My generation is missing from the fight for our future

At most meetings I attend about antisemitism, I am the youngest person in the room by twenty years. That is not a mood, it is arithmetic. The median age of a Board of Deputies deputy is 65. Under-35s sit at the Board not as deputies but as “observers”, and the title tells you everything about the offer.

Across communal life the picture repeats: the boards, the committees, the AGMs. The people leading the response to the worst period for British Jews in living memory have carried this work for decades. They deserve reinforcements, not spectators. But this is not another complaint about communal democracy. It is a warning about the fight itself.

The war has changed, on the streets, on the campuses and above all online, and we are meeting it with an arsenal designed for a different age. Antisemitism in Britain is at the highest level ever recorded, and the numbers are worst exactly where the future lives.

One in five Britons now holds antisemitic views, double the figure of five years ago. Among 18 to 24 year olds, one in five believes the 7 October massacre was justified. One in five says Israel has no right to exist at all. Three in five believe Israel treats the Palestinians as the Nazis treated the Jews.

On current numbers, the most antisemitic generation in living memory is forming its views right now, and it is forming them on TikTok, on Instagram and in the comment sections, at a speed and scale no press release will ever touch. That is one front. The campuses, the workplaces and the streets are not going any better. Our response has not changed with it. The same statements, the same letters, the same panel events, the same imagery and the same language we have been using for twenty years.

These are tools built for a fight that no longer exists, and the polling is the proof that they are not winning it. You cannot answer a viral lie with a communiqué, and a movement that never refreshes its face, its voice or its ideas should not be surprised when a generation scrolls past it.

This is why the next generation is not a nice-to-have. The community needs what only young people can bring: fresh ideas, fresh faces, new language, new energy. We are fluent in the culture this fight is now conducted in. We are already in the group chats, the comment sections and the seminar rooms where the poison lands, and our parents cannot make the argument for us there, however willing, because the argument is not happening anywhere they are.

The streets need us just as much. A rally of the same three hundred faces reads as a remnant. A rally full of young people reads as a future, and every camera present can tell the difference. I understand the reluctance. Visibility has a price. A photograph follows you around a campus, a post follows you into a job interview, and everything is permanent now. But invisibility is not protection. It is losing quietly, and the numbers above are what losing quietly looks like at scale.

So here is the call, and it is not an invitation to join a committee. The next time a lie about Jews gets ten thousand likes, be the answer underneath it. The next time a lecture hall goes quiet around the one Jewish student in it, be the second voice. The next time the community stands in the street, stand with it, and bring three friends. Post on the worst day of the year, not just the best. Make the meme, cut the video, write the thread: whatever you already make about the things you love, make it about this.

The weapons of this fight are in your pocket and you are fluent in them, which is more than our institutions can say. Nobody will hand you a role. Take one. Showing up is a decision, not a qualification. And take the seats at the table too, the shul board, the deputy’s chair, because the money, the platforms and the air cover for the people fighting online are decided in those rooms. To our communal leadership, the ask is simple: match us.

If a nineteen-year-old is willing to stand in front of a camera and absorb the abuse that follows, the least our institutions can do is fund her, platform her, and give her generation votes at the Board instead of observer badges. Trust is not a speech. It is a budget line. The stakes are not abstract. If the next generation of Britons is lost to this hatred and the next generation of Jews stays silent, the future of British Jewry is bleak, and it will have gone dark on our watch. Our great-grandparents built Jewish life in this country from almost nothing. Our grandparents defended it. Our parents are holding the line today. What it becomes next is up to us.

• Max Royston is a co-founder and primary spokesperson of StopTheHateUK