OPINION: It may be hard to be a Jew at the moment. But it’s not as lonely as we might think
'Now is the time to be gracious and to accept the help of others. How sad that I even need to spell this out', writes National Holocaust Museum director Marc Cave
Last week two very good things happened. The British public voted for Israel’s Eden Golan at Eurovision. And on Yom Hashoah, Christian groups organised a ‘March of Life’ rally in London (and Oxford) to celebrate Jewish life and to stand with us against the haters. It was attended by triple the number of people who were at the Jewish community’s Yom Hashoah event at Westminster.
It may be hard to be a Jew at the moment. But it’s not as lonely as we might think. We do have friends. They are keen to show their support publicly and vocally. And guess what? They can even bang out a rally chant without getting embarrassed.
I, however, do get a bit embarrassed when we as a community refuse their hand of friendship. We may worry there’s a knife in their other hand, or perhaps an evangelising crucifix. After centuries of persecution, that is understandable, up to a point. But mostly, we are looking a gift horse in the mouth (that’s a 5th Century Christian proverb, by the way) because groups like Christian Action Against Antisemitism do not wish to proselytise.
They feel a sense of responsibility from the weight of Church history. And they are outraged by the explosion of anti-Jewish racist glee which began the day after October 7. They know that what starts with Jews does not end with Jews. The ‘Red Green Alliance’ of extreme Leftists and extreme Islamists wishes to overthrow what we ALL believe in: the Judeo-Christian values of Western civilisation. It’s a war on truth, freedom and plurality. That is why courageous Iranian dissidents stand with us too.
So now is the time to be gracious and to accept the help of others. Now is the time to drop petty communal ego and our obsession with controlling the message — which is rather witless when we don’t even have a message. While Hamasniks around the world orchestrate every march & cunning stunt according to a 30-page communications guidebook, we spend our time worrying about a JLC versus a BoD logo. We are fiddling while Hendon burns.
True, we do have ‘external’ conversations. But we whisper. Even now, as the Anti Jew smashes through one red line after another, we prefer a quiet word in Westminster’s ear to confident, coordinated counter-action in public. We are not willing to promote a Yom Hashoah rally if we have not organised it. We do not want the help of non-Jewish educators on university campuses.
Even when our Gentile friends have audience insights and expertise that we do not, we don’t see their value… because they don’t understand what it is to be Jewish. But erm, that’s not the point. Our friends understand the audiences that we as a community have so lamentably failed to address, let alone tame. Friends of the British Jewish community see what we fail to see. They say what we fail to say. They press buttons we don’t know exist. Their support lends third-party credibility. How sad that I even need to spell this out.
In conclusion, we must accept the hand of friendship because on that hand, there is skin in the game. Our war is their war. This actually makes them more than friends. It makes them allies. And allyship changes things. When Abraham Heschel and his fellow rabbis marched with Martin Luther King, it helped to change civil rights in America. When the Jews of South Africa campaigned with Mandela, it helped to end Apartheid (the real one).
So this is not a call for interfaith work — that alone would be too niche. It is a call to get smart and get strategically allied. To get a message out, together. To get it amplified by the huge majority of decent, middle-of-the-road people in Britain who don’t much like the brazen antics of the narcissistic Keffiyeh Karens.
The Shoah happened because in that era, the heads of nation states and the majority of their populations were either against us or looked the other way. This time it’s different. We are allies against a common enemy whose terrorist ‘spectaculars’, from 10/7 or 9/11, delight and incite the useful idiots of the Red Green Alliance.
In early summer the National Holocaust Museum – the only Holocaust museum in the world founded by Christians, the wonderful Smith family, “as a gift to the Jewish people” – will launch an allyship manifesto. It will define goals to gel and empower all of us who dare stand up against the relentless and staggeringly well funded war of attrition on the freedoms we all cherish.
I hope you will join the alliance.
- Marc Cave, director, The National Holocaust Museum
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