanyahu. Erm, what’s that got to do with the price of [gefilte] fish?

• The silence from the self-avowed anti-racists

• The “anti-Zionism isn’t antisemitism” defence [see the fish]

• The rising tide of conspiratorial cranks, for whom every act of antisemitic violence is a ‘false flag’ i.e. the Jews did it for… secret reasons.

All washed down with the understanding that antisemitic violence always, always leads to more violence. See October 7 itself, or the spike in antisemitism following last year’s Glastonbury Festival. But I think what I find most difficult is the sense of abandonment, and how quickly it all happened.

I don’t believe I was naive. In the 2010s, on the mercifully rare occasions I would need to get to a synagogue, I would reflexively input the address into the Uber app as a random house across the street from the shul. Why go looking for trouble? But I had clearly missed the fact that, for years, animus against Jews was gaining strength and waiting for its moment. It took October 7 for it to be unleashed.

I still remember waking up that day and being shocked — not by the BBC live blog detailing the events, but an Instagram story shared by a friend that was justifying and celebrating the attacks while they were still ongoing. This person later seemed genuinely surprised and angry not to be invited to my wedding!

More and more, I think I ought to exercise some gratitude. That I got to live the first three decades of my life during the great aberration — when the post-World War II taboo surrounding antisemitism was largely enforced in Britain. Where one could be Jewish and not have to think about it. What a privilege. I only wish I’d appreciated it at the time.