‘I feel punch drunk,” says Laura Marks, the co-founder of Nisa-Nashim, a Jewish-Muslim women’s network, referring to the alleged attempted murder of two Jewish men in north London this week: “Every day it feels like there is something else. It’s relentless.”
Nisa-Nashim was set up as a charity eight years ago to bring Jewish and Muslim women together through social events. The idea was to nurture relationships in UK communities that could help overcome the distrust, division and religious stereotyping exacerbated by Israel-Palestine tensions in the Middle East.
The violence in Golders Green, the latest in a wave attacks targeting the Jewish community in the UK amid the deepening Middle East conflict, can feel like a demoralising rebuke to voluntary projects such as Nisa-Nashim that for years have been working relentlessly for community cohesion.
“I do sometimes despair,” says Marks, a former advertising executive with years of social activism under her belt. But she does not intend to give up. “I’m an optimist. If I don’t believe I can make things a bit better, then what am I doing? But it is difficult.”
It is not primarily the Golders Green-style violence, perpetrated by individuals almost certainly indifferent to persuasion, that is the cause of her despair, she says: “A lot of this work is not designed to address extreme radicalisation, when a bit of hanging out together is not going to make any difference.”
Rather it is the challenge posed by the malign effects of local violence and the wider conflict: a ratcheting up of fear, suspicion and distrust. The aim, says Marks, is to try to see “beyond conflict: to help ordinary Jews and Muslims acknowledge their similarities as well as their differences, whether culture, history, scripture or food”.
The 7 October 2023 attack on Israel, and the subsequent conflict in Gaza, made this work much more difficult, says Marks. As the Gaza crisis grew, support for Nisa-Nashim waned. Some volunteers were put off by online abuse or extremist threats, some were demoralised, and others were dissuaded by their families.
The immediate priority is community safety, she says. “Right now, all people [in the Jewish community] can hear is walls, police, security. I understand that. It’s like a hierarchy of needs: if we are not safe, we can’t do anything else. But long term we can’t live behind walls. We have to build bridges.”
Mohammed Amin, the co-chair of the Muslim Jewish Forum of Greater Manchester, a voluntary group set up more than 20 years ago to bring together religious communities through joint social events, says he felt “horror and dismay” when he heard about Wednesday’s attacks in Golders Green.
The forum’s work makes a real and tangible difference to community relations, he believes, encouraging tolerance and understanding of others, widening social and cultural horizons and creating empathy. “People get to know each other. We have seen real friendships emerge.”
Amin is looking forward to a forum-arranged trip to a kosher-halal fish and chip restaurant in Leeds, which is staffed by Muslims and Jews. You can’t change the course of international politics, he says, but such events, in their small way, help change the atmosphere and defuse tension.
Amin, a businessman and former Conservative party member who is now a Liberal Democrat, says addressing the problems of cultural cohesion cannot simply be the job of charities, but requires political leadership and a change in political culture.
“Some politicians in our society trade on sowing division and resentment,” he says. He singles out the Reform UK leader Nigel Farage’s comments in the wake of the Southport riots in 2024 as an example. “If politicians are going to pour petrol in the flames do not be surprised by the outcome,” says Amin.
Marks says that while community safety is crucial, the government must also invest in interfaith and cohesion work, a relatively unloved part of the civil society economy: “At the core of what we do is mixing people, bringing people together. This is social cohesion at the coalface.”
For Amin, community tensions inevitably ebb and flow depending on the state of conflict in the Middle East. But interfaith work at a local level has a vital role. “If you increase connectivity, you decrease hostility,” he says. “The key is to recognise we are all ordinary human beings.”
