On the surface, I am ideally suited to write about the terrorist atrocity on the Heaton Park synagogue. The attack, on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, Yom Kippur, left two Mancunian Jews dead, several seriously injured and a local (and national) Jewish community traumatised.
Over a 40-year career, I have researched and written about antisemitism in the UK, from the readmission of the Jews to Britain in the mid 17th century through to today. I have also published widely on British Jewish history over the same period. Lastly, I am a Mancunian Jew born and brought up in the city, later working in the Manchester Jewish Museum.
There are, however, limits to my ability to understand what happened. I am an insider because of my roots: my parents bought their first house on the same street as Heaton Park synagogue in the 1950s. But I am also an outsider, having grown up in the south side of the city in one of its leafier suburbs, and spent over half my life some 260 miles away in Southampton.
