We were made to feel there was no place for Jews at Pride. So we built our own

Walk down to Miznon on Saturday afternoon, and you’ll find the party has already spilt onto the street, music, people, the unmistakable buzz of a Soho block that’s been taken over for the good. Then you step inside, and it properly hits you: that specific frequency of a Jewish room at full tilt, somewhere between a wedding and an argument, everyone talking, nobody listening, and somehow all of it joyful.

Look closer, and you’ll see what it actually is. Queer Jews, dancing. Drag and tzitzit in the same eyeline. Someone’s bubbe who came to support her grandson and is now, against all odds, the most enthusiastic person on the floor. A pride flag and a Magen David sharing a wall without either having to apologise for the other.

I want to tell you about that room, because three years ago we were told it wasn’t supposed to exist.

Back then, Jews were quietly edged out of Pride in London. The organisers wouldn’t guarantee our safety, wouldn’t train their stewards on antisemitism, and seemed more interested in a war thousands of miles away than in whether we could walk through our own city unafraid. The message, never said outright but impossible to miss, was that we were a complication to the movement that would rather not deal with.

So we made our own room. Not a sulk in a side hall, but a party, out in the open, in the middle of Soho, exactly where we’d been made to feel unwelcome. The point was never to hide our hurt. The point was to be so visibly, defiantly alive that we couldn’t be pretended away.

What I didn’t expect, that first year, was who would walk through the door.

Because alongside the queer Jews came everyone else. Friends from shul who wouldn’t know a pride march from a parade but turned up anyway. Parents. Cousins. People who, when the community was being told its LGBTQ+ members were too awkward to accommodate, decided with their feet that we were theirs and they weren’t letting go. I have been to a lot of Jewish events in my life. I am not sure I have ever felt the word “community” mean as much as it did watching that crowd.

That is the thing about being pushed out. It shows you, with brutal clarity, exactly who stays.

And it turns out that staying changes things. This year, the room looks different, not because we changed, but because the world finally moved towards us. A new leadership team at Pride in London actually sat down with us and listened. Their volunteers are doing antisemitism training. Our bloc in the parade has the security it needs. And the party itself, the one born out of our exclusion, is now supported by unity funding from Pride in London. We held our values in public for three hard years, and the door we’d been shown opened back up.

I don’t say that as a victory lap. I say it because the queer Jewish kid reading this, the one who has felt unwelcome in LGBTQ+ spaces for being Jewish and unsure of their welcome in Jewish ones for being queer, needs to know it can go this way. That you do not have to choose. That the room exists, and that it was built by people who refused to vanish when vanishing was the easier option. Sapphic Shabbat and The Hineni Project built that room with their bare hands, and the beautiful thing is that the very people pushed furthest to the margins are the ones now leading everyone back in.

So here is my invitation, and I mean it for all of you, not just the obvious ones. Come on Saturday, between 2.30 and 6.30, to Miznon. Come if you’re queer. Come if you’re not and you just believe a Jew shouldn’t have to leave half of themselves at the door. Come and be the bubbe on the dance floor. Come and be the friend from shul who shows up not because they fully understand it but because they understand that we belong to each other.

Because in the end, that loud, chaotic, gorgeous room is the whole argument. You can debate inclusion in the abstract forever. Or you can open a door in Soho on a Saturday afternoon, hear the noise, and know, instantly, in your chest, that we are still here, we are still ours, and we are not going anywhere.

Pull up a chair. There’s room.

Jewish Pride will be held on Saturday, 4th July, between 2:30pm and 6:30pm at Miznon, 8-12 Broadwick St, London W1F 8HW.