Will Britain miss its Jews once they have gone?

The Jews are gone.

No more Friday evening rush before sundown. No bakery windows stripped bare of freshly baked challah and bagels for the weekend. No more community centres, school halls or synagogues packed with fundraising dinners, charity auctions, school campaigns, along with the endless arguments over politics, antisemitism, Israel, whether the “golden age” of Jews in the UK has come to an end, or should we stay or should we go.

The bankers are gone, the entrepreneurs too, along with the familiar Jewish names behind businesses, brands and boardrooms. No more Jewish doctors sitting on hospital boards, because somebody has to do it. No more Jewish lawyers unable to hear a bad argument without tearing into it. No more Jewish writers, journalists, publishers, comedians, actors, psychologists, philanthropists, politicians, campaigners or charity workers.

The start-ups, the scientists and inventors have gone elsewhere. Cabbies in London seem less talkative, and definitely less intrusive. The communal busybodies are gone too, forever involving themselves in things that may not affect them personally, yet somehow always seemed to matter. The Rabbis, the interfaith outreach, the endless attempts at dialogue and cohesion, gone with them.

No more Jewish families sitting around the dinner table on Friday nights. Enough food for the entire street. Lively conversations and laughter. Voices raised in order to be heard. Multiple topics with even more opinions. No families out in their Saturday best, on their way to or from synagogue. No more rushing home from synagogue for a quick change of clothes, getting in the car and making it to the stadium just in time for the 3 o’clock kick-off.

You never really noticed that much. Until now, that is. Now that they’re all gone.

People who made up barely half a percent of the population, yet were somehow woven into the full spectrum of British life in ways that were visible, tangible, and perhaps all too easy to take for granted until suddenly, they weren’t there anymore.

Britain carries on though. The trains still run, still late. The pubs are full. The face of British high streets continues to change, while struggling to compete with ever more shopping malls. Politicians continue to pander where they deem it useful, and peddle slogans rather than substance. The weather remains typically British, and something to talk about. From the outside it’s business as usual.

But on the inside, in towns, cities and communities across the country, there are things, tangible and intangible, that are simply missing.

Old synagogues are now luxury developments. Characterful old buildings with Hebrew writing above the entrance, giving them a certain chic, are now homes for young urban creatives, the discerning and the affluent. Of course, no one can read the Hebrew, but it’s kind of exotic. Some stand deserted, waiting to be snapped up by some adventurous developer.

Many are still houses of God, but now answer to the call of the muezzin, serving growing Muslim communities. Jewish school buildings are still schools, just not Jewish ones. Pupils no longer have to hide their uniform or their religious identity. Parents needn’t fear for their children. No need for security guards or barbed wire fences. No armed police stationed outside as the bell rings at the end of the school day.

You can still find bagels, but they don’t really taste the same. Jewish-style bakeries may look the part, but they’re not. The overly loud conversations, the fusion of English, Yiddish and Hebrew. The smells and the hustle and bustle of Friday morning challahs and Sunday morning bagels. Smoked salmon, cream cheese, chopped herring, egg and onion. Nobody knows how to make a proper salt beef sandwich anymore.

The sights, the sounds, the smells, the nervous energy that defined certain corners of British life have faded. That intangible yet unmistakable pulse is no more. It left along with the community that no longer lives here.

Britain still looks like Britain. Same, same, but definitely different.

But, back to reality. A pretty harsh reality at that. This seems like an altogether far-fetched scenario. Even ten years ago that would have been the case. Today, for Jews in the UK, a question that would once have sounded absurd to British Jews no longer sounds absurd at all.

For the first time in generations, in homes, at dinner tables, in synagogue corridors, in school WhatsApp groups, in quiet conversations between parents who would rather not be having them, Jews in Britain are asking questions their grandparents thought had been settled a long time ago.

Can we still live here openly? Will our children be safe here? Is this still home? Do Jews have a future here? Do we stay and hope things improve, or do we get out while we still can?

These are not abstract anxieties, or stereotypical Jewish neurotic overreactions. When Jewish schools in Britain require fences, barriers, security guards and even armed police, people stop noticing how totally insane that really is. When security outside synagogues and Jewish community centres becomes the norm. When Jewish students arrive on university campuses wondering not what they will study, but what kind of hostility they are walking into, or whether they need to hide their Jewish identity. When, according to a recent Union of Jewish Students poll, one in five students would not share a house with a Jew. When parents think twice before allowing their children to wear school uniforms on public transport. When Jewish staff keep their heads down in the workplace. When they feel nervous about raising antisemitism, or talking about family in Israel. When families hesitate before hanging a mezuzah on the front door, wearing a Star of David, or speaking Hebrew in public. When identity increasingly feels like exposure and a risk. These are questions Jews in Britain are asking themselves.

Since the Hamas massacre of 7 October, the light sleeper that is Jew hatred awakened with a start, louder, bolder and harder to ignore. Repackaged for the digital age, wrapped in the language of activism, human rights, anti-colonialism and social justice, it finds expression in intimidation, abuse, threats, vandalism, extreme violence and even murder.

To add insult to injury, non-Jews are lecturing Jews on what is and is not antisemitism. Why the hostility directed at them is exaggerated or misrepresented.

That is not the Britain its Jewish community knows and loves. And yet, here we are.

For generations, Britain seemed to offer Jews something rare in European history. Not perfection, certainly not acceptance without conditions, but stability. Space to build, to belong. To become deeply woven into the life of the country. Integrating successfully without the need to hide or surrender identity, culture or way of life.

After centuries of expulsions, pogroms, quotas, ghettos and the general European habit of blaming Jews for whatever ills were unfolding at the time, Britain came to be seen by many Jews as one of the few places where history had finally eased its grip, even if just a little.

There was still antisemitism, obviously. Britain never lacked for snobbery, prejudice or conspiracy theories, whispered at drinks parties and muttered in golf and country clubs. Indeed, as a result of being excluded, Jews ended up establishing their own golf clubs. Jews were kept out of certain institutions, neighbourhoods, professions and social circles for years. Britain had its own home-grown fascists. Mosley and the Blackshirts were not some continental import lacking support. But compared to much of Europe, Britain felt safer, calmer, less feverish.

Jews built lives here. They arrived in waves from Eastern Europe, Russia, Germany, Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East, often poor, often traumatised, often carrying memories of places they considered home that had turned on them. They worked, studied, argued, organised, built businesses, entered professions, founded schools, hospitals and charities, wrote books, made films, entered journalism, law, medicine, politics and public life with the same mixture of insecurity, ambition, humour and stubborn determination that has followed Jews through diaspora life for centuries.

Britain became home.

Not in a naïve sense. Jews rarely trust permanence absolutely. History has tended to punish them when they do. But British Jews, particularly after the Second World War and the Holocaust, largely came to believe that whatever Europe’s old sickness was, Britain had escaped the worst of it. Jews in the UK entered what many regarded as a golden age, defined by upward social mobility, integration and growing cultural confidence.

Overt institutional antisemitism appeared to decline. British Jews achieved higher levels of representation across the professions, business, media and politics, participating fully in mainstream British life while maintaining strong communal and religious continuity. Synagogues, Jewish schools and charities flourished, creating generations of British Jews who believed the UK was unquestionably home.

Which is why the current atmosphere feels so profoundly disappointing and disorientating for so many.

This is not the old antisemitism of fascist rallies and skinheads marching through the streets. It is something more insidious. Sophisticated, respectable and socially acceptable, wrapped in the language of human rights, anti-racism, social justice and decolonisation, allowing bad actors and useful idiots to indulge hostility towards Jews while convincing themselves they are engaged in some higher moral cause.

Across Britain, so-called progressives, well-meaning and not so well-meaning liberals happily march arm in arm with Islamist extremists and religious reactionaries whose worldviews clash on almost everything, united by hostility towards the Jewish state and increasingly towards Jews themselves.

Jew hatred has adapted, reinvented and intellectualised itself, adopting the language of progressive politics and embedding itself within a Western culture so lacking in confidence, so desperate for meaning, so narcissistic and self-righteous, that under the dubious guise of anti-Zionism and hostility towards Israel, it increasingly peddles Jew hatred as moral courage, with conformity to a hateful ideology as virtue.

And it turns out Britain, for all its endless self-congratulation about tolerance, liberalism and diversity, is not immune to any of this. In many ways, modern Britain seems almost designed for it. A culture increasingly incapable of distinguishing between activism and intimidation, morality and performance, compassion and ideological hysteria. A political and media class terrified of clarity, terrified of offending the wrong people. Petrified into silence, incapable of speaking honestly in the face of what much of the country can already see unfolding in front of them.

Britain has reached the point where Jews, one of its oldest and most established minorities, increasingly question whether they still have a future in the country they call home. Antisemitism is real and rising sharply, while wider society shrugs, looks away, or lectures Jews on why they are overreacting.

If British Jews decide to leave in significant numbers, it will be a damning indictment of modern Britain and the direction in which it is headed.

Great Britain, once a proud, confident world leader, a bastion of liberal democracy, dedicated to freedom, equality, tolerance, mutual respect, fairness, the rule of law, and good old-fashioned common sense, is lost.

Fractured and increasingly unsure of itself, Britain is facing an identity crisis and loss of direction. It is increasingly defined by political cowardice, moral confusion, and division. This crisis of confidence has presented a relatively easy target and fertile host for extremists determined to undermine British values and way of life.

If the country fails to act in a serious and robust manner, by the time Britain fully understands the scale of what it has become, it will be too late.

An exodus of Jews will simply be one more nail in the coffin of a floundering country headed for the abyss.

Gary Cohen is a writer and filmmaker. His substack can be found here: