Where can Jews feel safest? Not where you would expect

For some, Jews would be wise to keep a bag packed just in case, and for some with that belief, this might be the time to check your passport too.

These folk warn that we’ve been living in a fool’s paradise post-Holocaust and that antisemitism, apparently dormant, would rise again. The normal condition of the Jewish people would reassert itself and, once again, being Jewish will be full of travail. Only the Holocaust inhibited reasonably decent people from expressing what lay just beneath the surface— the normative reality that most people didn’t like most Jews.

I must admit that hasn’t been my experience. I’ve found, on the contrary, that most people are intrigued by and admiring of Jews. True, one could often detect envy in their admiration but that’s because being Jewish, not only in the modern world but often through history, has been so enviable!

I live in a small Jewish community in the west of England (in Bristol) and the last 18 months have not produced a vast outpouring of animosity on our streets. In fact, just recently, a Jewish community grandee came to visit our community to speak and started his speech with something like, “of course, this last 18 months have been really challenging for us all but I want to accentuate the many positive factors that still exist”. I looked round the room and could see most people thinking “why does he say it’s been challenging?”

Bristol is not immune to antisemitism. Only a couple of years ago, a sociology professor at the university was finally sacked for acting in a way “liable to bring the university into disrepute”. That was code for “teaching disgusting twaddle about the international Jewish – oops, sorry - Zionist conspiracy” and, for example, claiming that Jewish students were pawns of the Israeli government. (Since he was heaved out, he’s gone even more bonkers and his regular appearances on Iranian TV have tipped him into ranting mode! For example, apparently, our local Chabad rabbi is not only a Zionist agent but personally responsible for genocide. Chabad rabbis are really very busy. I don’t know how they fit it all in!)

But on a day-to-day basis, we Bristolian Jews go about our business not regularly assaulted by challenges that makes us feel uneasy about our Jewish lives. There was a pro-Palestine encampment, but it was relatively modest in size, slightly tangential to the campus and magnificently ineffectual. There are the occasional demonstrations but most Jews don’t go into the city centre, especially not on the weekend.

But in the big centres of Jewish life, the story is very different. In Melbourne, Manchester or Montreal, many Jews are highly aware of antipathy and aggression. Hostage posters are torn down. Tik-Tok is a cesspool. Synagogues have been attacked, Jewish property has been defaced and Haredi Jews in particular have been assaulted. School children coming and going from Jewish schools have faced abuse, threatening behaviour and intimidation.

Famously, in Australia (though the picture is still very murky), the narrative of antisemitism on the streets was so evident and plausible that it appears that a criminal gang thought it a useful front to utilise for its own nefarious purposes. In Canada, Jewish schools have been shot at and arson attempts on Jewish buildings have been widespread. France and the US can tell the same story.

The UK has so far been spared the worst excesses of this aggression but Jewish schools have been nervous about their pupils walking the streets with their school badges targeting their hearts. In the USA, President Trump has been able to use the widely documented phenomenon of antisemitism on campuses to conduct his own strongarm campaign against the universities he wants to tame.

Most right-of-centre presidents have found the left-leaning bias of academe uncomfortable but none have previously tried to muzzle it in this way. But given his readiness to go after any institution he has in his sights, it is noteworthy that he’s felt the need to dress up this assault with the fig leaf of combatting antisemitism.

You know all this. You’ve been reading about this for months. But you may not know about the strange reversal that has also occurred.

In the Commonwealth Jewish Council, we draw together about 40 Jewish communities around the world. Some are large and well-resourced, like Australia, Canada or the UK. Others are teeny-tiny outposts with only a few Jews in them, like Sri Lanka or Trinidad. The general consensus always was that the big communities with all their resources, insights and skills would look after the small when required. The CJC could always ask South African Jewry to help, say, Zambian Jewry if it found itself under pressure.

But since October 7, this pattern no longer holds good. Since then, the big communities have themselves been reeling (disproportionately) from the onslaught of antisemitism, masquerading as anti-Zionism. (Of course, it’s possible to be harshly critical of Israel without being antisemitic, but if your first impulse is to attack a synagogue or call for Jews to be gassed, I’ll start to suspect the purity of your anti-Zionist ideals.)

Furthermore, Jews in large Jewish communities have encouraged each other to feel the exquisite psychological pain manipulated so brilliantly by Hamas and allies through the hostage process. This has been the true “terrorism” of these months. Watching the posters being defaced, telling each other of the latest graffiti outrage, getting onto social media to challenge the grubby people who rejoice in the licence to say things they would never dream of saying in the open air, magnifies and aggravates the sense of embattlement.

As a result, oddly now, the Jews who feel least embattled are those in the outposts and little communities of the world. They may still not have easy access to kosher food, but they mostly do not feel regularly beset by the depredations of our enemies either.

From the perspective of our big communities – and the bigger, the more, it seems, – life has never been so fraught. Some feel the world changed for Jews on October 7 and will never change back. This is the new reality. For many in our tiny communities, however, it doesn’t feel particularly threatening and life goes on as before. Visit Barbados, where the historical site of the synagogue, mikvah and museum in the centre of Bridgetown is as open to visitors as it ever was and security is no more intense than it was prior to October 7.

I’m not arguing that one viewpoint or the other is more correct but what I am saying is that the view from the erstwhile strongholds of the Jewish community is not the only view. We would do wisely to avoid making statements about how the Jewish world is or has become, when the Jewish world is infinitely more complicated than we usually think.

Social media has the capacity to magnify the voices of a few crackpots. Those without the capacity to properly assess scale, proportion and reality often are bamboozled into thinking that volume equals power. But look around the world and see which countries actually do and do not have time for Israel and the Jews. You’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Don’t be distracted by what people do at the United Nations when they must, but how they behave bilaterally. For example, when a visiting Muslim preacher to Singapore was reported to have said stuff in a sermon that might have made matters worse, the government not only promptly expelled him but required that the Muslim representative on the official government-run “Council of Religions” go on TV and publicly disassociate himself and his community from any such comments.

Without doubt, malevolent people have been given permission in the current climate to act on their antisemitism in ways they did not feel emboldened to do before. What’s more, one of the great casualties of Hamas’s butchery in October 2023 was Muslim-Jewish relations. There will have to be painstaking reconstruction there and the authorities will have to act firmly to get anti-Jewish racists back in their box. But this is not the “same old same old”. After all, as Mark Twain observed, history does not repeat itself, though it sometimes rhymes.

Strangely, just now, safety for Jews doesn’t seem to lie in numbers – but did it ever? It lies in outward-facing confidence. We’re good at that. So, for your own sanity and a clear view, you might do wisely for a while to get out of the Jewish bubbles that so many of us live in, kick back in some unlikely place with a doughty band of Jews flying the flag and add your energies to them.

Two extra Jews in Lesotho or St Lucia can make all the difference! Talking of flying the flag, go to Bermuda and see the Israeli flag they’ve had flying outside their community building since October 2023. No fear there of its defacement.

But if you must stay in the heartlands, don’t despair or let the headlines become your reality. Look at the pronouncements of government leaders and the authorities when there is some antisemitic outrage. Do they shrug or act?

Obviously, lots of people will be dissatisfied that not enough is being done by enough people to overtly ally themselves with us and our own perceptions. But on a day-to-day basis, it is still far better to be a Jew in the 21^st century than just about any other ethnicity I can think of.

And October 7 didn’t change that.