It was only a matter of time

Rising antisemitism has reshaped everyday life for British Jews — and few seem to care

I remember what it was like to be a 15-year-old boy. The surround smells of body odour (or even worse — Lynx), the obsession with girls and the constant displays of showmanship that unconvincingly mask underlying feelings of inadequacy. You may not have had a mortgage to pay or the latest round of workplace redundancies to negotiate, but uncertainty abounds.

That’s why I so clearly recall something that happened one late afternoon in — of all places — biology class. We were instructed to pick a partner (oh good — more social anxiety) and measure each other’s height, weight, heart rate etc. The point of the exercise was to learn about bell curves and normal distributions.

Normal distribution graph (Wolfgang Kowarschick)

At some stage, a classmate raised his hand and asked the teacher, a kindly, prematurely bald man, whether the data he had compiled was “normal”. With the practised confidence of a middle-aged man who lost his hair in his twenties, he replied: “You’re all normal. You might not be average, but you’re normal.”

Even at the time, it came across as a striking remark. But only as I grew older did I realise what an extraordinarily generous thing it was to say to a group of teenage boys. We were all normal. Even me.

Meet the new normal, same as the old one

Around the same time, I attended a school friend’s confirmation. My first reflection was relief — the service lasted scarcely 45 minutes, far shorter than the two-hour-plus marathon of synagogue. Maybe these Catholics were onto something. The second was the conspicuous absence of guards outside of the church. Who was keeping the congregation safe, I wondered? It did not occur to me at that age that people could pray without security.

But that is normal for Jews in Britain. I don’t attend synagogue anymore — not even for Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar. But I did walk past one last week on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year. And what happened disturbed me. It wasn’t the uniformed police or temporary concrete crash barriers. That’s just an extension of the high fences and security guards that have been permanently stationed outside our places of worship for years now. It was my reaction.

“Yeah, that’s probably sensible” I thought to myself. Bleak. And despite yesterday’s appalling events in Manchester, in which two Jewish men died and several others remain in hospital, not even especially prescient. I don’t think anyone who has been paying attention over the last two years can be shocked by the horrific violence. To be honest, many Jews are surprised it hadn’t happened already, and no doubt but for the tireless work of the security services, it would have.

I’m still often surprised by the scale of it. Speaking to BBC Radio 4, Nick Aldworth, former national coordinator for counter-terrorism policing, revealed that even several years ago, policing the Jewish high holy days was “a massive operation, probably the second biggest operation to New Year’s or Notting Hill Carnival, to actually protect those communities.”

I shouldn’t be surprised. It’s been going on for years. I consider myself lucky and sheltered but far from immune. I recall the stranger who approached me at a bar to inform me — apropos of nothing — that I had a Jewish nose. The ‘friend’ — now a senior Labour Party person — who once responded to my question about how much something cost with: “That’s such a Jewish thing of you to ask”. The antisemitic stalker who emailed me veiled threats for months following 7 October.

Things are getting worse

Look, I’m not going to flood the zone with statistics. How, depending on the time frame you choose, antisemitism in Britain rose by up to 600% in the period before and after 7 October 2023. How Jews comprise a tiny proportion of the population (0.5% in the UK, 2% in the US — the largest outside of Israel) but the target of roughly 70% of all religiously motivated hate crimes, according to the FBI.

This rising tide of hatred was tragically turbocharged by the massacre in Israel on 7 October. It’s worth pausing to reflect on what followed. The first incident in Britain inspired by Hamas’ attack was reported to the Community Security Trust (CST) on 7 October at 12:55pm, when a car drove past a synagogue in Hertfordshire with a Palestinian flag attached, the windows rolled down and an occupant shaking their fist in the air towards the building where congregants were present. It was only the start.

As the CST reports, in the week following 7 October, there were 416 anti-Jewish hate incidents — higher than any subsequent week. The charity concludes:

It indicates that it was celebration of Hamas’ attack, rather than anger towards Israel’s military response in Gaza [which hadn’t yet started], that prompted the unprecedented levels of antisemitism across the country.

Put another way, after the murder of 1,100 Israelis in a single day, people around the world, including in Britain, didn’t just look away — some seemed to join in. The same thing happened all over the world. In the US, Canada, Europe, Australia, South America. For no other territorial conflict does this sort of thing happen. And in that discrepancy lies something deeply unsettling.

Not a real minority

For the avoidance of doubt, the far-right, neo-Nazis and the like still very much hate Jews. They think we’re subhuman, conspiring to manage global affairs and facilitating the migration of people of colour into the West. There is a reason they marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting “Jews will not replace us”. By the way, Donald Trump called them “some fine people”.

I don’t expect racists to like Jews. But I do wish those who speak out most passionately against racism would remember to include Jews in that circle of care. Too often, we’re treated not as a vulnerable minority, but as symbols of power — ‘oppressors,’ ‘colonialists,’ or simply ‘white.’ And in those moments, the protections typically extended to minorities vanish.

Calling Jews ‘white’ is not about ethnicity or genetic characteristics. Not least when almost half of Israeli Jews are Mizrahi, that is, descended from the Middle East and North Africa. In other words, we don’t all look like Larry David. Calling Jews ‘white’ is instead about affirming how we benefit from alleged unjust privilege, built on legacies of oppression. It is a way of denying Jews the protection of racial minority status. And it is working. As Liel Leibovitz wrote in a 2021 essay for Commentary magazine:

The creative genius of Jew-hatred has always been its ability to imagine the Jew as the embodiment of whatever it is that polite society finds repulsive. That’s why Jews were condemned as both nefarious bankers controlling all the world’s money and shifty revolutionaries imperilling all capital; as both sexless creeps and oversexed lechers coming for the women and the girls; as both pathetically powerless and occultly powerful... And if you decide that there’s such a thing as ‘whites’ and that they are uniquely responsible for all evils perpetrated on the innocent and downtrodden, well, the Jews must be not only of them but nestled comfortably at the top of the white-supremacist pyramid.

I ask myself: what kind of privilege and supremacy forces my synagogue to email me (given my line of work, I think it’s bad karma to unsubscribe from anything) saying:

PLEASE REMEMBER to bring your tickets and lanyards in order to ease congestion at the security gate and we suggest leaving extra time in order to arrive at services on time.

Thank you for your patience with our security volunteers over the next couple of days - they will be working hard to keep everyone safe.

Imagine, for a moment, if your place of worship or social club sent you an email like this before a holiday — not about celebration, but about how to safely get past the front door.

The Big Double Standard

For the last two years, British Jews — like their co-religionists across the world — have faced an intensifying campaign of hatred. And the reaction of civil society has often been little more than a shrug. These shrugs come in various forms: the shrug of indifference. The shrug of ‘what did you expect?’ The shrug of ‘But what about Gaza?’ As if British Jews are somehow combatants in a foreign war. And therefore fair game.

I can only speak for myself. It’s arrogant enough writing a daily newsletter. But I think what hurts most is the lack of empathy. The silence that greets so many instances of anti-Jewish hatred. The curious reticence to name or ascribe motives to those who attack Jews.

I think back to autumn 2023, when numerous public and private bodies saw the tsunami of hatred against Jews and decided, instead of fighting it, to capitulate. I’m talking about local authorities attempting to cancel their Hanukkah celebrations or primary schools postponing their visits to exhibitions on Jewish life due to ‘safety fears’. I hadn’t realised our place in society was so fragile.

And look, I get it. You don’t get praise on social media or at the pub for condemning anti-Jewish hatred. It’s just one of those pursuits that doesn’t have that kind of cachet. It’s a shame, because there is no racism Olympics. There is more than enough ignorance, hatred and sadness to go around. But it is hard not to notice the silence from those usually so eager to denounce racism.

Just one example. As Australian Jews endured a southern hemisphere summer of hatred, with synagogues, Jewish daycare centres and Kosher restaurants set ablaze on what felt like a weekly basis, where were the anti-antisemitism marches from people who are usually so quick to protest racial hatred?

Of course, all racism is irrational. The additional double standard applied to anti-Jewish racism is jarring. But it is perhaps unsurprising for a strand of politics organised around perceived notions of ‘privilege’ to be blind to antisemitism, a conspiracy myth about power and how the world ‘really works’.

I try not to let it get to me. But if you think that the Union Jack or Flag of St George can be used not just to celebrate moments of national unity but as a weapon to intimidate minorities (a view I share), surely you might also be able to see how waking up in Tower Hamlets, where I lived at the time, to find Palestinian flags on practically every council-owned pole might have felt intimidating to some Jewish residents.

The hard bit

It is as if many people see their own oppressor in Israel — whether that’s colonialists, white supremacists, or even straight people. Because, no matter where you are, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is always local. I suppose this is why people rightly horrified by senseless loss of civilian life in Gaza are so often quiet about Xinjiang, Sudan, Ukraine, the plight of the Rohingya people and so on. It’s sad, but as Neville Chamberlain said of the Sudeten crisis, a “quarrel in a far away country, between people of whom we know nothing.”

I don’t want to over-index on the protests. People have right, even a responsibility to protest. And many people attend them out of sincere horror about the war and the intolerable loss of civilian life. Still, there are those in attendance who, shall we say, hate Israel more than is strictly necessary.

Of course, even the vast majority of people who yell ‘globalise the intifada’ have no intention of physically harming Jews. But that is not a standard we hold when it comes to the incitement to violence against any other minority. We don’t know who will act on those words. That’s why they ought not be said.

This is an appalling war. The loss of life is intolerable. The hostages remain captive. A terrorist group like Hamas cannot be left in charge of Gaza. The incompetent criminals in the Israeli government cannot either. Few groups on Earth are more desperate for it to end than British Jews.

The protests are only some of the more visible examples. It’s really anytime Jews are publicly Jewish where there is a potential problem. The journalist Gabriel Pogrund, in a long post on X, mentioned — just in passing — how on the two occasions he visited JW3, the Jewish communal centre in north London, “people driving down Finchley Road have hooted or screamed abuse at the queue of elderly folk shuffling in.”

I’m angry — can you tell?

I didn’t intend for this piece to be as long as the one below. On the attempt, successful in that case, to bar two Jewish comedians from Edinburgh, for the crime of being Jews. I thought it was a perfectly fine piece of writing. But it wasn’t an emotionally truthful one. The facts were all there. But a reader might be forgiven for not knowing the depth of my feelings.

I got it signed off by people I trusted. I was making a case, you see. Trying to be unimpeachable in my logic. Forensic. Acceptable in a world frequently ambivalent if not giddy about Jewish pain. Whereas in fact, I was upset. And grieving — for the 34 years of life I had enjoyed up to and including 6 October 2023. For the knowledge that, if it were happening to any other minority, the pubs which cancelled the comedians would have faced protests and boycotts, and other venues would have been falling over themselves to give them a spot — as they absolutely should have.

Already, we’re being told by apparently well-meaning people, not to make this ‘political’. As if, if there are going to be dead Jews, the lessons should be universal, not specific. Like one of growing genre of Holocaust Memorial Day statements that do not even mention ‘Jews’.

As if yesterday’s attack took place in a shopping centre, where anyone could have been, rather than a synagogue on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar. Where only Jews — and those who stand outside protecting Jews — would be. Ironically, Jews were the last people to find out. They were all in synagogue with their phones on silent.

Victoria Park, 6 October 2023 (Jack Kessler)

As if Jews don’t face specific threats, and anti-Jewish hatred doesn’t manifest in unique ways. As if there’s there’s no consequences of the unrelenting rise in Jew-hatred in the streets, social media, in our classrooms and workplaces, university campuses, the NHS and the arts.

Of course, the opportunistic and bad actors who care nothing about British Jews will exploit this tragedy for their own purposes. From the ultra-nationalist, incompetent criminals in Netanyahu’s government to the far Right in Britain.

The security religion

I know what’s next. Synagogues, already akin to fortresses, will be further shielded from the public. The streets on which they are situated will be cordoned off. There will no doubt be more security, more public money for the CST, more police. But, oddly, it doesn’t really change all that much. Jews were being targeted for being Jews long before 2 October.

There’s only so much you can do to protect a tiny group of people from a hateful minority, and a larger bloc who conclude it’s not their problem. The ultimate mitigation against Jew-hatred must come from the public saying ‘no more’. And leaders of all kinds demonstrating with actions that they will not — or at least no longer — allow opposition to the Israeli government as free license to harass Jews in Britain.

We’re not asking you to don a hi-vis jacket and stand security. But perhaps you could do something — one thing — to make your Jewish friends and neighbours feel that they are loved.

To be clear, I still think UK is a decent place for Jews. A country where members of the public call the police when they see something wrong, those police show up within minutes, and neutralise the immediate threat. Not as good as it once was, but better than pretty much any alternative over time and place.

I come back to that question of normal versus average:

It is normal for Jewish places of worship to be protected like fortresses — but not average. It is normal for Jews to be abused in the street because of a war taking place thousands of miles away — but not average. It is normal for Jewish school kids to practise active-shooter drills — but not average. It is normal to decide which route to take to work depending which has the fewest Swastikas-atop-Israeli-flag-stickers — but not average.

It is normal to see CCTV images of people smearing faeces on synagogues or removing mezuzahs from homes — but not average. It is normal to want to say how you’re grieving, or scared, or in pain, but demur out of a fear people will reply: ‘What about Gaza?’ — but not average.

Right now, it feels like the usual rules have been suspended — just briefly — in the wake of a tragedy. We’re allowed to speak a little more freely. That window won’t stay open long.

So if all this feels distant — if your schools don’t practise active-shooter drills, if your places of worship don’t need crash barriers — I’m glad. It means you live in a safer world than we do. But ask yourself: why is this normal for us?