What a mad old horrible time to be a Jew. Part of me feels my whole life as a liberal Jew in Britain has been leading here, to this sharp and ragged point, where families are cracking apart and fears are being mongered.
Even by writing this, I know I will draw criticism and abuse from both fellow Jews and the people who hate them, a fact that is undoubtedly leading to uncomfortable silences from many other people like me, dealing with a grey complexity of feeling that is tricky to articulate, even inside our own heads. We were brought up on a story of Jews fleeing persecution to return to a sacred homeland, a story that rarely acknowledged the Palestinians already living there, but one that was central to British Jewish identity, and one that many of us have spent our adulthoods painfully unpicking. Unpicking at a time when antisemitism is rising, which is terrifying, and when that rise is being weaponised, which is horrifying. People like me who find themselves wading daily through weeds, trying to find a home.
