JONATHAN FREEDLAND: Why Britain’s Jewish leaders are silent on Farage’s schoolyard antisemitism

Is that the sound of silence you’re hearing? I’m not talking about the Simon and Garfunkel classic, but rather the noise emanating from the official Jewish community in studied non-reaction to the long line of people – now numbering more than 30 – who have accused Nigel Farage of tormenting classmates with racist and antisemitic abuse back when he was a pupil of London’s Dulwich College.

Plenty of Jews have spoken out, shocked by the accounts published over several weeks by the Guardian of the young Farage sidling up to a Jewish boy – who grew up to be Bafta-winning director Peter Ettedgui – and growling the words “Hitler was right” or “To the gas chambers” or “Gas them” or simply making the long, sustained sound of hissing gas.

Most recently a group of Holocaust survivors, among them the cellist Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, a surviving member of the women’s orchestra of Auschwitz, wrote to Farage, urging him to answer the accusations – which have now been corroborated several times over – with “honesty, reflection and commitment to truth.”

But from the official community – from the Board of Deputies, from the Jewish Leadership Council, from the Holocaust Educational Trust – there has been not a word.

Ask some of those involved to explain their silence and they’ll tell you that these allegations relate to events many decades ago and that no adult should be judged by their behaviour as a child. You might counter that this conduct – witnessed by former teachers as well as pupils – is, in fact, said to have continued throughout Farage’s teenage years, including when he was a sixth former aged 18. But put that to one side. For this is not solely a matter of the past. On the contrary, this episode relates directly to the present.

That much is clear in the letter from Lasker-Wallfisch and her fellow survivors. What concerns them is Farage’s response now, in 2025. He has not said that antisemitism, of the kind alleged by these dozens of accusers, would – had it happened – be unconscionable. He has not even issued a stock, politician answer about there being no place for such prejudice in modern Britain. Instead, he strongly implied that such behaviour would – had it happened – amount to “banter in a playground”. The survivors’ letter is at pains to set him straight on that point: “Let us be clear: praising Hitler, mocking gas chambers, or hurling racist abuse is not banter. Not in a playground. Not anywhere.”

Jewish organisations always insist that they “stand with the victims of antisemitism”, that they will be at their side. Yet those bodies are conspicuously not there for Ettedgui or any of his fellow ex-pupils

A similar problem arises from the way Reform UK has spoken about Farage’s accusers. The party’s deputy leader, Richard Tice, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that their testimony was “made-up twaddle” and that Ettedgui himself was a liar. Ettedgui has written candidly, and affectingly, of how the antisemitic bullying he received at school has stayed with him to this day, how it remains “intensely ingrained, as was the emotional impact – degrading, humiliating.” Now, all these years on, he is branded a liar.

This is where the silence of our communal organisations becomes all the more baffling and all the harder to defend. Cast your mind back to the turbulent period when Jeremy Corbyn was leader of the Labour Party. We were often compelled to point out that to accuse Jews of lying about their experience of antisemitism – and to suggest they were doing so in pursuit of some undisclosed political agenda – was itself an antisemitic trope. Yet Tice says Farage’s accusers have a “political axe to grind”.

What’s more, Jewish organisations always insist that they “stand with the victims of antisemitism”, that they will be at their side. Yet those bodies are conspicuously not there for Ettedgui or any of his fellow ex-pupils.

They stand apart, mute, while he endures an all-too-familiar fate – a Jew traduced in the public square, accused of lying about his own suffering to advance some hidden purpose. Those Holocaust survivors are with him, but the Board and the others – they have nothing to say.

Communal officials insist they would be loudly condemning Farage if antisemitism played any role in his or his party’s current politics – but, they say, it does not. Again, that is easily contested. It was as a fully adult politician that Farage warned LBC listeners in 2017 about the might of the American Jewish “lobby”; that he spoke darkly of “globalists”, George Soros and Goldman Sachs; and appeared as a guest at least six times on a show hosted by a far-right US pastor who would later describe the impeachment of Donald Trump as a “Jew coup”.

A more truthful explanation for the Jewish organisations’ silence comes in private conversations. In those, communal figures will admit that they believe the accusations against Farage are true, but that they have made a pragmatic calculation. “He’s the coming man and right now he’s not hostile to us,” was how one senior official put it to me. They don’t want to make an enemy of a politician who, polls suggest, is heading to Downing Street.

Besides, they fear that if antisemitism becomes the stick with which Farage is beaten, a good portion of his supporters will run towards that rather than away from it: they will adopt antisemitic postures as a gesture of defiance. And so the decision has been made to “keep our heads down and hope it blows over”.

That is an Anglo-Jewish strategy with a long and unhappy history. Our communal elders tried it back in the 1930s, when Oswald Mosley was on the march. Of course, the situations are different: Mosley was overtly hostile to Jews, while Farage seems, for now, to have other minorities in his sights. But it amounts to backing away from the crocodile, hoping he’ll eat you last.

And it comes at a high price. It requires our leading organisations to abandon the victims of antisemitism. It opens them to the accusation that they are, as Daniel Sugarman argued on these pages, selective in their condemnation of antisemitism: unequivocal when it comes from the left, hesitant when it comes from the right.

And it leaves them in the unprincipled and undignified position of a crouch: head down, waiting for the storm to pass. Instead we should be standing tall and saying in a strong, clear voice that any man who cannot tell the truth about his own past, and who shows no contrition even as the evidence of vile hatred mounts up, is unworthy of Downing Street – and no friend of ours.

• Jonathan Freedland is a columnist for the Guardian and the author of The Traitors Circle: the Rebels Against the Nazis and the Spy Who Betrayed Them