OPINION: Anti-racism education needs to move beyond lectures. Here’s why
By Marc Cave, director of the National Holocaust Museum, whose ‘Racism Response Unit’ launches this week
I thought I’d start a chant at the march on Sunday: “From the sea to the river, there will always be chopped liver.”
I felt a bit sheepish. As protest marchers go, I’m a bit rubbish. I suppose I typify the 105,000 who showed they’re a peaceable lot, who simply want to be allowed to live a safe British, Jewish life. It’s a dual identity with which we are completely comfortable.
If only others were too. The assumption that being Jewish means loyalty to Israel – and therefore disloyalty to Britain – is a racist one.
This Loyalty Libel assumes ‘the Jews’ are a single global cabal. It lies behind the anti-Jewish hate crime that has exploded in Britain since 7 October. It holds British Jews responsible for the actions, alleged and actual, of the state of Israel.
Just imagine holding British Muslims responsible for the monsters who run Syria or Iran.
Of course it is only a minority peddling this divisive hate. But then it was only a minority of hooligans who destroyed British football in the 1970s and 80s.
It’s time to get real about who they are. British Jews may feel it’s just not cricket to single out other groups for criticism. But in this case, they are extremists who are not only making life miserable for Jews, but dividing Britain into new factions. There seem to be three groups in an unholy alliance.
The first is Islamists. They don’t just want to wipe out the Jewish state. They want a caliphate. Everywhere, including Britain. They mobilise support by defining a common global enemy: “The Jews”. (Look, there’s that racist little word again: “The”).
This is why they import a Middle East conflict that has nothing to do with British civil life. How many of their supporters in Britain mouth their chants without even knowing which river or which sea their chanting is about?
The second group is the Extremist Left. The people who, as explained in Camilla Bassi’s 2022 book ‘Outcast,’ use a term beloved of the Nazis to define their struggle against capitalism: “The Jewish Problem”.
Their newer tactic is what we at the National Holocaust Museum call the Colonial Libel — a sly move to reposition the UN-approved recreation of the Jewish homeland as the intrusion of alien imperialists.
But in some ways, the most morally repugnant group is the third: the university lecturers and secondary school teachers in whose care we place our children.
The corrupters of the gift we cherish so profoundly for them: education. The men and women who abuse positions of immense trust to indulge hate and harassment of Jews. And at worst, to incite it — be it the primary school teachers who allow nine-year-old children to go ‘on strike’ against Israel, or the UCL union encouraging the genocidal, cross-border idea of ‘Intifada until victory’.
Well before 7 October, the National Holocaust Museum has been on the front line of all this. After two years of work on university campus, we have formed a Racism Response Unit for university staff, security and even cleaning teams.
It is also for any school, council or police force looking for proven learning techniques that, instead of merely citing the history of anti-Jewish racism, give their employees the critical thinking skills to spot it for themselves today.
Lectures about ‘antisemitism’ (a word most ordinary people do not understand, let alone see as racism) are not education.
Giving people the ability to join the dots between the slogans and memes on ‘Pro Palestine’ marches, and the hateful ideologues in history with whom those marchers would be ashamed to be associated? That’s what I call education.
Why? Because it changes attitudes. In our programme at the University of Nottingham, when we showed a cartoon depicting a Jewish puppeteer controlling political leaders, 42 percent of participants thought it racist beforehand… and 92 percent after.
We know too from our partnership with the Outwood Academy Trust, chaired by Lord Mann, that anti-Jewish racism exists in schools where even Jews themselves do not. It is that bad.
We have the data. And for two school years, we have been piloting a revolutionary cross-curricular programme to unstitch the damage it is doing to the social fabric of this country.
Both initiatives I mention are about teaching the teachers. Students come and go. It is the institutional racism in our learning institutions that we need to dismantle. It is time to stop the warped hate groomers inside them from legitimising the trial of British Jews by the mob. It is they not we who should be in the dock.
Our Racism Response Unit – and the allyship of non-Jews like the Lords Mann, Pickles, and Austin – suggests we can succeed.
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