I was walking down Lambeth Palace Road, on the way to make a shared statement against antisemitism, anti-Muslim hatred and all forms of racism, alongside a senior imam and the archbishop of Canterbury, when a young woman stopped me. “I’m so relieved to see you here with your skullcap on,” she said. “I’m Jewish and I’m so afraid.”
Figures published on Thursday by the Community Security Trust, showing a soaring rise in antisemitism, five-fold in some places, are not mere statistics. They’re about lives, schoolchildren, students, Jewish people across the whole of society, including Holocaust survivors, who’ve felt isolated, shunned, blamed and targeted since the horrors of 7 October. This has nothing to do with their views. I have congregants who feel passionately supportive of Israel, or utterly distressed at the suffering of Palestinians caught between Israel and Hamas; or, like many of us, both these emotions at once. That’s not the issue. The target has been Jews, any Jews.
