I find myself looking over my shoulder before I step into lobby at the Jewish Chronicle’s headquarters in central London. “We’ve always had to take security very seriously,” the paper’s editor, Jake Wallis Simons, tells me as he walks me through a warren of anonymous white corridors to a small, nondescript meeting room with a modest Jewish Chronicle logo on the wall (the only branding in the whole building). It is the same room his colleagues would use to escape the newsroom and cry in those first sleepless, “traumatic” days after October 7.
Wallis Simons and his colleagues have kept the location of their offices secret since they moved here two years ago for fear of anti-Semitic attacks (they choose not to publish their address, a rare move in the media industry) and I’m shocked at first — but perhaps I shouldn’t be. The 2015 shootings at the offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris were horrifying proof of the threats journalists can face while doing their job, and attacks against Jews have only escalated since then – even before Hamas terrorists invaded Israel and its response triggered a wave of anti-Semitic hate here in Britain.
