OPINION: This is a time to wear your Jewish identity with pride
In these traumatic moments, it is worth reminding ourselves what Britain is and why we live here, writes Josh Glancy
How would you describe your emotions right now? I asked my Jewish school friends this question on our WhatsApp group last night. The response? “Drained.” “Despairing.” “Isolated.” “Angry.” “Scared.” I think every Jew I know has felt each of these sentiments all too keenly in the past three weeks. Horror at what has happened, in Israel and then in Gaza. Fear at what comes next.
And yet there’s another emotion creeping in among some I’ve spoken to: panic. Stories of people taking their mezuzot down; removing their kipot; avoiding trips to kosher shops; even wondering whether there is still a Jewish future in this country.
It’s understandable that people feel like this: the mood is ugly, the war may be long and antisemitic incidents are already soaring. As the old saying goes, most of us are only here because some ancestor had the wit to leave somewhere else before it was too late. Neurosis is a historically sound ethnic trait.
But this is not a time to panic. This is a time for resilience and sober defiance. A time to affix mezuzot, not take them down. To put kippot on, not take them off. To stand unapologetically tall as British Jews, relishing the freedoms that our predecessors paid such a high price for. Because things are not as bad as they feel in the witching hours when you are doom scrolling in the dark. And even if they become so, this blessed plot is a Jewish home worth fighting for.
Things are not as bad as they feel because we are living inside a digital fear factory. We can’t remind ourselves of this enough. Social media takes every recorded incident of antisemitism happening anywhere in the world and promotes it straight into our feeds, where it knows we will fearfully consume it. Then it delivers us some more: hostage posters being ripped down. London Lions football games being boycotted. Golders Green restaurants being vandalised. Chants of death and vengeance on London streets. Crazed mobs ripping through Dagestani airports.
But it’s in the WhatsApp groups that the fear really multiplies.
We bring each other morsels of hate like errant cats delivering dead dormice: “Seen this?” “Awful.” “Terrifying.”
Thankfully, some of these incidents aren’t quite as heinous as they first seem. The London Lions episode turned out to be one player withdrawn by one set of parents, swiftly investigated by the relevant footballing authorities. Shocking, but hardly a threat to Anglo-Jewish life as we know it. When the restaurant Pita in Golders Green was smashed up shortly after October 7, it felt like an antisemitic attack, a mini-Kristallnacht. But it was actually an unrelated burglary. Still, the chemical and emotional effects of fear linger, warping our wellbeing, even when a less- awful reality emerges.
None of this is to diminish the gravity of what is unfolding. Life is undeniably becoming less comfortable, particularly if you have children at school or on campuses. Things may well get worse before they get better and the chance of a paradigm-shifting act of antisemitic violence is not trivial. But, right now, much of this discomfort is still in our heads.
As the old saying goes, most of us are only here because some ancestor had the wit to leave somewhere else before it was too late. Neurosis is a historically sound ethnic trait.
In these moments, it is worth reminding ourselves what Britain is and why we live here. Because this is not Dagestan. There are no traumatic stories of genocide or exile in my family, not that we can remember anyway. The pogroms that drove them to these shores are distant folk tales. Since then, things have been splendidly unhistoric for the Glancys.
Once they made it to England, my family sold dresses and electronics. They became doctors and lawyers. They founded synagogues and golf clubs. They raised heimishe children and sent them to great schools and famous universities.
These were not dull or boring lives, but they were lived almost entirely outside the fierce glare of history.
This, by and large, is the quietly brilliant story of Anglo-Jewry.
Look at our friends, in Downing Street and beyond. Look at the majority of the British public, stolid, dispassionate, far more interested in moaning about the NHS or pub closures than wasting their time on Jew-hatred.
Sometimes, if I’m honest, a warped part of me even envies the inherited trauma of continental Jews. But mostly I’m profoundly grateful that my ancestors chose England and not Germany, France or Italy. Of course, Anglo-Jewish lives have been tainted by prejudice and exclusion, but looked at in the round it has been a staggering success. Viewed through the lens of our long and torrid history, this might be among the best times and places to be a Jew ever. We have so, so far to fall.
Look at the bloodshed destroying so many lives in Israel and Gaza and compare it to Radlett or Whitefield. Look at our writers and lawyers and entrepreneurs; our institutions, our homes and our history. Look at our friends, in Downing Street and beyond. Look at the majority of the British public, stolid, dispassionate, far more interested in moaning about the NHS or pub closures than wasting their time on Jew-hatred.
Yes, I can already hear someone responding, this is what they said in 1920s Berlin. But frankly, it’s an ahistorical indulgence to imagine ourselves anywhere close to Weimar Germany. That’s not where we are and not where we are going.
And if the picture does continue to darken? There was another word my school friends used to describe their current mood. “Pride.” Pride at our peoplehood. I’m told anecdotally that sales of Magen David necklaces have rocketed at London jewellers. That’s the resilience and sober defiance we need. Because this is a time to affix mezuzot, not take them down.
• Josh Glancy is news review editor at The Sunday Times
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