Why Britain’s Jews no longer feel at home

There is a scene in Annie Hall where Alvy Singer, played by Woody Allen, recounts to his friend instances of supposed anti-Semitism against him: ‘You know, I was having lunch with some guys from NBC… So I said, “uh, did you eat or what?”, and Tom Christie said, “No, didchoo?”. Not did you – didchoo eat. No, not did you eat, but Jew eat. Jew. You get it? Jew eat?’ Among other examples, Singer also claims that a music-shop assistant is being anti-Semitic by telling him there’s a sale on Wagner records. His friend, Rob, dismisses his concerns as paranoia.

This will raise a smile with most Jews. Our paranoia about anti-Semitism can be a source of great amusement within our community. When I first started out as a news reporter, at the Jewish Chronicle, we would compete to see who could take a newsdesk call with the most ridiculous example of imagined Jew hate. One of mine was a call from a woman who wanted to report a big clothes retailer for selling striped pyjamas with a star on them.

Unfortunately, the laughter has long since stopped. Over the past few weeks in particular – that is, since the Manchester synagogue attack – I feel like I’m living inside Singer’s head. Except that I’m not paranoid, it’s now just daily life for a Jew living in Britain today.

It is now over a month since Jihad Al-Shamie attacked Heaton Park synagogue in Manchester on Yom Kippur, leaving two Jewish men dead and more injured. And while Britain’s Jewish community is still reeling from what happened on that terrible day, the knocks just keep coming.

Mere hours after Al-Shamie’s act of Jew hatred, pro-Palestine protesters couldn’t help themselves. Instead of cancelling or even just postponing their pre-planned anti-Israel protests scheduled for later that day, they pressed ahead. They gathered in major UK cities, including Manchester itself. At a protest outside Downing Street in London, one protester was filmed saying, ‘I don’t give a fuck about the Jewish community right now’. No kidding.

In Brighton, another set of protesters chanted ‘Zionism is a crime’, while in Edinburgh, one activist held up a sign that read, ‘Punch your local Zionist’. These were protests against the very existence of the Jewish State, and they were staged on the same day a man called Jihad tried to kill as many Jews as possible.

There was no let up in the days that followed. On the Saturday after the synagogue attack, the streets of London were once again filled with what has become a routine celebration of anti-Israel hate. Each new march brings its own panoply of worrying indicators that Britain has lost its streets to the Islamo-leftist mob, from anti-Semitic placards resurrecting the blood libel to comparisons of Israelis to Nazis to the shameless promotion of Hamas and Hezbollah.

The marches are old hat for us now. And the Metropolitan Police have made it pretty clear that the Jewish community can’t rely on much help from them. Indeed, on one Saturday in April last year, Gideon Falter, the chief executive of Campaign Against Antisemitism, was walking through central London on his way home from synagogue. While passing near a pro-Palestine march, he caught the attention of the police. They had noticed he was wearing a kippah and carrying a small bag with a Star of David on it. A police officer pulled Falter aside on account of him being ‘quite openly Jewish’ and said: ‘This is a pro-Palestinian march. I am not accusing you of anything, but I am worried about the reaction to your presence.’

Just two weeks after the Manchester synagogue attack, another story came to light that reinforced the sense that the British authorities see Jews as the problem. In August, a Jewish lawyer had been arrested during a protest outside the Israeli embassy in Kensington. Although, officially, he was detained under the Public Order Act for allegedly breaching the agreed conditions of a protest, the police’s line of questioning suggests his Jewishness was the real issue. Specifically, police said the fact that he was wearing a small Star of David necklace – just two centimetres in diameter – had ‘antagonised’ pro-Palestine protesters.

The so-called pro-Palestine marches are only the half of it. The rot of anti-Semitism is infecting every aspect of public life. There were troubling scenes at Villa Park football stadium just this week, ahead of Aston Villa’s Europa League fixture against Israeli team Maccabi Tel Aviv. The local Safety Advisory Group’s decision to ban Maccabi fans from attending effectively turned the area around the ground into a battleground. The Jews and their allies opposing the ban were forced to stand in a caged-off basketball court for their own protection while hundreds of pro-Palestine activists staged an ugly protest nearby, calling Israelis ‘baby killers’ and chanting ‘Death, death to the IDF’. Prior to the match, the activists stuck up posters around the ground featuring the slogan, ‘If you see a Zionist, call the anti-terror hotline’. I wonder why they even bothered with the word ‘Zionist’.

The authorities initially said they imposed the ban for vague ‘safety’ reasons, although they have since claimed it was due to the ‘significant levels of hooliganism’ among the Maccabi fan base. If they’re thinking of the violent unrest in Amsterdam in November 2024, when Maccabi played Ajax, they should probably take a look at the recent trial of those involved that night. It showed that groups of mostly Arab men went on a pre-planned ‘Jew hunt’ of the Israeli football fans.

The decision to ban Maccabi supporters followed a campaign by various anti-Israel groups to cancel the match or ban Israeli fans from attending. The campaign was supported by pro-Palestine local councillors and local independent MP Ayoub Khan, who had previously cast doubt on the atrocities committed by Hamas on 7 October. Attempts by the government to intervene proved fruitless, and the Israeli football club announced that it would not issue any tickets to away fans even if the decision was reversed due to safety fears. As former 7 October hostage and Maccabi Tel Aviv fan Emily Damari said, it’s akin to ‘putting a big sign on the outside of a stadium saying “no Jews allowed”’.

The situation on university campuses is equally dire. At City St George’s, University of London, an Israeli economics professor, Michael Ben-Gad, has become the target of a campaign of harassment by a group of pro-Palestine students. Taking issue with the fact that Ben-Gad served in the IDF under his mandatory service in the 1980s, they have handed out flyers with the professor’s photo displayed against a blood-stained background branding him a ‘terrorist’. Masked protesters stormed his lecture, chanting ‘From the river to the sea’, and, according to Ben-Gad, one said he should be beheaded.

In a refreshing turn of events, the university has actually stood by Ben-Gad and 1,600 people including lecturers have signed an open letter in support of him in the Observer. However, the sad truth is that campus life has been made extremely difficult for Jewish students and academics across the UK. Anti-Semitic incidents on campus have risen by 117 per cent since October 2023 and Jewish students frequently report a hostile environment on campus.

For a small snapshot of the callous and ugly anti-Israel hysteria now prevalent at UK universities, look no further than what happened on 7 October this year, on the second anniversary of the Hamas pogrom. In an attempt to erase the memory of the hundreds of Israelis who were raped and slaughtered that day, pro-Palestine student groups staged anti-Israel protests – or worse, celebrated Hamas’s pogrom as a form of ‘resistance’. At my own alma mater, the University of Liverpool, there were even plans for a ‘Palestine bake sale’, complete with the ominous-sounding tagline, ‘It’s time for dessert’. Following pushback, the event was postponed by the students’ union.

Most of what I have described above has all happened in the five weeks since the murderous Yom Kippur attack. But this tidal wave of anti-Semitism has been washing over British public life ever since the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023.

It depresses me to write this, but I don’t think it is an understatement to say that Jews are facing a concerted anti-Semitic campaign that aims to push us out of public life – or at the very least, make us feel deeply uncomfortable.

There are now streets we must avoid at the weekend, football matches it is no longer safe to attend. Pupils at Jewish schools are now told to hide the school’s emblem on their uniforms to avoid harassment. The often celebrity-led campaigns to exclude Israelis from academia, culture and sport have picked up pace. Even in the National Health Service, there are growing concerns over anti-Semitism among medical staff.

In the media, our own national broadcaster, the BBC, still won’t call Hamas ‘terrorists’ and happily broadcast the threat to kill Jews, ‘Death, death to the IDF’, during its coverage of the Glastonbury festival. Just last month, renowned interviewer Louis Theroux put out his latest podcast, a lovely cosy chat with the creator of the ‘Death to the IDF’ chant, punk-rapper Bobby Vylan. During the podcast, Theroux and Vylan revealed they both essentially equate Zionism with white supremacy. As Theroux put it, ‘Jewish identity in the Jewish community, as expressed in Israel, has become almost like an acceptable, quote, unquote, way of understanding ethno-nationalism’.

Hearing someone as mainstream as Theroux not only nod along, but also seemingly agree with such an obnoxious idea is a powerful reminder of just how far the constant demonisation of Israel has gone.

The hatred among our cultural and political elites towards the Jewish State, the determination to prioritise the war in Gaza over all other conflicts, has unsurprisingly – albeit, in some cases, unintentionally – led to the demonisation of Jewish people. The line between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism has all but disappeared. That is why the British Jewish community was not surprised by the Manchester synagogue attack, carried out in the name of the Islamic State. We knew something like that was inevitable.

We Jews now live with the constant hum of anti-Semitism as the background noise to our lives – something I would have considered unthinkable when I was growing up, rarely fearful of being Jewish. We can still go about our day-to-day business, and nowhere is expressly verboten, but something has changed. It may be imperceptible to our non-Jewish friends, but we now change our behaviour in myriad, tiny ways. The internal Alvy Singer voice is always piping up, and now we are listening. My husband and I moved to our new house two years ago, but it remains without a mezuzah (a religious parchment in a small ornamental case hung on a door post) – because we worry about indicating that Jews live there. The cheder (Sunday religion school) where I bring my children runs armed-attacker drills, and after Yom Kippur our rabbi had to explain to children as young as four that there had been an attack on a synagogue.

Then there is the constant internal monologue: ‘I’m wearing my Star of David today – did I bring a scarf, lest I inadvertently “antagonise” someone? Which of my friends can I speak honestly and openly to about Israel? How long will it be before my son encounters anti-Semitism at school?’

And where can we go to be free of this constant attempt to break our spirit and undermine our Jewishness? Well, we thought we could take shelter at our communal centres – but even that comfort has been denied to us since the Manchester synagogue attack.

Such is the success of this relentless campaign of anti-Semitism, that a community once so confident and well-integrated is now being ‘Othered’ once again. We question ourselves, we look over our shoulders, and we wonder how long it will be before the rest of the country realises that this is no Woody Allen-esque neurosis: anti-Semitism has become our lived reality.

Naomi Firsht is a writer and co-author of The Parisians’ Guide to Cafés, Bars and Restaurants. Follow her on Twitter: @Naomi_theFirsht