The word Zion occurs more than a hundred times in the Hebrew scriptures. In 587 BC, the Babylonians conquered the land of Judah and expelled its people; the psalmist describes their despondency and their yearning for a return home. “By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion.” This lament is a recurrent feature of the Hebrew scriptures. And later, after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 AD, the same desire for a return home, to Zion, was the defining feature of what came to be called Judaism. Zionism was not invented in 1895. It is as old as the psalmist, even older.

But the arrival of Christianity did something very particular to our understanding of all religions and has distorted the way we understand words such as Judaism and Zionism. For Christianity, and especially protestant Christianity, religion is essentially a system of belief. So successful has this idea become that it is often impossible for people to understand that a religion can be anything other than a system of belief. Yet to be Jewish is not just about what you believe, it is also about where you come from, where many yearn to return to, who your mother is, what practices you have. For the vast majority of Jews, then, Zionism is not simply a political philosophy that was invented in the years before the First World War. It is a way of life that is fundamentally constitutive of what it is to be Jewish.

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By Giles Fraser

Which is why, in passing a motion that “Zionism is Racism”, the Green Party has done something profoundly wicked. Those who scream “from the river to the sea” — though they probably couldn’t tell you the name of either the river or the sea — have decided to describe the safety that many Jews seek in Israel as a hatred. To condemn Zionism is to seek the destruction of Israel and open Jews up to a danger that has followed them around since forever.

This idea that Zionism is a racist and colonialist enterprise is absurd. The yearning for Zion long predates the Holocaust, but the murder of six million Jews by a European civilization gave that yearning a new urgency. And yes, there were Jews who, before the Second World War, believed that they could make a safe home for themselves in Europe, fearing that Herzl’s new political version of Zionism would destabilize the assimilation into that society they had done so much to build.

My great-grandfather’s brother, Samuel Friedeberg, ran the Princes Road Synagogue in Liverpool. In 1917, his community debated Herzl’s proposal, many worrying that the foundation of a Jewish state would “prejudicially affect the position of such Jews as are members of the British nation”. The motion was defeated 39 votes to 30. The result was a reflection of how safe many well-to-do Jews had come to feel in England, especially during the reign of Queen Victoria. As the then Chief Rabbi of the British Empire, Hermann Adler, put it in 1898: “Our faith teaches us to seek the welfare of the nations under whose protection we dwell, to take part in their national efforts and to work for their success, and to wait silently for the day when the prophets will be fulfilled.”

Adler’s message to Herzl was that he shouldn’t rock the boat. Yet after the Second World War, Jews could no longer count on being protected by European nations. The “nations under whose protection we dwell” no longer protected them, indeed turned against them with diabolical and murderous consequences. Zionism wasn’t revived as a political reality by Herzl; it was revived by the screams of six million souls murdered in Europe. That was real genocide. A Jewish homeland could no longer remain a yearning.

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Ed Miliband’s Jewish agony

By Howard Jacobson

The state of Israel was founded on 14 May 1948, under the auspices of the United Nations. But Israelis were left fighting for their lives the very next day, for that was when the armies of neighboring Arab nations invaded. And the Israelis have been fighting for their lives ever since, against the Palestine Liberation Organization, against Hamas, and now against a ridiculous cohort of student politicians who like to cosplay as radicals by draping themselves in Palestinian colors and shouting empty words about colonialism — none of which will help the Palestinians.

What might help the Palestinians is a two-state solution, the land divided fairly between Palestinians and Israelis, giving both the right to self-determination. And, to be clear, to believe in a two-state solution is also to be a Zionist, because it is also to allow the Jews a safe space in their ancestral homeland. Zionism isn’t a movement owned by Jewish settlers who want to push Arabs off their land and pull up their olive trees. It also represents the desire of Jews not to be murdered — by Cossacks, by Nazis, by Hamas. A one-state solution would expose them to precisely the kind of murderous reality from which they have long been seeking to escape. If you think I’m being dramatic, recall what happened on 7 October 2023.

I am flying back to Israel later this month with my family so that my wife can add her vote to those seeking to get rid of the wretched Benjamin Netanyahu.She still cares deeply for her home, because human beings are creatures of place, called to care for our places, be it Judah or Jarrow. When Chaim Weizmann was asked by a British politician why the Jewish people insisted on safety in Palestine, rather than someone more convenient, he replied: “That is like asking you why you drove 20 miles to visit your mother last Sunday when there are so many old ladies living in your street.” Place matters. In the Hebrew scriptures, we are creatures of place, called to love and care for our little plot of land, just as Wendell Berry loved and cared for his little bit of Kentucky. This is the real philosophy the Greens should be defending, the fact that we are creatures of the earth. But this means nothing to our current generation of Greens, who are now a dark perversion of what that party was born to defend: our rootedness; our love of place. 

On 10 November 1975, under pressure from heavy KGB propaganda, the United Nations adopted resolution 3379 that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination”. Later that day, the Belfast born Israeli Ambassador, Chaim Herzog, stood up and contemptuously ripped the resolution in half. “For us, the Jewish people, this resolution based on hatred, falsehood and arrogance, is devoid of any moral or legal value. For us, the Jewish people, this is no more than a piece of paper and we shall treat it as such.” Sixteen years later, the resolution was revoked.

Today, the accusation Herzog tore apart has returned, dressed in the language of a new generation of radicals. So stuff the Greens, their vacant student posturing, and their cosplaying as Hamas terrorists from the safety of Brighton. Because Zionism is not racism: at its heart is something far older even than the state of Israel. And because today that desire to be safe from the dangerous racism of others has become urgent once again — including, now, from the Greens themselves.

Miliband’s father was a distinguished Marxist intellectual at a time when being of the Left didn’t mean you had to deny Israel’s right to exist. And though Ed called himself a bridge between Corbyn and New Labour, the bridge was not a particularly sturdy one. Still and all, he seemed to be at the center of a powerful personal storm when he stood shaking at the dispatch box last week and helped put clear blue water between Andy Burnham and Keir Starmer in the matter of Israel. If Burnham looked even more uncomfortable than Miliband, that was because he had more to be uncomfortable about. It was he who kicked off his premiership with the promise to turn the clock back on Starmer’s caution in the immediate aftermath of the October 7 massacre, when the then prime minister refused to bow to the Politburo anti-Zionism of his backbenchers and held fire condemning Netanyahu.

Yes, bugger Netanyahu. But it was a moral imperative, initially at least, to go after Hamas who had made it public that they couldn’t wait to rape and massacre again. Not an imperative, though, to Burnham, who I don’t recall mentioning his misgivings at the time but who now must win back the traditional Labour haters of Israel, who deserted to Zack Polanski, or just deserted full stop. Well, politics is a filthy business, and it might have been that very thought that troubled Miliband, causing his eyes to dilate blackly and the dark antagonistic clouds of Marxist principle and Jewish agony to pass across his face, as though presaging thunder.

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Philip Guston's fight against evil

By Howard Jacobson

“I am a proud Jew,” he said. Part confession. Part warning. Was it also part apology for what was to come? I don’t mind admitting that I shuddered. I am a proud Jew, but….

So how bad was it? Well, the roof hasn’t fallen in on us. We haven’t been thrown out of the country as we were in 1290. And the target was shrewdly selected. The settlers. Who loves the settlers? There is some argument as to how much of what we see on the forever discredited BBC News tells the whole picture, how many of the settlers on the West Bank are running riot, how much of what they do is encouraged by the government. But that they are there at all is hard to take. A number of the early Zionists had wanted to see the back of religious zealotry. Had I been an early Zionist I’d have agreed with them.

I visited the West Bank 30 years ago or more, while writing and subsequently filming Roots Shmoots, a journey into Jewishness and, I suppose, myself. I didn’t find any of myself on the West Bank. And while I don’t, as a rule, make the mistake of being ashamed of what Jews who are not like me do anywhere, the words, action and deportment of the West Bank Jews I met turned my stomach. A seemingly intelligent American woman talked to me at the door to the settlement she managed. After 10 minutes of rational conversation, she threw wide her arms and said God gave her all I saw before me. I told her we had a problem in that case as He’d also given it to me. I further witnessed a fringed, orthodox Jewish teenager mocking an elderly Palestinian woman and that was enough. I saw plenty more that was ugly. But sometimes one small act can tell you more than a thousand big ones. Get the hell out of here, I thought. Not me, him.

So all right, maybe sanctioning them is a good idea. But then again, maybe it isn’t. Too many fanatics — for the deranged can be found on both sides of any argument — had been calling for sanctions. You are a proud Jew, remember, Mr Miliband. Do you want to number yourself among the ignorant and the bigoted who chant outside Marks and Spencer and hiss at people who buy the wrong figs? Do you want to give them even a sniff of hope that they have not chanted in vain?

You don’t need me to tell you, Mr Miliband, son of a Marxist intellectual, that revolutions and other movements of great change don’t grow out of despair. The spark is hope. Cast your mind back to that October 7 Massacre, which your boss won’t allow himself to be too voluble about in case it cedes another robotic voter to Zack, and recall the way it stirred the settler-colonialist professors on the campuses of Oxford and Harvard to rise up and call for more of the same, more blood, more hostages, more rape, more death. Hamas are pleased with you. “So far so good,” they say. “Good start.” Did you answer them, Mr Miliband? Did you ring Corbyn to get advice on how to talk to terrorists? Did you say thank you, comrades, while reminding them you’re a proud Jew and that’s all they’re getting. Or is there more in the pipeline? Is Burnham, too, hoping you won’t stop there? As I write, a Labour MP is recommending military action against Israel, which could be stretching our armed forces if we’re also having to go protect the Falklands again. But that’s what hope does. It makes men greedy and unrealistic. Even the Bishop of York is calling for a few more targeted sanctions while you’re on the job, at the same time as warning, as you would expect of a senior Churchman of York — where long ago there was another famous massacre of Jews — against the perils of antisemitism.

Antisemitism! Tut, tut, none of us want that. But will telling it we don’t want it be enough to put it back in its box. You dropped a few of the catchwords favored by the river-to-the-sea marchers in your troubled address. Demo-speak. “The occupation”, without explanation. “Ethnic cleansing” which, though there are some in Netanyahu’s ultra-Right coalition who admit they think along those lines, suggests a more systematic program of removal and destruction than we can be sure exists. You are on the foothills of the biggest of all the lies currently doing the rounds, Foreign Secretary and, if you’re not careful, you’ll soon be putting the definite article before “genocide”. THE genocide. I think I see the phrase beginning to form on Andy Burnham’s lips, though he pointedly resisted it when he was merely Mayor of Manchester and had only tram-drivers to answer to.

There is no point, Mr Miliband, offering to be confident that people with a Jew-grudge will listen sympathetically to the nice distinctions you are making between the West Bank and Israel and Israel and the Jews and the Jews and Israel, if you are not yourself fastidious in the language you employ. You rose and addressed a tinder box of a nation. Maybe you knew it. Maybe that was why your eyes turned black as though swimming in pitch. I am a proud Jew. But what might I just have put a match to?

Here, with nothing but good will, Mr Foreign Secretary, is a suggestion for you. Worldly wisdom is as important a virtue in a politician as a good heart. So is knowledge of the hearts of others. It’s a fine thing to be a proud Jew. But what we need even more than that right now is an intelligent Jew.

Howard Jacobson’s latest novel is Howl (Jonathan Cape)

Josh (not his real name), a New York public-school teacher, told UnHerd about an assault that happened to him. “I usually hide [the skullcap] under a cap, but my hair was wet,” he said. Thus he was walking down the stairs of a subway stop in Brooklyn, daring to be a visibly practicing Jew, when someone pushed him from behind; the resulting fall left him with a head fracture and gash requiring 18 stitches.

Later, Josh found out that he was hardly alone. Locals said there had been an estimated 30 such attacks in recent weeks. The more recognizable Hasidic Jews, he says, no longer take the subway. “This was one of the guys who keep doing this,” he noted, “but the police now do nothing.” 

Or take the case of 22-year-old Dawood Faisal, who was charged in late July with manslaughter when he allegedly lost control of his car and ran over the Jewish journalist Cara Trager, resulting in her death. Faisal has now also been charged with vandalizing a Jewish-owned bagel shop in Queens. “The fact that this guy did a hate crime … days before means that he could have been apprehended before my mom was killed,” Trager’s daughter told the Forward. 

The deteriorating situation for New York City’s Jews is no accident. It follows years of antisemitic agitation on college campuses and even in high schools, and then the election of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has identified himself, first and foremost, with militant anti-Zionism. By threatening Gotham’s multi-ethnic middle class, and in particular its large Jewish component, this type of violence endangers not just the city’s economy but the very essence of what has made the Big Apple so great for so long.

Assaults at subway stations, particularly in heavily Jewish enclaves in Brooklyn, happen regularly. Overall, despite a drop in violent crime and homicides, hate crimes are up almost 10% since Mamdani took office, with the vast majority directed at Jews. 

That all this is happening in New York, the longtime capital of American Jewry, is shocking to a third-generation, Jewish former New Yorker — me. These attacks are directed at almost every aspect of Jewish life. 

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Can Los Angeles be saved?

By Joel Kotkin

Throw feces at a synagogue here, trash a kosher market there, ransack a bagel shop, ban a Jewish lawmaker from a coffee shop, bar Israeli products from the local food co-op, or, worse, perform a stabbing on a city street in broad daylight. You can even turn Columbia from a heavily Jewish school with thousands of Hebraic alumni and donors to the epicenter of anti-Israel activism and an antisemitic hotbed. 

This is the new Gotham, very different from the old one. The New York I grew up in was home to some 2 million Jews; today, the number is closer to half that many. And given the rising number of antisemitic incidents in the city and the current administration’s lack of concern, it is likely many more will leave.

In his brilliant mayoral campaign, Mamdani won roughly a third of the Jewish vote, although he did poorly among both older people and native New Yorkers — you know, the kind to whom you can’t sell the Brooklyn Bridge. As opposed to the campaign, when he sought, with the help of friendly mainstream media, to tone down his anti-Israel fanaticism, in office Mamdani has been far more explicitly hateful towards Israel, and disdainful of the vast majority of Jews who support it. 

The mayoral hostility comes in many flavors. It includes refusing to restrict demonstrations around temples, refusing to attend the Israel Day parade, bloviating about arresting Benjamin Netanyahu for “war crimes,” and supporting the candidacy of a Brooklyn democratic district leader who cites such sources as Henry Ford’s The International Jew as a factual guide.

One particular illustration of Mamdani’s disdain for Jews was his appointment of an 18-member judicial advisory commission without a single Jewish member. This is amazing, given that close to half of Gotham’s lawyers are Jews. Judaism is a legalistic religion, whose parsing of the Torah and Talmud has long been excellent training for lawyers and judges.

To be sure, Mamdani is a very effective politician. Already, he has successfully backed three Democratic Socialists of America candidates for Congress and made inroads on the city bureaucracy, turning key segments into jobs programs for his cadres. He has consolidated his power at the expense of the previous, long heavily Jewish, establishment, which stupidly backed Dracula, also known as Andrew Cuomo, as its hope to beat him. 

Now that establishment, Jews and gentiles both, are mostly on the outside looking in, while the mayor hides his hateful politics behind a seemingly permanent benign smile. His election was first and foremost driven by young, college-educated Leftists struggling with mediocre jobs in an impossibly expensive city. In addition to this segment, Mamdani also won the powerful backing of mostly recently arrived Muslims, whose numbers are rapidly equaling those of the Jews.

The surge in hate crimes will likely deepen Jewish hostility to Mamdani, but if there’s any hope for change, it will be resistance to his economic agenda that unsettles his coalition. His assault on small property owners certainly hits many affluent Jews; bashing “greedy Jewish landlords” is a popular meme for Mamdani supporters such as activist Thomas Lopez-Pierre, who compares them to enablers of the Nazis — yes, Jews.

But not all landlords are wealthy, nor are they primarily Jewish. Hasidic and Orthodox communities tend to invest in real estate, but so too do many middle-class New Yorkers. Mamdani’s assault on property owners is also receiving opposition in heavily African-American and Asian areas like Queens. People don’t much appreciate Mamdani’s designated tenant advocate, Cea Weaver, who calls property ownership an instrument of  “white supremacy.”  

This population, whom Marxists might label as “petit bourgeois,” will be increasingly opposed to Mamdani’s socialist economics, unlike the privileged “Lulu Lenins” who are more insulated from it. He is clearly alienating working- and middle-class New Yorkers such as bodega owners, many of whom are minorities, who will soon be competing against city-owned grocery stores. Mamdani’s socialist Mini-Mes will keep shopping at Whole Foods, but for the bodega owners, subsidized city stores will be a matter of business life or death. 

The great irony here is that Mamdani’s South Asian base is also highly entrepreneurial and owns small businesses, including bodegas. Indeed, in capitalistic New York, there should be harmony between Jews and Muslims, both enterprising, family-oriented peoples. American Muslims, notes the Manhattan Institute’s Reihan Salam, may not start as anti-American, but their children’s exposure to academic culture produces young, affluent, educated Leftist cosmopolitans like Hasan Piker and of course Mamdani himself.

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Ultimately, only when the ethnic areas begin feeling the pain from Mamdani’s policies can the situation change. The city’s future is now a race between how quickly the economics unravel and how rapidly its mayor chases out the Jews and other kulaks. We have seen such things before, during the Michael Curley era in midcentury Boston or Coleman Young’s disastrous turn as mayor in 1970s Detroit. 

Such divisive politics “work” on one level: a city with fewer middle-income people will be a clear field for the political apparatus, the NGO-industrial complex, and the dependent poor. But this is a tragedy: the Big Apple is not Detroit or Boston, but a great world city that has ambition in its DNA. Even the Lulu Lenins may get tired of diminishing opportunity — growth is hardly a prime DSA objective — as well as an infarcted infrastructure, a tent-city crisis, and high property crime. Perhaps a few years off campus will inject the mayor’s base with a dose of reality.

But if the Jewish population and other elements of the middle class leave, it could foreshadow a  future New York reduced to a playground for the rich and their pampered offspring, government workers, and welfare recipients. Stopping hate crimes — not seeming to wink and nod at it — is one way to keep people like our teachers from looking for the exits.

“You feel like no one will protect us,” Josh told me. “Is it getting worse? Are you kidding me? We used to see the police but now the subways are a no man’s land. People are now looking at Long Island, New Jersey — or Texas, Arizona, or Florida. There’s less reason to stay.”

“I don’t want to bring my kids up here,” he added. “It’s very scary.”  

Also this week, the British government appeared to hold a man responsible for things he did when in the grip of mental illness. Kanye West has been banned from entering the UK in order to perform at a festival. In the recent past, he has written songs called “Heil Hitler” and “Gas Chambers”; been on several offensive social media benders; made various conspiratorial statements during interviews; sold swastika T-shirts. Earlier this year he offered a fulsome apology in the Wall Street Journal, saying that his behavior was the result of uncontrolled bipolar disorder, but it has made no difference. According to the Prime Minister, “Kanye West should never have been invited to headline Wireless… We will always take the action necessary to protect the public and uphold our values.”

There is no doubt that West has a serious illness. In the final episode of the 2022 Netflix documentary about him, he is seen raving incoherently to the alarm of his friends. At other times his speech is slurred and his face and body heavy with medication. He cuts a mournful figure, even before deterioration is visible onscreen; sensitive and child-like, coping with the consequences of a serious car crash, devastated by the death of his mother, his ego buffeted by simultaneous currents of adulation and demonization from the world. It would be a lot for a sane person to deal with, and West is not always sane.

The tracks “Heil Hitler” and “Gas Chambers” were both produced in the first half of 2025 during what seems to have been an extended manic episode. During this period West got into a creative folie à deux with an obscure rapper called Dave Blunts, working together to produce a now-deleted album called Cuck. Before working with West, the 23-year-old Blunts was mostly known for being morbidly obese and in premature heart failure, having gone viral for rapping on stage with an oxygen tank. West would apparently talk to his new friend on the phone for hours, then instruct him to write lyrics based on their conversations at a rate of three songs a day.

Perhaps needless to say, the results of this chaotic process were not good. Aside from all the Nazi lyrics (“Reading Mein Kampf, two chapters ’fore I go to sleep”) there were also a lot of passing references to laughing gas; a confession by Kanye of an incestuous sexual relationship with a male cousin; and a revenge song comparing his ex-wife to the disgraced pedophile Jared Fogle. The album cover had KKK imagery on it. The whole thing has since been expunged from the internet, though the track formerly known as “Gas Chambers” remains in circulation, indiscernibly retitled as “All The Love”.

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There has been some discussion about whether West should be “forgiven” for this behavior. It may seem like annoying pedantry — particularly if you have ever been at the sharp end of a destructive mental illness — but if it is genuinely the case that the mania was in charge during the periods in question, strictly speaking there is nothing to forgive. Actions emanating from insanity can only be excused, not forgiven. You excuse pets, young children, and people in the grip of madness for what they could not help doing. You forgive everyone else — or not — for actions that were within their control.

The ban on West seems appropriate, but not as a reflection of personal culpability. The official rationale for it is that his presence is “not conducive to the public good”. And indeed, it probably wouldn’t be particularly beneficial to the public good to have an extremely charismatic famous person making wildly antisemitic statements in front of adoring Finsbury Park crowds in a time when community tensions are high in North London, and hate incidents are on the increase. But this has nothing to do with whether West should be forgiven for the things he has said, or alternatively blamed and punished. The ban has a different logic: that of the risk manager, dealing with a potentially dangerous dog, or an unexploded bomb.

Obviously, people are not dogs or bombs, no matter what their mental states; and describing a loss of agency like this can sound jarringly demeaning, even if accurate. The assumption of deliberate decision-making and self-control is crucial to many historical constructions of personhood. Viewed in retrospect, periods of dislocation can feel deeply humiliating, partly for that reason. As psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison, herself bipolar, writes in her classic memoir An Unquiet Mind about the time when stability returns: “there are only others’ recollections of your behavior—your bizarre, frenetic, aimless behaviors—for mania has at least some grace in partially obliterating memories. … Who is being too polite to say what? Who knows what? What did I do? Why? And most hauntingly, when will it happen again?”. Or as West described it in the apology he paid to publish in a newspaper: “the disconnected moments … lead to poor judgment and reckless behavior that oftentimes feels like an out-of-body experience.”

Perhaps partly because of a background worry about dehumanization, it is increasingly common to suggest that even severely dislocated episodes like these are compatible with moral responsibility. There are ethicists who argue that a person can be criminally responsible, even when subject to hallucinations. And there are  neuroscientists who want to emphasize the similarity of the “normal” case to that of the mentally ill. As scientists get better at mapping the brain, they say, it will become clearer that all of our behavior, whether functional or dysfunctional, is completely determined by prior neurological, chemical, and environmental events. In that case, the fiction of a responsible self will become obsolete, and it will be obvious that no-one is accountable for any of their actions, mad or sane.

This last one seems to me a particularly daft line of argument. Moral responsibility is primarily a social notion, not a claim about immunity to causal chains. To grant responsibility to someone for their actions is to say that — as philosopher Bernard Williams put it — they are able to belong to “a set of persons, not necessarily known … or specially important to one another, living under a common system of justice”. At a minimum, living communally like this requires being able to run through coherent chains of reasoning; to remember what you just did; to make plans and simple predictions; to show reasonable impulse control; to avoid violence to self or others; and, of course, to recognize reality as it is without delusions. If you cannot do these basic things — not just in the sense that you are unwilling to, but that you are literally unable — your ability to meet local moral standards will be radically compromised. You will fall out of the community of responsible agents altogether until stability can be regained.

To count as responsible in this sense, you also have to know what local moral standards are. Such knowledge is implicit in the M’Naghten rule defining the criminal defense of insanity: either the defendant didn’t know what he was doing, “or if he did know it… he did not know he was doing what was wrong”. When you are manic, you can lose track of the social cues which otherwise would alert you to your own transgression. You may think you are being fabulously witty, sensuous, clever, and provocative, and that everyone else can see this. All the while your family and friends are staring at you, appalled.

So there remains an important distinction to be made, between the personal responsibility of well people and mentally ill people; one, moreover, that is crucial for looking after the latter properly, since it recognizes their limits and associated risks. Equally, though, it seems that in smaller ways, ordinary life is becoming more like mentally ill life — though the vibe is more depressive than manic. As we become reliant on technology to do the thinking for us, individual powers of reasoning and memory diminish. Whole days can be lost staring at screens. Our minds feel like passive receivers of whatever content is being beamed into them, and we are growing less able to distinguish true from false. When we do encounter reality, it can feel like a hallucination.

And there’s also the fact that which rules we are supposed to be following, exactly, is increasingly obscure. Ethical codes are often matters of contentious dispute; many laws are only lightly policed; from Trump down, transgressive edgelords seem to be getting away with highly antisocial acts. Shame seems to be a vanishing emotion, and shifting blame onto others common. In order to know when, exactly, moral responsibility is lacking, we need clear cases of people actually owning it. And yet it is all too easy to pretend that nobody really does.

Meanwhile, instead of nurturing the capacities that make for socially responsible citizens, tech elites now valorize something called being “high agency” — a debased version of responsibility which seems to amount to no more than a willingness to move fast and break things. You should not be merely copying other people, apparently; you should be plowing your own furrow, being insouciantly disagreeable, and doing all the new things all of the time. Take risks, gleefully cause some chaos, and don’t go worrying about what anyone else thinks. In other words, you should be just like Kanye during a manic phase — except that unlike him, you won’t have any excuse.

A war is being waged against the Jewish diaspora. It is being waged with bombs, shootings, harassment and intimidation. The attacks, and the fear of them, are a small side plot in a great Middle Eastern War. Those two men charged in London had a plan to attack a sister synagogue I sporadically attend. I feel this myself, as I push my son’s pram past the policemen at the temple gate. Yet more than fear, I feel disappointment. For if ever me and my son, or any of us who pray here, were butchered by a gunman shouting “Free Palestine”, many Western activists would equivocate, contextualize, or even say it served us right. Never mind that us diaspora Jews have no single agreed view on Gaza, the West Bank, or Benjamin Netanyahu, let alone Iran.

I am reflective of this myself. In a small synagogue, I am, to the best of my knowledge, the only person who’s had any connection to British government policymaking regarding the wars in the Middle East. As a special adviser to David Lammy when he was foreign secretary, I advised him to sanction Israeli ministers, supported his decision to recognize Palestine as a state, and was involved in a futile attempt to persuade Iran and America to make a deal.

But I am under no illusions: if my family had happened to pray at the Manchester’s Heaton Park synagogue, where Jihad al-Shamie killed two worshippers and injured three others on our holiest day of the year, and if I had been among the fallen, I would have been “contextualized” by people who call themselves anti-Zionist. The obvious distinction — that criticism of Israel’s occupation or military conduct is legitimate, indeed necessary, but holding all Jews worldwide accountable for Israel’s actions is antisemitic and targeting them nothing less than murderous — is clearly breaking down.

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The shattering of the Jewish world

By Ben Judah

A line had been crossed where prominent, highly influential X accounts were unable to say, unequivocally, that targeting Jewish children in provincial Michigan was simply terrorism and utterly reprehensible.

The internet is now a front in this war on the diaspora. It has been since October 7. Israel has wrought destruction in Gaza, and the images are truly horrific. There is no denying that, and anyone who does so is wrong. But around them, a viral campaign has arisen, one which has moved well beyond criticism of the IDF. It has moved beyond a push for sanctions, beyond the desire for a two- or even one-state solution for peace. It has moved into a kind of annihilationist anti-Zionism that wishes to hurt Israel’s supporters wherever it can find them. And the place where this is most easily done is in the diaspora.

If you have spent any time on social media in the last two-and-a-half years you know this. You know about the explosive viral fame of the Hitler fan Nick Fuentes. Such is Fuentes’ popularity that the arch-conservative Rod Dreher has warned that at least a third of Republicans under 30 in DC are in thrall to him. Then there are the Talmud blood libels of Candace Owens, with an audience of 24 million across platforms, or Tucker Carlson, whose influence on the Republican base is such that Vice President Vance cannot bring himself to disavow him, despite the conspiracy theories he pushes out about Jewish groups to his equally huge audience.

You will have noticed, if you live online, the now ubiquitous semi-ironic Nazi-like language, from “The Goyim know” to “Goy-slop”, going mainstream. The nudge-nudge, wink-wink use of the term “the Epstein Class” by congressmen. Or the sudden omnipresence of the idea that America is a “colony of Israel”, riffs on which are now being pushed from the likes of Nassim Nicholas Taleb to Slavoj Žižek into their fandoms. Now that antisemitism goes viral with ease, you can spend your day scrolling through, non-stop denigration of Jewish history, from posts calling Hebrew a “fake language” to the claim that, according to spurious DNA evidence, Ashkenazim are “fake Jews.”

This kind of antisemitism has slipped into and radicalized anti-Israel protest and political movements across the West, in an age where the membrane between online hatred and real world violence is permeable. The culture war around the pickets outside Gail’s is reflective of something bigger. Instead of picketing its owners, Bain Capital, or any major private equity firm invested in the Israeli arms industry — which would hardly be unreasonable — anti-Zionist protestors have chosen to picket a bakery known to have an Israeli founder and stock Jewish-style challah bread.

Many in this movement are no longer pursuing accountability and action against the state of Israel — a ceasefire, sanctions, the ICC — all of which are all perfectly legitimate to push for. Instead, they are prosecuting a war on association, where any link, any sympathy, any connection to Israel, be it a founder or a baked good, is presented as immoral, even demonic. As Susan Abulhawa, a leading anti-Zionist, whose language proved too much even for Zohran Mamdani, put it on X: “I don’t give a shit if people collapse the distinction between Zionists and Jews.”

By effectively demanding total disavowal of the world’s only Jewish state, this campaign has ceased to merely be a rally for a free Palestine. Rather, it has become an offensive against the diaspora, from the high street bakery to the House of Lords. This poisoned discourse reached its nadir on 12 March, when a gunman arrived at a synagogue in West Bloomfield, Michigan, with the intention of massacring the 130 children there and at the school next door. But, I heard, the synagogue had the word “Israel” in its name. But the Jewish communal leadership had always supported Israel. But the Lebanese attacker — in fact known to be connected to Hezbollah — had lost family to Israeli bombs.

The Middle East war, of course, will end. Wars always do. The algorithm will move onto other things. And I do expect, when that happens, the intensity of the proxy diaspora war to slacken too. But I fear that now the seal has been broken. The effusion of Jew-hatred has reversed decades’ worth of declining antisemitism, as memories of the Holocaust fade, with large numbers of young Brits and Americans now dabbling in the taboo-busting “JQ.” This is online slang for asking the “Jewish Question” and exploring its florid antisemitic answers.

Their generation, then, is shaping up to be antisemitic. Over 25% of young Americans now hold unfavorable views of Jews; among older Americans, it’s just 5%. And in the UK, a fifth of students don’t want to houseshare with Jews.

There is evidence to suggest that the intensity of this spike, especially in the case of outright Holocaust deniers like Fuentes, may be driven by foreign powers using bot farms to rip into American cohesion. The war against the Diaspora is a tool of hostile actors in their wars on the West. The king of the “Groypers”, as his fans are known, has enjoyed a dramatically higher rate of early retweets of his X posts — this being the key to viral takeoff — than even Elon Musk. Yet, according to a 2025 report, 90% of the accounts boosting Fuentes’s early retweeters were fully anonymous, with roughly half of his retweeters coming from Pakistan, Nigeria, Malaysia and Indonesia. The tide may well, when the Democrats return, subside. But the ubiquity of online antisemitism will not.

There are the obvious reasons why. The wars in the Middle East will go on. The diaspora desperately needs them to stop but is powerless to stop them. They are neither Israeli citizens, nor are they listened to — with the exception of a few individuals. The bitter truth is that communities like mine are scorned by Netanyahu, who sees us as weaklings that he can ignore, destined to assimilate away. While at the same time, our lives will always be too connected to Israeli society, be it through family and spiritual ties, to ever be seen as not guilty in a radicalized anti-Zionist movement’s eyes.

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History has caught up with British Jews

By Tanya Gold

That won’t change, but the places where the Jewish diaspora lives have already done so. Cities like New York, London and Paris now have more Muslims, more Hispanics, fewer old men like Joe Biden with a war-era fondness for Jews. In both Europe and the United States, these growing minorities are more antisemitic. They are also younger, more likely to get their news online and watch foreign TV, be it Televisa or Al Jazeera. This is the mechanism by which imported prejudice gets stirred by the footage these wars export.

But a subtler change has taken place too. Every time our civilization evolves, antisemitism, like a mutating virus, changes with it: from a religious hatred in a world of faith to an ethnic hatred in a world of nation states. Each era seems to decide anew what it cannot abide about the Jews and what respect it will accord them. And every rupture in how we communicate, from the coming of the printing press to the dawn of the radio, seems to see society’s antibodies to this virus weaken.

Suspect for being too rootless and transnational in the twentieth century; now Jews are suspect for being too rooted and tribal in the twenty-first. The truth is that we no longer really live in what you could call Western civilization: an order based around historic nations, a culture based around print, a way of life still furrowed by the old faith, with a clearly defined attitude towards Jews.

Its successor is a globalized internet civilization that plays out in viral clips and has become unmoored from old certainties. This is a world where X mega-influencers like Iain Miles Cheong and Sneako are as much players as the Archbishop of Canterbury. Everything is being relitigated. This new civilization, since its litigation is occurring via ephemeral, emotive social media posts rather than by works of sustained thought, has an oral culture rather than a literary culture. By its nature, this culture rewards hatred and anger. Which, I fear as I push my pram, will not prove kind to the Jews.

Of course, the trial will reveal further details about Pittman and the attack on the Beth Israel Congregation. For now, though, we may sketch out the following picture. The teenager’s alleged actions seem to have been premeditated: members of his gym claim to have heard him say that he wanted to set fire to a synagogue. It appears, moreover, to have been the culmination of the suspect’s increasingly erratic and threatening behavior: his mother has told the FBI that she had recently considered locking the bedroom door during the night. It should go without saying, too, that the attack was antisemitic in nature: Pittman has apparently admitted that he went after the synagogue for its “Jewish ties”.

Crucially, there is good reason to suspect a religious motive. Pittman is said to have referred to his target as “the synagogue of Satan”, a staple of Christian anti-Judaism going all the way back to the 4th-century homilies of John Chrysostom. On social media, he describes himself as a “follower of Christ”; when read out his rights he said, “Jesus Christ is Lord”. It would not be the first time, as it happens, for this synagogue to have been attacked in an act of terror by extremists of the Christian Right: in 1967, it was bombed by the Ku Klux Klan.

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The Mystery of Britain’s Orthobros

By Cosmo Adair

There is a powerful tendency to regard modern, racial antisemitism as a phenomenon fundamentally distinct from an earlier, religious anti-Judaism. This is seen most clearly in discussions of Nazism and the Holocaust. “Nazism owes nothing to any part of the Western tradition,” Hannah Arendt asserted: Auschwitz marked a total break from the course of Europe’s Christian civilization. In 2000, more than 220 Jewish intellectuals and rabbis signed a document called Dabru Emet, “Speak the Truth”, affirming that “Nazism was not a Christian phenomenon”. All this complemented a certain view of Nazism, making it the very antithesis to Christianity, and instead either atheistic to its core, like Soviet Communism, or else pagan and esoteric — perhaps even amounting to a religion in its own right.

The notion that the Nazis had nothing in common with the fanatical, Christian Jew-haters of earlier centuries is no longer tenable. There was no straightforward transition from “religious” to “racial” thinking: in fact anti-Judaism had already long had an important “racial” component. Jews were identified as a group in the Middle Ages not only on the grounds of their rejection of Christianity, but also by their immutable physical characteristics. A Jewish handbook, Sefer Nizzahon Yashan, written in Germany in the early 14th century, tells us how Christians would often taunt their Jewish neighbors by asking, “Why are most Gentiles fair-skinned and handsome while most Jews are dark and ugly?” Around the same time, Jews were already being depicted with hooked noses.

Moreover, modern racial antisemitism, epitomized by National Socialism, was more fundamentally religious — more Christian — than has often been supposed. An influential book by Richard Steigmann-Gall, The Holy Reich, argued more than 20 years ago that there was a “religious dimension to Nazi antisemitism, which coexisted with and in some ways even informed the racist dimension”. Much of Nazi Christianity was built atop the fancy that Jesus had really been an Aryan. “I can imagine Christ as nothing other than blond and with blue eyes,” said Hitler in 1921; “the devil, however, only with a Jewish grimace.” Seeking to keep the SS from fracturing along religious lines, even the pagan Heinrich Himmler forbade “any attacks against Christ”, including the attack, “without doubt historically false”, that Christ had been a Jew. Some Christian Nazis hoped to reform their religion by jettisoning the Old Testament from the Biblical canon. But still there were plenty of others who were perfectly conventional and orthodox in their beliefs.

In Michael: A German Destiny in Diary Form, Joseph Goebbels’s strange semi-autobiographical novel, the protagonist insists that “Christ is the genius of love, [and] as such the most diametrical opposite of Judaism, which is the incarnation of hate”. The Nazi struggle, thought Goebbels, was one “between Christ and Marx”, to be waged “until victory or the bitter end”. Hans Schemm, the head of the National Socialist Teachers’ League, put it more succinctly when he declared that “Our religion is Christ, our politics Fatherland”. The law of race did not need to contradict the revealed law of Christianity; race, after all, could be construed as an integral part of God’s Creation. “We, the racists, are the only ones who render to Christ the homage that is his due,” wrote the Nazi lawyer Herbert Meyer. Whatever his private beliefs, Hitler too presented himself as having been charged with a religious mission. As he wrote in Mein Kampf: “I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.”

Those who emphasize the distance of Christianity from the theory and practice of Nazism are often, it would seem, committing a No True Scotsman fallacy: no true Christian would be an antisemite, because Christianity is really a religion of meekness, self-sacrifice, and neighbor-love; and no true Christian would be a Nazi, because no true Nazi would ever wish to be a Christian.

Christianity also played a part in the development of modern antisemitism closer to home. The British Union of Fascists had several churchmen in its ranks. George Henry Dymock, vicar of St Bede’s in Bristol, inveighed against the Jews in 1935 for engaging in “vile usury”. The Reverend M. Yate Allen, influenced perhaps by the religious declarations of Hitler’s top brass, thought that Nazi Germany was “truly on the side of Christ”. The newspaper British Fascism came up with a pithy formula in 1930: “There can be no true Fascism that is not Christian, for Fascism is military Christianity.” An earlier group produced a “Children’s Fascist Creed” in 1925, whose opening is unmistakably Nicene: “I am a Fascist. I believe in God, the Father Almighty, and in Jesus Christ His only Son Our Lord, and in the Holy Spirit…”

Under the leadership of John Tyndall — and under the spell of postwar neo-Nazi mythmaking — the BNP was broadly anti-Christian. When Nick Griffin set out to “modernize” the party, he therefore had to Christianize it. He succeeded. In 2008, the party underscored the point that “Christianity is so large a part of our identity that to give it up would mean giving up that identity”. In the European elections of 2009, in which the BNP won two seats, the party (much to the dismay of the established church) ran an expressly Christian campaign. A poster cites John 15:20: “If they have persecuted me they will also persecute you.” “What would Jesus do?,” it goes on to ask. The answer: “Vote BNP.”

Shortly before the attack in Mississippi, an account belonging to Pittman posted the “happy merchant” antisemitic meme. This account also promotes a website called “One Purpose”, which advocates “scripture-backed fitness” and “biblical nutrition”. He would seem therefore to belong to a subculture familiar to any young man who has spent time on the online Right — one which mixes edgy internet humor and aspirational self-improvement with an ultra-reactionary, identitarian version of Christianity. The antisemitism draws from both these sources. Sometimes, these cohorts are written off as “nihilistic”, their religion as mere “LARP”; but here, again, the No True Scotsman rears its head. “Christ is King”, sounds the battle-cry of the Groypers. There is no reason whatsoever to believe that the “trad” Catholicism of Nick Fuentes and his ilk is anything other than sincerely felt. Indeed, it underpins everything they say and do. It is central to their entire narrative about the decadence of modern liberal, secular society — which, predictably, is imagined to have been engineered by the “perfidious Jews”.

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Jews don't feel safe anywhere

By Samuel Rubinstein

For all this, we ought not to miss the wood for the trees. It remains obvious that the major threat to Jewish life in the West comes not from Christian, but rather Islamic, religious extremism. The attacks in Manchester and Sydney amply demonstrate as much. Insofar as the blood libel — an English invention — is alive and well in modern Britain, it has principally sustained itself as a more recent import. Muslim antisemites, as Christopher Hitchens once put it, often “have to borrow — when they want to be anti-Jewish — the rubbish of medieval Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox antisemitism”; though Hitchens was quick to add that they equally possess a vigorous antisemitic tradition all their own. Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ is probably the 21st century’s most concerted effort to revive the kind of Catholic antisemitism or anti-Judaism that was de rigueur prior to Vatican II and Nostra aetate. Not for nothing did it prove a smash hit across much of the Arab world.

The institutions of mainstream Christianity deserve credit for opposing antisemitism on theological and moral grounds. Fuentes might hold Jews collectively responsible for the death of Christ, and advance an extreme form of supersessionism, dictating that the New Testament replaced, rather than fulfilled, the Old. But when he does so, his fellow Roman Catholics can appeal to the contrary pronouncements of another Chicago native, Pope Leo XIV.

Indeed, Christianity has always possessed strong tools for opposing antisemitism. In the medieval Rhineland, itinerant preachers launched crusades against Jews — yet local bishops also offered sanctuary to the victims. It may well be that Protestant Christianity was not incidental to Nazi ideology; that Jozef Tiso, a Catholic priest, oversaw the Holocaust in Slovakia; and that the ratlines which conveyed several high-ranking Nazis to Latin America ran through the Vatican. But none of this can dampen the Christian courage of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Niemöller, or the Scholl siblings. Their courage might now serve as an encouraging example, much as the attack in Mississippi ought to serve as a warning. There is, so to speak, a homegrown strain of antisemitism which is quickly gaining ground. If we are now witnessing a resurgence of antisemitism in the West, we should not be surprised to sometimes find it clad in its ancient, Christian garb.

That’s the understanding of the mind that Ye (the artist formerly known as Kanye West) referred to in his (latest) apology for what he described as “a four-month-long manic episode of psychotic, paranoid and impulsive behavior that destroyed my life”. (The apology was issued in the form of a full-page advertisement in the Wall Street Journal.) During this period, Ye identified himself wholly and horrifyingly with antisemitism. He posted images of the swastika on social media; he even bought an advertisement during the Super Bowl directing people to a website that sold swastika T-shirts. He released a song called “Heil Hitler” which sampled a speech by the Führer.

But Ye’s history of antisemitism, and other chaotic and disturbing behavior, goes back much longer than those four months, and so do his efforts to explain it. In 2016, he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, but he now believes his issues started long before that, as he wrote in the apology statement: “Twenty-five years ago, I was in a car accident that broke my jaw and caused injury to the right frontal lobe of my brain. At the time, the focus was on the visible damage — the fracture, the swelling, and the immediate physical trauma. The deeper injury, the one inside my skull, went unnoticed.”

The reaction to this was not uniformly welcoming. Some observers have suggested that Ye’s apology is simply an effort to launder his reputation ahead of his upcoming album releases, and regain some of the commercial opportunities he lost during his years of promulgating hate against Jews. Others have said, reasonably enough, that the damage Ye has done is too extreme for forgiveness to be an option. If you’re disinclined to be understanding, Ye pinning his actions on an injury looks a bit like an attempt to evade responsibility.

Nonetheless, what he’s saying has medical warrant. One study found that, in the year after suffering a traumatic brain injury (TBI), 31% of patients developed a psychiatric disorder, and 22% developed a psychiatric disorder they had never experienced before. Neuropathologist Dr. Bennet Omalu told Vanity Fair: “There is no doubt in my mind that the TBI he suffered was a significant and substantial contributory factor to his progressive behavioral and cognitive impairment regarding his impulsivity and lack of restraint on the public domain.” He urged compassion for those with TBI: “They need our empathy and sympathy and not our judgment and dismissal.”

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Don't punish Kanye West

By Hadley Freeman

Standing behind all this is the figure of a man who had the misfortune to become the classic case study of brain injury and personality transformation: Phineas Gage, the American foreman who survived having his head impaled by a metal pole, but was left with scars far beyond the physical.

That Gage lived at all is miraculous. In 1848, while he was working on the railway in Vermont, an explosion forced a tamping iron through Gage’s left cheek and out of the top of his skull, destroying a portion of his brain. The doctor who treated him, John M. Harlow, reported being able to pass “the index finger of the right hand into the opening its entire length”. Harlow kept the risk of infection at bay and, remarkably, Gage recovered his physical health, though he lost the sight in his left eye.

His personality, however, did not come through the experience intact, and this became the most significant part of Gage’s story. “Previous to his injury,” wrote Harlow, “though untrained in the schools, he possessed a well-balanced mind, and was looked upon by those who knew him as a shrewd, smart business man, very energetic and persistent in executing all his plans of operation. In this regard his mind was radically changed, so decidedly that his friends and acquaintances said he was ‘no longer Gage’.”

This “new” Gage was “fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity (which was not previously his custom), manifesting but little deference for his fellows, impatient of restraint or advice when it conflicts with his desires, at times pertinaciously obstinate, yet capricious and vacillating, devising many plans of future operation, which are no sooner arranged than they are abandoned in turn for others appearing more feasible. A child in his intellectual capacity and manifestations, he has the animal passions of a strong man.”

This may sound familiar to followers of Ye’s career. Since his arrival as an artist in the early 2000s, Ye’s astonishing, generation-defining musical talent has been repeatedly waylaid by bizarre acts of self-destruction, which have become increasingly dark, cruel and inexplicable  over time. It was surprising (but politically semi-coherent) when he went off-script during a telethon for victims of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 to declare: “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” It was outrageous but funny when he crashed Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards to say: “I’mma let you finish… but Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time.” This was wild behavior, but wild within the remits of celebrity misbehavior, and it was fun to watch.

But it felt ugly when he escalated the Swift feud in 2016 with the song “Famous”, in which he rapped “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex./ Why? I made that bitch famous.” Adding to the humiliation, the video features a naked body double of Swift. It was, effectively, revenge porn too. There was something vicious, too, about the way he made himself a svengali to his reality star wife Kim Kardashian, posing her in ever fewer clothes. “He’s pimping her,” said a friend of mine at the time. He would do the same thing later, and more disturbingly, to his second wife, Bianca Censori.

When he endorsed Donald Trump in 2018, it was disorienting: how do you go from attacking George Bush Jr over racism, to endorsing the white supremacists’ top pick for president? At Paris fashion week in 2022, he wore a “white lives matter” shirt, alongside his friend (and fellow black Right-winger) Candace Owens. All that, maybe, could be wrestled into a narrative of Ye rejecting identity politics and embracing a role as a provocateur — both things that are not completely outlandish within hip-hop. But when he tweeted in 2022 that he was “going death con 3” on Jewish people, that line of understanding expired.

Something in Ye had fractured, a fracture of personality complete enough that he felt compelled to change his name in 2018. I have spoken to associates of his who feel that the downward spiral began when Ye married Kim Kardashian in 2014 and was absorbed into the circus of her family, exposing him to a kind of celebrity power-gaming that he could neither control nor understand: he was made into a character in someone else’s reality show rather than the protagonist of his own life. I’ve always suspected that the death of his mother in 2007 was his greatest catastrophe. Donda West had been an absolute believer in her son’s greatness: she worked for him, and she protected him from some of the more predatory aspects of fame. When she died aged 58 as a result of complications from plastic surgery, he lost the one person who was able to tell him “no”.

Both those versions of the Ye story protect a “real” Kanye West who existed and made music for a time before a “bad” version of him took over. The new narrative of the traumatic brain injury takes that away: before the crash, there was no Kanye West in the public eye. He was still toiling away for his breakthrough, believing utterly in his own abilities, but unable to get record labels to see him as more than a producer. His debut solo single — the 2004 song that made him a star — was “Through the Wire”, which tells the story of his injury and recovery.

The wire in the title is the one that held his jaw together. He made the song so close to the accident, he’s literally rapping through the wire on the recording, causing him to lisp in an odd, vulnerable way that represented something characteristic about Ye’s art: a shocking capacity for sincerity, a vulnerability within the braggadocio that made him unique. When South Park mocked him in 2009 with the “Gay Fish” song, it nailed that part of his personality completely: the gag in the song is that Ye takes a stupid joke about “fish sticks” so seriously, he reshapes his whole personality around it.

So there is no separating the artist from the illness with Ye. If you love him as a fan, then the only way you’ve ever known him is in his damaged form. Maybe we even owe the art to the damage. Looking at Ye’s career, you could even make the argument that his pathologies made him. Without his impulsiveness, his stubbornness, his imperviousness to “normal” behavior, would it have been possible to achieve all that he achieved? Then again, if he wasn’t an acknowledged genius, would any of these traits have been indulged up to the point of Nazism?

The story of Gage ends badly. In multiple popular accounts, he’s described as growing ever more dissipated, even wicked. Biographies claim he was unable to hold down a job, and was reduced to the undignified life of the freak-show exhibit, always accompanied by the pole that maimed him. But that isn’t quite the picture the archive paints. Much is post-hoc elaboration. Yes, in the immediate aftermath of the accident, Gage is documented as showing many of the behaviors we would now label as “disinhibition”. But it’s also known that in later life, he worked for several years as a stagecoach driver — demanding work that could hardly be done by the wild semi-human he’s often described as. Gage’s accident changed him, obviously, but it did not place him forever beyond the realm of morality. He did, apparently, get better, in mind as well as body.

I cannot argue that Ye deserves forgiveness: that is for the individuals he has injured to decide, from his own family to the global Jewish community. I am not even sure that forgiveness is something he needs from a strictly commercial perspective: the music is so good, Ye has always been effectively cancel-proof. I’m interested less in what the world owes to Ye than in what is possible for him now. If Ye really is a modern-day Phineas Gage, there is hope. The historical record suggests that recovery is possible, with the right support. It may never be complete, but it is real.

The larger question is whether it can be available to someone like Ye. There’s a cruel irony that the biggest block between Ye and stability might be the thing that, for many, disqualifies him from sympathy: his privilege. With so much money, and so many people happy to become enablers in order to bask in his celebrity, there is very little to restrain him. No Donda to tell him when he’s gone too far. No limit to what he can spend in the service of his own ruin. (How many bipolar sufferers must, on learning about the Super Bowl ad, thanked their stars that their manic episodes had never coincided with being a millionaire?) His brain may have been damaged, but nothing can demolish a person like wealth and fame.

It’s difficult to grasp the appeal of Fuentes, a diminutive chauvinist virgin who has described himself as an “incel”, a “loser” and a “chud” — the latter, for those with jobs, is new-gen internet slang for a Right-wing prat. Yet somehow the man who coined the phrase “your body, my choice” has become a boyband-grade obsession for an army of alternative female yearners. If his fans in general are “Groypers”, a term related to the 4chan mascot Pepe the Frog, then these sighing women are his “Groypettes”.

Velvet Groypette is a typical case. They post images of Fuentes edited into album covers, or standing awkwardly at a nightclub with the looksmaxxing streamer Clavicular (the recent Avengers Assemble-style gathering in Miami also included Andrew and Tristan Tate; the group sang along to Kanye West’s song “Heil Hitler”). In their bio, they brag that they have been banned from TikTok three times. To them, Fuentes is Radiohead’s pitiable, misunderstood Creep, which is why one edit plays that song over a clip of our improbable matinee idol saying: “I am a bitchless, rizzless, hoeless, 5’9” chud incel who was over before it began … it’s over for me.” “I could save him,” writes one commenter; he is 2026’s Christian Slater in Heathers, a weirdo masochist who only sensitive girls truly see.

The Groypettes perform lovelorn victimhood, cosplaying as a battered girlfriend in a toxic relationship with this baddest of “bad boys”. The user Grippy Groypette, another exemplary specimen, hangs a pinkified American flag showing Fuentes doing the Nazi salute; “he could hit me and it would feel like a kiss,” reads the caption. “Me too girl me too,” writes a commenter. On Instagram, a user called Groypergirlies says “I’d let him ruin me”; Womenforfuentes takes the urge to self-sacrifice further, committing to a “baby groypling revolution” by churning out children for the cause.

It could, you might say, all be a canny ragebait device; what woman would engage with, let alone fantasize about, a man whose interests are so in opposition to her own? But the community is simply too large to be a trolling fad — if you search for X accounts with “Groypette” in the username, you can scroll and scroll. Besides, Andrew Tate, the OG slaphead king of the manosphere, never boasted a comparable league of female footsoldiers; Tate is massively more known and despised than Fuentes, only a recent inductee to the liberal mainstream’s fascist hall of fame. And if these women truly hope to be hit by a far-Right agitator, there is evidence suggesting Tate would know what he was doing. Nevertheless it is Nick who has been chosen as the “pretend bf” to this burgeoning subculture of troubled “foids” (women, to you and me). Why?

Perhaps it is because, unlike Tate, Fuentes’s violence is only hypothetical and therefore can be seen as romantic; so is his sexual life. Also unlike Tate, Fuentes is boyish, inaccessible and a little awkward. While both are undeniably camp, Tate does it in a hypersexual, dominating way, designed to impress other men; his moral universe is about status and money, and the women within it are only ever ciphers. Fuentes is obsessed with suffering and purity, civilization and destiny; his is a world which, in a very narrow way, leaves space for the perfect woman. Tate is a brutish warlord, and Fuentes a sad princeling. For a Tumblr princess, the choice is simple.

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Does Nick Fuentes have daddy issues?

By Kathleen Stock

The Groypette did not come out of thin air. A scour of TikTok, Instagram and X suggests the standard-issue Fuentes fangirl is either white or vaguely Latina, in her early twenties and terminally online; she listens to Lana, she bedrots compulsively, she takes photos of herself crying. She is, in other words, an inheritor of the other tortured female internet subcultures which have so obviously shaped her aesthetic and which have tightened their grip on isolated young women since Covid: the first is clearly ED Twitter, where eating-disorder girlies post thinspo (thin inspiration), list dizzyingly low current, starting and goal weights and competitively make themselves miserable and ill. It is no surprise that many of the self-identified Groypettes also have these stats in their bios, or the telling tag “edtwt”; martyrdom and attention-seeking suffering is native to both communities.

The other, perhaps even more obvious, progenitor is the Tumblr e-girl — a young woman seen on moody collages with long brown hair, hiding her face in adorable despair, taking a picture of her skinny legs and cigarette, and mournfully daydreaming about… herself. She is the grieving maiden of former times, dragged into the 21st century and given smudged eyeliner, bulimia and a phone addiction. And she is perfectly portrayed in another Velvet Groypette banger about the user’s grief in having to withstand Fuentes’s Christmas posting break. In this one, images of pretty girls crying and looking out of windows, clutching their silky hair or lying catatonic like Flaming June, are interspersed with Fuentes thirst traps.

For the Groypette, Fuentes’s beliefs and the broader America First movement are, ironically, secondary to her performative sadness. Where male fans of Fuentes crack sick jokes about the Jewish Times columnist Daniel Finkelstein’s family members “dying in the Holly”, the Groypette focuses mainly on her deathless love. Hitching herself to Fuentes’ bandwagon is less about ideology — these girls almost never post about his racial politics, for example, save from attention-seeking deployment of the n-word — than about recruiting Fuentes as the latest instrument for self-harm. Cutting herself, smoking, making herself sick and even showing off bruises is so aggressively woven into the DNA of the internet sadgirl; posing as the girl not only picked, but hit, by the anti-woman bogeyman of the day appears to have a perverse way of making otherwise unremarkable women feel special.

There is much to despise in the Groypette: she is craven, inauthentic and willing to sell other women down the river for a scrap of online attention. But, as a product of today’s balkanized youth culture, I understand her. If you were nerfed by Covid isolation, have a fragile sense of self and need male admiration to survive your own crushing mediocrity, then throwing yourself in with this band of countercultural “poasters” makes sense. The fact remains that nobody is as simpishly servile to a semi-attractive alt woman than a man who professes to despise her sex. Case in point: such men fill Groypette comment sections with admiring missives such as “the Groypettes might actually be crazier than the Groypers and that’s awesome honestly”; “I need a Groypette”; “WTF? I love women now.” If you’re looking for attention, this is a good place to start.

This thirst for alt-Right women explains why Amelia is probably filling your timelines this week. For the uninitiated, she is the purple-haired girl from a catastrophically misguided anti-far-Right, Prevent-funded video game called Pathways commissioned by Hull City Council for use in schools. Unfortunately, she’s become an instant cult heroine. In AI-generated fan renderings, Amelia burns pictures of Keir Starmer with cigs and tenderly pets British bulldogs; she leads the game’s male main character to brighter futures with fields of poppies, a sort of manic pixie doomer girl. In many ways, she is the platonic ideal of a Groypette: the Amelias of this strange new world aren’t bimboish “Staceys”, big-breasted blondes at the top of the sexual hierarchy; instead they are based noticers or, in plain English, they get the world’s depressing realities and are a salve, not salt, to the downtrodden man’s wounds. They might resemble the liberal e-girls with pronouns in their bios who normally deride the “incel”, but really they are meek, compliant and devoted — all the women, in other words, who have spurned him in real life given an ideology transplant.

For the Groypette, it’s win-win. She needn’t particularly engage with Fuentes’s ideas, or even meet up with any members of this oleaginous movement in real life; her mistreatment is only theoretical, and her proximity to something so overtly sinister is enough to make her feel important, with all the distinction of the not-so-secret self-harmer. All that remains is to wonder whether, when Nick Fuentes does step out with his own First Lady, all the glamour of groypettery will dissolve into a puddle of tears. His professed sexual loserdom seems to be part of his appeal; any woman he chooses would become by definition exceptional. Strange as this all may seem, it appears likely that if and when Fuentes stops being such a massive virgin, his female fanbase will revolt. There was a reason why John Lennon had to hide his marriage to Cynthia.

The fate of the Groypette is an alarm bell for the collapse of liberal feminism: though she has attached herself to a movement which is by definition disempowering, she sees it as a price worth paying for a sense of belonging, for devotion and meaning. An empty and cynical modern feminist credo which has robbed young women of the right to question transgenderism, prostitution, pornography and the consequences of mass immigration is losing ground, because of course it is. The worldview of the Groypette may be hopelessly ironic, nihilistic, racist, even suicidal — but for a small subset of women it is more enticing than the dreary bullshit-artistry of the progressive mainstream. That should worry us.

“There must have been about 10 apartments and there were 600 people,” he tells me. “And the situation looked so bad that a number of old people climbed up onto the roof and jumped off.” 

When not chewing the fat with me in the pub, John spends his time speaking in schools for the Holocaust Memorial Trust. Lest we forget. 

Of the remaining 200,000 or so Holocaust survivors, most are in their late eighties, which means that these vanishing witnesses to Nazi evil may all be gone within a decade. That is why, a few years back, John took part in Testimony 360, an innovative project to create a digital record of his experience. Thanks to some sophisticated AI and virtual-reality technology, future students will be able to interact with a virtual John, ask him questions, and learn from his testimony.

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But the use of AI in Holocaust remembrance is becoming increasingly controversial as fake images circulate around the internet. Such is the level of alarm that the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance has issued a warning to schools, concerned that memes are being used “for political or ideological purposes, including denial and distortion”. Holocaust memory, they say, is under attack and false narratives are on the rise at a time of significant jeopardy for the Jewish community. 

For the time being, those with a keen eye and some knowledge of historical events can still tell the difference between fake images and real ones. There were only a handful of real photos taken within Auschwitz, and so images of children hiding under floorboards or playing violins ought to be treated with great caution. Fake ones are all too obvious, clearly designed to tug at the heartstrings, and often contain small mistakes. But as AI improves such giveaways will be ironed out. Inevitably, it will become harder to tell the difference.  

For some, the fictionalization of the Holocaust — in literature for example — is a useful way of introducing the young to the reality of the horrors of the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis — take The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, for example. It offers an accessible way into a historical reality that is too dreadful for children to absorb in its entirety. But even this can be controversial. As Imre Kertész, another Budapest-born Holocaust survivor, said in Who owns Auschwitz?: fictionalization can mean that “survivors watch helplessly as their only real possessions are done away with: authentic experiences”.

Whatever we conclude on this tricky question, bot-promoted deepfakes are different; it’s not clear that these images are a fiction at all. And so, as fabricated content floods social media, the truth becomes harder to recognize and easier to dismiss. Suddenly, a whole new world of Holocaust suspicion opens up. The fear is that certain forms of Holocaust remembrance could even be conscripted into Holocaust denial. 

In church, we know how technology can complicate memory. Wedding videographers promise to preserve a perfect record of that special day. Yet many couples find that, over time, this vivid recording crowds out any organic memories of the day, leaving only what the videographer saw. Ten years on, wedding couples admit they can’t actually remember those little details that made the day so real to them. Recorded “memories” can easily supplant real ones. 

In handing over responsibility to the videographer, you also relinquish control over how the day is curated and, potentially, remembered. AI imagery can do the same with history: creatively and powerfully interpreting historical events through particular perspectives, until interpretation muscles out the truth. 

Memory is the lifeblood of Jewish togetherness. Jews speak of the deceased as being “of blessed memory”. Passover is an act of collective liturgical memory, remembering the liberation from Egyptian bondage. “Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy” exhorts the book of Exodus. The Hebrew Bible is full of instructions to remember what God has done. In the UK, we mark Holocaust Memorial Day today, the 81st anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. In Israel, remembrance takes place on Yom HaShoah in April or May (27th Nissan, to be precise), the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. The different dates register different emphases: one the liberation of passive Jews by others, the other the heroism of Jews who resisted the Nazi regime. But memory is the common thread. And threats to it are rightly regarded as existential. 

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This is particularly salient today, amid the continued fallout from the October 7 massacre. Even though the Holocaust is the only historical event that is compulsory within the KS3 history curriculum, schools are becoming increasingly nervous about commemorating it. Only this month, a visit by a Jewish MP to a school in Bristol was canceled following protests by local pro-Palestinian groups. And over the past few years, the number of schools marking Holocaust Memorial Day has halved. 

There are some, Simon Jenkins for example, who argue that we should do less remembering and more forgetting. It is an unusual take for a historian. He warns us not to “drink from the rancid well of grievance”, and that “almost all the conflicts in the world are caused by too much remembering: refreshing religious divisions, tribal feuds, border conflicts, humiliations and expulsions”. I take the point but I don’t agree. Memory makes us who and what we are. It creates shared identity. That’s why so many of us fear dementia. To lose our memory is to forget who we are. 

There used to be graffiti on the towpath near our pub. Six million lies, it read. The graffiti has been washed away. But the lie has not. Memory, then, is both a reminder and a warning of what we are capable. Memory is what renews our conviction: never again.

Odessa A’zion, star of Marty Supreme and Rachel Sennott’s HBO series I Love LA, is a name of which you may only be vaguely aware. A raven-haired 25-year-old, daughter to the voice actress Pamela Adlon (aka Bobby Hill from cult animation King of the Hill) and the filmmaker Felix Adlon, is undeniably a nepo baby. Unfortunately for the peanut gallery, she is also an excellent actress. But no matter — the bitchfinder-generals of social media are determined to hate her anyway. She is, after all, a “jew mid”, “zionist nepo baby”, “jew psyop”, “IDF plant” according to the not at all spiteful public square. This young actress — despite having no association with Israel or Middle Eastern politics beyond the crime of simply being Jewish — has been so viciously targeted by the terminally online for her assumed beliefs that she had to announce on her public Instagram story that she was, as she put it, “not a zio”. A healthy and normal pop culture indeed.

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A’zion’s list of crimes is growing by the hour. There’s the “not quite blackfishing” accusation cowardly couched by the TikTok creator Georgie James, the logic of which goes that by dyeing and curling her hair, A’zion is attempting to look more, ahem, “Mediterranean” and ethnically “ambiguous” in order to muscle in on the social cachet of biracial Hollywood superstars. Then there was the Wigcident, as I am now calling it. During a red carpet interview last month, A’zion was asked if her hair was real. Evidently taking the red-carpet gratitude olympics too far (“I feel so blessed,” mewled everyone and her dog at the Golden Globes on Sunday), she said: “You think I can afford a wig like that? And wear it all the time? I’ve heard wigs can go up to like 20 or $30,000… are you fucking kidding me?” Cue a slew of armchair critics spitting feathers over her famous family and cinematic success, accusing her of playing mock-humble. Yes, she may have over-egged the pudding — but given how neurotic her fanbase seems to be, can you really blame her for trying to prostrate herself?

What a load of bad-faith nonsense this promising talent has had to field already. She’s been on the scene for all of five minutes but is already having to apologize for her Jewishness, withstand a purity test on Palestine and discuss the state of her finances. We are a million miles from the Hollywood of former decades, when stars like Johnny Depp and Sigourney Weaver would work with dodgy directors like Roman Polanski without facing any real stick — or when monsters like Harvey Weinstein were able to make the most of the casting couch as part of a smug open secret. A startling overcorrection has taken place which nastily guns for those whom fans once most adored: the young stars on the rise, the interesting new talents tasting well-earned fame and doing exciting things on screen. It seems all that has been swept away in favor of a sort of equal-opportunity fandom, where admiration is constantly tempered by jealousy and suspicion that a starlet might be the wrong kind of success story.

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Even A’zion’s Marty Supreme co-star is not immune. Timothée Chalamet, despite being perhaps the world’s most celebrated young actor, is getting similar accusations — notably, rounding on his Jewish heritage. Under a tweet celebrating Chalamet’s success in the Golden Globes — he won best actor in a musical or comedy — the eye-rolling goes turbo: “Why do you think he has been pushed so hard,” writes one anonymous account; another intones: “He’s a huge star in Hollywood getting an unreal push from the media. Lol ya it’s probably a safe bet he’s Jewish.”

Clearly, antisemitism is in the water. In this climate, the successes of someone talented can be conveniently wafted off as the product of in-group plotting and industry-planting, calling on ancient conspiracy theories heard more often in the wake of October 7. But the focus on Jewishness is just one — and perhaps the most noticeable — of a range of modern refrains which make insecure audiences feel better about someone else’s achievements. The fact is that any perceived advantage — beauty, family, even ambition — renders fame undeserved in this pitiful age of envy. Think of the purportedly feminist outcry at Sydney Sweeney’s breasts, or the sudden shocked realization that many famous actors also have famous parents (a state of affairs as old as the film industry itself), or indeed the backlash against Chalamet saying, while accepting an award no less, that he was determined to be “one of the greats” last year. In 2026, the worst thing a celebrity could be is satisfied and successful — which is why another wave of spite broke out when Chalamet declared his love for Kylie Jenner at the Critics’ Choice Awards. And if you’re asking yourself why Chalamet seems always to be at the scene of the crime, here’s your answer: he is the most successful.

None of this tall-poppy scything benefits a soul, least of all the arts themselves. But the frequency and vitriol of online dogpiles seems likely only to increase; they are, after all, built into the algorithms of social media. For a generation of Zillennial underachievers too nervous and inept to conduct a job interview, let alone lift an Oscar, the best justification for your failure to thrive is the same as any toddler’s complaint: It’s just not fair! Couple that with the delicious dopamine loop of liking and retweeting a vindictive post about someone whose life you’d very much rather have, and the well of celebrity culture is hopelessly poisoned.

You might not give a fig about the consequences of this, but the pool of talent in the entertainment industry may well go the way of that in politics: dismal and packed with dopey masochists — after all, who else would put up with the abuse? For a rational adult to succeed in the hypercritical pop culture of 2026, they have to be willing to swallow the most bitter of pills and perform continual meekness, forever on the right side of social media’s obsessions. The result? Zara Larsson, the Swedish pop star, posting a bizarre Instagram story last week reeling off all the groups she “loves” which, you’ll be glad to know, includes… “criminals”. In trying to appease the peanut gallery, celebrities can only ever look like clowns. It’s high time we remembered why we used to elevate people in the first place, with the only test that really matters: are they any good?

When they returned to Australia, the pair perpetrated the worst terrorist massacre in the nation’s history — murdering 15 people at a Hanukkah celebration on Bondi Beach, turning what should have been a day of bright, joyful warmth into a day of horror. If it weren’t for the bravery of citizens in thwarting the attack, the death count would have been far higher.

Islamic State has not claimed responsibility for the atrocity — though it has of course delighted in the deaths of so many Jewish people as a “source of pride”. But the attack on Bondi Beach came right out of the Islamic State playbook, grimly familiar from the attack on music fans at the Bataclan, Paris in 2015 — or indeed two massacres at churches in the Philippines in recent years. This is a decentralized operation with no discernible command structure but a coordinated typology of violence. The sadism, the fact that the victims were celebrating, worshipping — all of this is intentional.

And Islamic State is an organization that exports its hateful ideology abroad, making significant inroads in Southeast Asia in recent years. If most Westerners think of this region at all, it is a holiday destination, a region of white sand beaches, chaotic cities, and vibrant food cultures. The Philippines’ majority-Muslim neighbors, Indonesia and Malaysia, are both often cited as examples of moderate Islam.

However, the attack signals some uncomfortable truths: militant Islamism is rising in a region that is home to more than 240 million Muslims — and Islamic State is exploiting the changing conditions in order to make a global comeback after years of languishing in relative obscurity. What Bondi Beach shows is that its instructions are not falling on deaf ears. Unless we make an effort to understand why and how this is happening, and the breadth and scope of the threat, then Bali, Bangkok or Bintan Island could be the next to suffer a deadly attack.

While the Philippines is a predominantly Christian country, it has long had a significant Muslim minority as well as a history of Islamist movements dating back to the early 20th century. The Muslim population is historically concentrated on Mindanao, a mountainous island straddled between three bodies of water — the Sulu Sea, the Celebes Sea and the Philippine Sea — meaning it is both geographically and culturally distinct from the rest of the Philippines.

When the Philippines achieved formal independence in 1946, a deluge of government-sponsored Christian migration swept Mindanao — causing resentment among many of the region’s Muslim farmers who now found themselves outnumbered by Christian settlers. By the early Seventies, Muslim separatists had formed a rebel group under the banner of the Moro National Liberation Front, or MNLF, which received financial support and military training from Malaysia and Libya. In 1972, a deadly conflict broke out between Muslim separatists and government forces under the command of President Marcos. It was one of the nastiest “small wars” of the era. For four years, the 30,000 strong MNLF forces succeeded in tying down four-fifths of the Philippine military, inflicting an average of 100 casualties each month.

In the decades since, at least 10 violent conflicts have flared in Mindanao. The MNLF has transmogrified into the awkwardly named Moro Islamic Liberation Front — MILF, for short — and several splinter groups have emerged, vying for ideological and military domination. These groups have often looked to the Middle East for inspiration and ideology. The Abu Sayyaf network founded in the late Eighties, took its cues from Al Qaeda. Dawlah Islamiyah, a coalition of different Islamist groups, tethered itself to the Islamic State in its era of prominence, between 2014 and 2015.

The long-term objectives of these groups are the same. They want to form a global Islamic caliphate. However, their methods differ. Al Qaeda and its offshoots adopt what’s known as a “far enemy” strategy, which means they like to strike enemy targets in far-flung parts of the world. Islamic State adopts a “near enemy” approach. The idea is to start locally, gaining control of territory and steadily consolidating and expanding its position until it can create a government operating under Islamic law.

The international nature of the threat makes it extremely hard to eradicate. But in 2017, it looked as though the struggle against Islamic State in the Philippines would finally reach its denouement — as President Rodrigo Duterte deployed his military to take on Islamic State-affiliated forces in Marawi, the capital city of the Lana Del Sur province in Mindanao. The urban war lasted five months — making it the longest urban warfare campaign in the Philippines since the Second World War.

Duterte’s forces prevailed, inflicting massive casualties on Islamic State. In 2019, the region became the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM) and with Islamic State seemingly out of the way, it appeared for a brief period that the bitter and bloody struggle was coming to an end. A peace process was established. MILF (a rival with Islamic State for regional control) described the settlement as an “antidote to extremism”.

However, the optimism proved premature. As a Filipino army officer noted in the aftermath: “We have brought the number of insurgents to the lowest ever, but we never seem to quash the whole thing.” Any victory in the context of a battlefield will always remain temporary. Islamism’s ideological precepts never truly die — and despite suffering heavy losses to its most virulent adherents, a new coalition is emerging.

From 2019 until the beginning of 2024, Islamic State claimed credit for at least 18 attacks within Mindanao, which have claimed 162 lives — including 37 civilians. 13 of these attacks were conducted against military targets; two were against regional rivals, MILF; one was against critical national infrastructure — and two were on Christian worshippers. In January 2019, an Indonesian couple affiliated with Islamic State suicide-bombed a church on Jolo island in the Philippines. And in December 2023, Islamic State claimed responsibility for dropping an explosive device into a Catholic Mass in Marawi. Even in a state of retreat, Islamic State is capable of wreaking catastrophic levels of death and destruction.

The attacks on churchgoers are very much how Islamic State likes to operate. The terrorists chose deliberately soft targets; they targeted members of a different religious group; and they sought to optimize a sense of palpable horror in the broader population. The spectacular nature of the attack grabs attention. The desired effect is paralysis by fear.

If this sounds all too familiar, it’s because it’s precisely what played out on Bondi Beach earlier this month. “For twenty minutes, they were just shooting. I couldn’t hear anything, the shooting was just too loud,” said a survivor of the attack. “They were targeting everyone. Just anyone. Jews. They just shot. Doesn’t matter who. Just anyone.”

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The attacks also have a lot in common with recent Islamist attacks on the West. Since Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, there has been an exponential rise in attacks on Jewish civilians or institutions — as Islamic State has leveraged opposition to the conflict in Gaza to foment a virulent form of antisemitism, combined with an unequivocal call to violence. “The conflict with the Jews is not about patriotism, but ideology. The battlefield is therefore everywhere,” said an Islamic State infographic from late October 2023.

Peter Neumann, a terrorism scholar based at King’s College London, encapsulated Islamic State’s motivations: “Jews [are] to be terrorized because they are Jews” and not necessarily “because they fought against Palestinians in Israeli uniform”. Drawing on statements made by Islamic State, Neumann explained the rationale: “unprotected crowds are better than hard targets, and places of worship are also particularly suitable for attacks.”

Meanwhile, in the Southeast Asian context, Islamic State’s revival is rising amid a rising Islamism. In Malaysia, an Islamist political party known as Parti Islam Se Malaysia, or PAS, is growing in popularity, winning 146 of 245 seats in the 2023 elections — making it the single largest party in the Malaysian parliament. Their agenda includes harsh punitive measures such as the amputation of limbs for theft, stoning to death for crimes such as adultery, and the public flogging of individuals caught in homosexual activities.

In Indonesia, the Prosperous Justice Party, or PKS, seeks to impose a strict version of Sharia — and is deeply hostile to concepts like gender equality or gay rights. It currently hold 50 seats in the Indonesian House of Representatives. Like Malaysia’s PAS, it is inspired by the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Members have expressed support for Hamas, hold antisemitic views, and refer to adversaries as the “enemy” of Islam. This surely spells trouble for two countries that have often been touted as exemplars of moderate Islam.

If these trends go unchecked, a region known for verdant landscapes and pristine waters could rapidly turn into a global epicenter for Islamist terror. On a different day, what happened on the Australian coast could have happened on a beach overlooking the Andaman or the Java Seas. If Islamists have their way, it will.

Several years previously, I’d gone to Shabbat Services in Deauville. The synagogue door was burnt black and blistered from the fire that had been set the previous Yom Kippur, and the shul members decided to preserve it as a reminder. Back in the Seventies, the reminder was constant. Every day we Jews in Chicago and New York saw tattoos on the left arms of our neighbors.

These days, Holocaust Remembrance Ceremonies, however well intentioned, are inert. For, in the Diaspora, young Jews unaffected by antisemitism, and removed from living reminders of outrage, were invited to express sympathy for what were, to them, historical characters. (Israeli Jews, of course, spent and spend entire lives facing the reality of savagery.) We American Jews mouthed “never again”, but did nothing to prevent the reoccurrence. Our comfortable, old-school liberal attitude of “we must change the narrative” was essentially sedative. We did nothing to “change the narrative”. This was not indictable as there was no “narrative”. There was simply the endorphin of permitted brutality.

This year’s Erev-Chanukah, the day before Chanukah, broke with the news of the slaughter of Sydney Jews. That evening, when we first heard of the murder of Rob and Michelle Reiner, we assumed that it was more antisemitic savagery, and, at our Chanukah table, our actual Holocaust Remembrance was that husband-and-wife conference which has been going on intermittently for 2,000 years: “Oh my God, is it time to move…?” The traditional Jewish conference was intermittent as, with most potentially vast changes, it is always too early, save when it is too late.

At its release in 1982, someone wrote of Sophie’s Choice that it was “Mandingo for Jews”. I have always loathed the film subgenre of Jew Porn, allowing folk to feel they are experiencing Good Will for watching actors portray “The Other” being thrown into The Oven.

The inescapable notion that Jews are The Other inspires and allows us to be treated as other-than-human. The crocodile sympathy of moviegoers, and devotees of Anne Frank, Fiddler on the Roof, and so on, is expressed for Jews as victims. And only as victims. The Jew, here, given an award for passivity. Not only is the award moot, it is not even extended to a real Jew.

Forty thousand firearms were taken from the Jews of Warsaw before the Nazis exterminated them. The Jews, of course, hoped to better their position by acquiescence. Hope is the placebo of the powerless. But it is not a strategy.

Violence is a constant and universal possibility. That it can be deterred by Good Feelings was disproved, rather dramatically, by the slaughter of young Israelis at a music festival on October 7.

Some years back I was tasked with taking my niece on a college tour of Brown. The student guide showed us this and that on the beautiful campus, and pointed to a phone kiosk. “There’s one every hundred yards,” he said. “Which will summon our gloriously unarmed Campus Police.”

I thought, at the time, that the University must be a congeries of fools. Not so much as their cops were unarmed (that was, to my mind, simply a dereliction of common sense, understandable in an institution largely engaged in make-believe), but that its representative was selling to prospective buyers, the notion that to be unprotected was laudable — an attitude certainly of interest to the violent. To announce to the world that campus cops were unarmed was merely stupid. To praise that folly was delusion on the order of “changing the narrative”.

A few years back, three Presidents of the Ivy League were called to Congress to testify about their schools’ passivity about antisemitism. Each was asked if the calls on campus for the murder of Jews were antisemitic, and each responded: “it depends on the context.”

Why would any Jewish parents then allow their kids to attend these schools? I’d be pleased to term it a “mystery”; but it is no mystery, it is a horrible passivity — not even the (understandable) dismissal of danger as statistically remote, but something finally much worse — a sort of death wish.

That Jewish parents send their Jewish children to institutions which allow, encourage, and so ensure, antisemitism is an act of sacrifice. It is an endorsement of the majoritarian’s right to oppress the Jews, in the hope the gift will forestall further violence. For the Warsaw Jews it was the surrender of their guns, in the Ivy League, the offer of our children.

These institutions offer Jew-baiting as an extra-curricular activity. What possible benefit could our children derive there which would offset the trauma of their abandonment?

The beleaguered Jewish student there can either embrace passivity as a necessary survival strategy, or — horribly more likely — march with the antisemites calling for the eradication of Israel — an apostasy which would spare them as little as did the Warsaw surrender of firearms.

Jew Hatred isn’t caused by Jews.

The Chanukah celebrants at Bondi Beach, the dancing kids on October 7, the Ivy Jews sheltering in Hillel, neither these nor those they’re persecuted for resembling did anything to inspire hatred. That something in their DNA, appearance, or religious beliefs excuses their persecution is delusional. It’s not a hatred of Jews, but a love of hatred.

Is antisemitic speech and violence a Hate Crime? All crime is hate crime; there is no such thing as Love Crime. To mete out justice based on the ethnic or religious status of the victim or the prejudices of the perpetrator is insanity. We’re all human beings as equal in our legitimate desires for safety as we should be in accountability for our acts.

Jews have been persecuted for 2,000 years because we were defenseless. Since the establishment of the Jewish State, we’ve been reviled because we asserted our right to exist, independent of permission.

Moses fled Egyptian luxury not alone because he slew the taskmaster, but because he was denounced by the Jew he saved. He was heartbroken. After the appearance of Moses, most of the Jews in the Torah plead, scheme, and betray in order to return to Egypt, which is to say, to the security of slavery.

Slavery is the sole possible state of that which the liberal mind celebrates as “equality”. To aspire to it is not merely wrong, it is immoral. For, in preferring subjugation to self-determination, we not only choose for ourselves, but provide example to those groups of which we are members.

My Brown graduate niece, now 43, wears a Free Palestine t-shirt; and the Jews of the world’s largest Jewish city have just elected an antisemite mayor.

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On Erev-Chanukah, last Saturday, we neighborhood Jews gathered, as planned, to light candles. But the day began with the slaughter on Bondi Beach, and ended with the murders of our Community members, the Reiners.

We were grieving, which is to say, in a state of Cognitive Dissonance. Nothing made sense save that nothing made sense. The last thing we wanted to do was to abandon the safety of our grief for a “religious celebration”. Then an elder explained the Miracle of Chanukah.

We all knew that the desecrated Temple had to be rededicated, that the resanctification required illumination of the sacred lamps. We knew, from childhood, that there was Only Enough Oil to burn for one day, but that the Jews lit the lamps and they burned for the required eight days. We all knew the persistence of the lamps was a miracle; but the Rabbis wrote that the true miracle was not the length of the lamps’ illumination, but that the Jews, knowing the oil was insufficient, lit the lamps in any case. As commanded.

After we heard the story, and, still grieving, we lit the lamps.

As Chanukah is, finally, the Festival of Lights, I’ll end with this note: in Sydney, at the Great Synagogue, I was in line, waiting to be frisked, and a man behind me said, “Aren’t you David Mamet?” I admitted I was. He wished me an easy fast, and a Good Inscription in the Book of Life, and said he was honoured I’d come to his shul.

I asked his name, and he told me. He was the shul’s Rabbi. The line had moved up, and the armed guard saw us talking and asked, “Rabbi, shall I just pass him in…?” “Nah,” the Rabbi said, “frisk him.”

Happy Chanukah.

It is this Australia that my parents, like hundreds of thousands of migrants in various waves, came to in search of a better life for themselves and for their children. Because this Australia gave them a home, in spite of hardships, they dedicated themselves and their deeds to their new country.

There are many such stories. Dai Le, a Vietnamese refugee who escaped Saigon with her family in 1975, now sits as a member of the Federal Parliament in Canberra. In her maiden speech to Parliament in 2022, Ms Le stated, emotionally: “I remember the moment when we were accepted to be resettled as refugees in Australia […] the feeling of acceptance and gratitude. We were filled with hope as we looked out onto the horizon of endless possibilities. Australia, you welcomed my mother, my family with open arms. You gave us comfort, food, and a warm bed to sleep in.”

How is it, then, that in successful, tolerant Australia, on a balmy summer’s eve on one of the country’s most famous beaches, 15 people (at the time of writing), including a 10-year-old girl, were slaughtered, and scores more critically injured, because of their religion?

This was once a proud, egalitarian nation, with a “fair go” for all. It was a country in which, in the words of former prime minister Bob Hawke, there was “no hierarchy of descent… no privilege of origin”. But that country is gone, its demise overseen by a government, led by Labor Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, which has done nothing but increase division.

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By David Rose

As a result, since October 7, 2023, with antisemitism rising, the likelihood of a terrorist attack taking place on Australian soil has been intolerably high. The warning signs could hardly have been clearer. On 9 October, 2023, there was a gathering of thousands at the Sydney Opera House who rejoiced at the atrocities a couple of days earlier, with one Islamic preacher calling it “a day of celebration”, egging on the mob who shouted, repeatedly, “Where’s the Jews?”. This vile episode, along with other Islamic preachers who called for “death to the infidels”, or the pro-Hamas protestors who have called for “global intifada” and aggressively disrupted cities by closing down key intersections, have been met with lukewarm condemnation from Albanese or his ministers. Figures from the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) show that, since the October 7 attacks, antisemitic incidents in Australia have increased threefold. The ECAJ report documented more than 2,000 such incidents — ranging from verbal abuse to arson, vandalism and physical assaults — in 2024.

Yet, while equivocating over condemning such hatred, Albanese consistently decries “Islamophobia”, even though no mosques have been attacked in Australia since 2016, even though a Christian bishop was stabbed in his own church by a Muslim fanatic, even though a synagogue was bombed in Melbourne by extremists linked to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.

Meanwhile, Albanese’s Home Affairs Minister, Tony Burke, has displayed a consistent recklessness in his immigration policy, settling 3,000 Gazans without security checks and overseeing the repatriation of the so-called ISIS brides. One of the shooters at Bondi, Sajid Akram, who was shot dead by police, first arrived on a student visa and then on a partner visa, and it seems he traveled several times to Pakistan. His son, Naveed Akram, who was born in Australia, was on an Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO) watchlist in 2019, but it “found no indication of any ongoing threat” as far as he was concerned. Rather than address the risks of immigration and consider the threat of rising radicalism, politicians here seem keener to talk up the advantages of “multiculturalism”.

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Meanwhile, the plight of the Jews is deemed secondary as Foreign Minister Penny Wong refused to visit the site of the October 7 atrocities and supported a UN motion for a permanent Palestinian state. It’s hard not to detect a moral relativism at work here.

In their press conference today, Albanese and Burke did not announce they were canceling the visas of hate preachers, nor that they intended to charge them with incitement to violence. They did not announce stricter immigration controls, in particular from countries where jihadist Islamic ideology is rife. Instead, they announced increased firearm controls for Australians.

In the coming weeks and months, we can expect announcements of new “hate speech” laws, new police powers, new surveillance mechanisms, new ways to monitor what ordinary Australians say and share. We can expect politicians to line up for cameras, pay lip service to unity, and then go back to the same failed settings that have splintered Australia.

And in the meantime, successful, tolerant Australia will have to come to terms with the fact that the most deadly attacks on Jews since October 7 happened here, on a Sunday afternoon, at the beach.

As the great Australian writer Xavier Herbert put it: Poor fellow, my country.

More than two millennia later, Judaism’s spiritual reserves endure. They caught flame in recent decades among the Bnei Menashe (Children of Menasseh) of northeast India, a group of roughly 9,000 Tibeto-Burmese people of the Chin-Mizo Hmar tribe. The tribe’s rituals and legends echo very ancient Jewish priestly practices as well as the story of the Exodus, down to the pillars of cloud and fire and the parting of the Red Sea. 19th-century missionaries convinced these former animists, whose ancestral patriarch was named Manmási, to adopt Christianity. They now believe they are descended from Menasseh, one of the Ten Lost Tribes that conquering Assyrians sent into exile in 720 BC. After 1951, when a tribal leader had a dream that Israel was their ancestral homeland, they began to learn prayers and observe Jewish rituals. In the Eighties, they started moving to Israel, where the government has just announced plans to help the remaining 5,800 immigrate by 2030.

The story of the Bnei Menashe raises fundamental questions about Jewish identity, questions which have been debated since the time of the Talmudic sages. Who is a Jew? What does it mean to be a Jew? And, not least, why would anyone want to remain, let alone become, a Jew? These are matters of existential import,  in which both Jews and their enemies have always had a say. The unusually harsh proclamation that excommunicated Spinoza from the Jewish community of Amsterdam in 1656 — assailing him for his “abominable heresies” — declared that “the Lord shall separate him unto evil out of all the tribes of Israel”, nullifying even his ethnic identity. Conversely, unimpeachable ideological orthodoxy was not enough to save ethnically Jewish citizens of the USSR from persecution under Stalin.

Jewish identity, then, is clearly complex, framed as it is by ethnic, national, religious, and political components. The Book of Exodus relates that the 12 sons of Jacob — the Israelites who settled in Egypt — grew from a family and tribe into the Hebrew nation, a people that Pharaoh enslaved and ultimately sought to destroy. These slaves became Jews when Moses led them out of Egypt and they accepted the Torah given by God at Mount Sinai. In the Land of Israel, God ruled through intermediaries: first judges, then kings, and, in the Second Temple period, through high priests subject to various imperial governments. The Maccabean Revolt was thus politically as well as religiously significant.

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Politics played little role in Jewish identity over long centuries in the Diaspora, when the affairs of local communities were administered by rabbis whose authority derived from their knowledge of scripture and the religious tradition. Writing in the 17th century, Spinoza believed that other nations’ hatred of the Jews prevented them from assimilating, and so preserved them as a people apart.

But identifying as a Jew, and being recognized as one, became two separate things after the wave of political emancipation that began with the French Revolution. Emancipation destabilized Jewish identity by making it, by turns and in shifting combinations, both voluntary and compulsory. Jews could choose to be religiously unaffiliated, yet identify, for example, as “culturally” Jewish. Nor did conversion guarantee that one was no longer considered Jewish: Benjamin Disraeli, who was baptized as a child and bought up in the Anglican church, was “hounded and reviled throughout his life — and beyond — as an oily, devious, dishonest Jew.” Then there are those horrors of the 20th century, with both the Nazis and Soviets persecuting and murdering many ethnic Jews who had zero connection with the religion.

Since its foundation in 1948, meanwhile, the State of Israel has had a say in determining who is a Jew, and therefore eligible for the protections and benefits of Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return. Interestingly, Jews who have converted to another religion are not eligible for immigration, presumably because they don’t feel the connection with the ancient Jewish homeland on which the Law, and its assumption of patriotism, is based. For the same reason, Palestinians do not enjoy a right of return. As part of its effort to filter out opportunistic migrants who have no commitment to Judaism, meanwhile, the government has obliged the Bnei Menashe to undergo conversion under the authority of the Orthodox rabbinate, a process that involves demonstrating their knowledge of Jewish religious law and practice. In 2008, indeed, some Messianic Jews were denied on the ground that they sought to enjoy the legal benefits of Jewish status while practicing Christianity.

Tests aside, though, and unlike the persecutors of Jews in the 20th century, it’s surely telling that the Bnei Menashe chose to be part of the covenantal community, coming to Judaism in an act, if not of rediscovering their past, at least of giving themselves one from which they wished to be descended. And after the October 7 pogrom it somehow seemed permissible — yet again — to gang up on Jews in public, that free choice seems particularly meaningful.

Jews have long been criticized for claiming to be God’s chosen people, which implies their superiority to other groups. But devout Christians and Muslims, too, believe they are God’s elect, and it would be strange if they did not. More to the point, election is not so much a privilege as an obligation — often an onerous one. “I know, I know. We are your chosen people,” Tevye famously laments in Fiddler on the Roof. “But once in a while can’t you choose someone else?” Judaism survives today not because God chose the Jews, but because the Jews persist, through thick and thin, in choosing God. As the German theologian and Holocaust survivor Leo Baeck wrote, “Israel is elect if it elects itself” — if, as he understood it, it embraces its vocation of being a “light unto the nations” by trying to mend the world through exemplary righteousness and charity.

Baeck’s “ethical monotheism”, which embraces the moral core of the rabbinic tradition in a way that is attractive even to unobservant Jews, understands Jewish particularism as a necessary condition of its universal mission. Of course, this contemporary understanding of what it means to be a Jew is only one of many. But common to all is a sense of obligation internal to what the Israeli national anthem, Hatikvah (The Hope), calls the “Jewish soul”. This sense of obligation is a constant, even if its perceived source — God, family, polity, one’s ancestors — varies widely. The theologian Emil Fackenheim famously derived the obligation to remain Jewish from the moral imperative not to give Hitler any posthumous victories. In our day, antisemitism is no longer sufficient, as Spinoza supposed, to preserve the Jewish people. Still, one wonders: do Jews remain Jews in spite of the persecution they’ve suffered, or because of it? In the Bible, both Moses and God call the Jews “a stiff-necked people”, and many have felt more solidarity with their brethren after October 7. The greatest massacre of Jewish civilians since the Holocaust renewed old questions about the meaning of Jewish suffering. Who among us is willing to say that it was all for naught?

Here is where the perspectives of two very different groups of people — educated Westerners like me, who come from a long line of Jews, and third-world Easterners like the Bnei Menashe,who want to become Jews — find common ground. While it would be strange to suppose that antisemitism would make one want to convert to Judaism, one suspects that the survival of the people of Israel over more than three millennia is, for the Bnei Menashe, an argument in favor of conversion. For it testifies to the Jews’ vitality, adaptability, toughness, and so bodes well for the future of anyone who wishes to join (or return to) them. Similarly, admiration for the noble accomplishment of countless generations of forbears, who kept the faith under the most difficul conditions, is, for many Jews today, a source of increased resolve in the face of widespread hostility.

As the philosopher Leo Strauss has suggested, the Jewish soul is, at bottom, characterized by fidelity or loyalty to one’s ancestors, “piety in the old Latin sense of the word pietas.” That virtue, which opposes every instinct of modernity, is by no means unique to Judaism. It is exemplified by Virgil’s Aeneas, a Trojan who carried his father Anchises on his shoulders out of the burning city of Troy when it was razed by the conquering Greeks. The homeless Aeneas would later become a progenitor of the Romans — whose belief that the future belongs to those who cherish the past was reflected in their worship of Janus, the god of gateways (jani) whose two faces look back and forward simultaneously.

Through long experience as a people in exile, the Jews, too, have learned what it means to inhabit liminal spaces, and to stand on the threshold between a known past and a deeply uncertain future. The festival of Hanukkah commemorates their remarkable capacity to begin anew by drawing on old resources, and so to recover what would otherwise have been lost. That capacity is reflected in the rebirth of their ancient language, the restoration of their ancient homeland, and now, either the return of a long-lost tribe or the ardent self-election of unlikely Jewish wannabes. And the fact that neither the orthodox rabbinate nor the Israeli government care which of these is the case tells us that, unlike ethnic or national identity, a deep and serious attachment to Judaism is universally sufficient to make one a Jew. As an Israeli rabbi who has helped to prepare the Bnei Menashe for conversion and immigration vividly put it: “They want to be Jewish, and so they will be.”

It’s odd sitting in a mansion listening to anti-Israel rhetoric, while inside they pretend they cannot hear. It is still, perhaps, the most British experience of my lifetime. Beyond the host offering to have me removed from the city — someone would take me for a drive, she said — no one had a thing to say about it. I made small talk about J.K. Rowling. That was my second mistake. I must have said something kind about her, because an amateur harpist chided me. They did have opinions.

This story is sequential, and divided into three stages: the first, from when Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the Labour Party in 2015 to the October massacre of 2023; the second, from the massacre in Israel to the attack in Manchester on Yom Kippur last week; the third, the five days since. For me, they have one common emotion. Rage. Not for myself, but for the murdered Jews of Europe, and Jewish children today, told to remove their blazers outside school because the badges identify them as Jews.

Where does it end? Zalmen Gradowski, the Sonderkommando who buried his testimony in the ashes of Birkenau, called the crematoria in Poland a mechanism to soothe an insatiable god, “who is hungry for their flesh and thirsty for their blood”. That feels right: Nazism was a religion, and antisemitism is a subconscious act, which comes from a place beneath thought. In The Zone of Interest, the best Holocaust novel, Martis Amis called Nazism a “Walpurgisnacht”.

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If this sounds morbid, this is my cultural inheritance. I’m a British Jew, fortunate and haunted, a member of one of the only intact Jewish communities in Europe. But the British love for Jews is heavily caveated. The blood libel was invented in Britain, in 1144, in Norwich. There were pogroms in London in 1189, and in Stamford, Bury St Edmunds and York in 1190. In 1290, all Jews were expelled from England. Ancient history, you may say. There’s no such thing. But, since our return to England in the 17th century, we have called ourselves lucky, even if England locked the gates to European Jews in 1938, leaving them to die. As a young woman, I thought British Jews pallid and uninteresting. I understand us better now. Anything not to be noticed, anything to demonstrate loyalty — our prayers for the royal family are gaudy; Bevis Marks, our famous synagogue, looks like a Wren church — but that was then.

The pause ended with Corbyn, who has absorbed the antisemitism (the anti-Zionism) that emerged from Stalin’s Russia. Its creed is: Zionism is racism. As ever, Jew hate is absolution of a kind; for a faction of the Left, it is absolution from colonialism and smaller personal failures. The journalist Vasily Grossman wrote: “Tell me what you accuse the Jews of, and I’ll tell you what you’re guilty of.” In 2016, I covered The World Transformed, the Corbynite conclave in Liverpool, and attended a debate asking whether the Labour Party had a problem with Jews. It was the best attended event of the week, even with a world to transform, because the hard-Left thrive on aggrievement, not thought, and need an enemy — the Zionist Entity! — to explain their calamities to themselves. Afterwards, I found an organiser and told him, like a credulous child: you’ve got a problem. Can I help? Apparently not. They’ll take the Walpurgisnacht.

Those years were pre-shocks. I left the Labour Party, or, rather, it left me because it was understood that Jews had murdered the last hope of modern British Socialism in toppling Corbyn, who really toppled himself. It was a new charge — or variation on an old charge — on a long sheet.

Until October 7, 2023 was the time before; everything else was the time after. When there were celebrations on London streets, I was shocked, and I was not shocked at all. My non-Jewish friends exuded embarrassment, boredom and, above all, cowardice. Write about it, non-Jewish journalist friends told me. No, I thought, you write about it. It’s as much your story as mine: no, more so. Besides, Jewish testimony is suspect. Philip Roth wrote a novel about Anne Frank: The Ghost Writer. Anne survived the war, but pretends she is dead, so people will read her story. The death holds the magic, and the power. People listen harder when we’re dead.

“You’ve got their sympathy when you’re being shoved in the oven,” a Hungarian-born survivor told me. I’m not sure I’d call it sympathy. “A bit blunt,” he says, “but I’m afraid this is it. The only time I did not feel the world was antisemitic was when the gates of hell opened up in 1945 until Israel started winning the war [in 1967]. Back to the old fashioned.”

I was mesmerized by the protests: I thought I could read our future in them. On the first great march for Palestine, I saw a woman with a sign: “resistance by all means necessary”. Is this what Manchester was? I found a first draft on the back of a sign in Trafalgar Square, a failed attempt, abandoned, as its writer was: “Israel is like my ex [boyfriend].” I thought of Jean-Paul Sartre’s words: “If the Jew did not exist, the antisemite would invent him.” Is this Sartre’s mirror?

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I stood with counter-protesters too: a group called Stop the Hate. As the marchers passed, they swelled towards us and gesticulated: the finger for “fuck you” most often; a cut-throat sometimes; the Hamas triangle, made with fingers, once. They come from all social classes, though young Muslims and bourgeois Leftists are overrepresented. This is an internal, and a proxy, war: partially a war on themselves, because their movement is anti-democratic, with a loathing of dissent.

I went to another Stop the Hate rally on a grim arterial road in inner London. Interview after interview was the same. “Just anger,” a woman told me. “Pure anger.” She works in a school, she said, and, playing football, Jewish children were told they should be gassed. A young Orthodox Jew told me antisemitism is now, “a trend. A cool trend.” That is, young people find it fashionable now. A man with a boombox played Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive”. Men laid tefillin — it’s a form of prayer — by the boombox, but only middle-aged women knew the words. Things have changed, but not that much.

Opposite us, a man stood on a traffic island holding a sign that says: “Israel kills more children than all other countries in the world combined.” He wore a suit and tie, and his expression was one of triumph amid fumes.

Again, on Yom Kippur five days ago, I was shocked, and I was not shocked at all. British Jews are a news story now, and we aren’t used to that. History has caught up with us. I went to Stamford Hill, where the Charedi live, and marveled at how odd their civilization — old Jewish Poland remade in London — felt that day. Some fear to wear the Star of David, or yellow hostage ribbon in public. Others do so, explicitly. Some of us go to synagogue more. Some of us go to synagogue less. Some of us have retreated into Jewish silos. Others have abandoned Jewish life. Some need Israel more. Some need it less.

The future security of Jews in Britain does not depend on Jewish denunciations of Israel. That is a feint and, when the Right has used us to attack Muslims — then what? It depends, rather, on the behavior of the impartial majority: what historians call the bystanders. I hope for solidarity. I expect silence.

As for creative freedom, that might be the biggest joke of all. Two Jewish comedians, Rachel Creeger and Philip Simon, have had their shows canceled at two venues. One of these, Whistlebinkies, at first claimed that this was due to “safety concerns” — presumably it feared that activists from “the right side of history” might turn up to assault audiences and staff in the name of compassion. Creeger and Simon say they were told of “staff discomfort at hosting Jewish shows”.

Of course, any appeal to “safety” in the context of a comedy show is mere sleight-of-tongue, a specious justification for the curbing of artistic freedom. The Banshee Labyrinth has canceled Simon’s solo show after trawling through his social media posts in search of heretical views. Chillingly, its managers have compiled a “dossier” of tweets in which Simon criticizes the hypocrisy of those who attend and organize “humanitarian” marches for Palestine while turning a blind eye to the atrocities committed by Hamas. The venue was particularly outraged that Simon pointed out that Greta Thunberg had not been “kidnapped” by the IDF when she sailed her flotilla to Gaza in her ongoing mission to save the universe and chronicle it all on Instagram.

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One would hope that a comedy venue of all places might appreciate that creatives do not always agree, and that it is not their place to cancel performers who do not pledge fealty to the fashionable omni-cause of the middle-classes. Alas, as ever, conformity is now being demanded from those we should least expect it from. It is particularly dispiriting to see this kind of groupthink take hold at the Fringe. Since its inception in the late Forties, performers have been accustomed to protests and demands for censorship from the Christian Right, but such calls today are coming from within the industry itself.

The ideological capture is evident from critics who laud shows for conveying the “correct message” and comedy commissioners who evidently prefer propaganda to art. Ever since Nica Burns, the director of the Fringe comedy awards, launched the 2018 festival with a paean to “comedy’s future in the woke world” which will “establish a clear marker for what is unacceptable today”, most performers and industry doyens have been diligently following the decree. Genuinely subversive acts have been edged out to make space for the mediocre and the bland.

This is a trend that is now firmly established. Three years ago, the Pleasance Theatre — one of the Fringe’s main provider of venues — canceled a show by controversial comedian Jerry Sadowitz. According to the director of the Pleasance, Anthony Alderson, this was because “this type of material has no place on the festival”, and “opinions such as those displayed on stage by Sadowitz are not acceptable”. When a leading comedy promoter openly admits that he doesn’t understand the difference between opinions and jokes, we know the rot is entrenched.

Kate Copstick, one of the few comedy critics who has refused to kowtow to the new orthodoxy, wrote the following after the Sadowitz cancellation: “In all my years of covering the Fringe, there has never been a more joy-stranglingly censorious August. Councillor Moira Knox in her heyday seems like a libertine now, in comparison to today’s recreationally offended. When the blood-chilling phrase “unacceptable and does not align with our values” is bandied about, and by a venue like the Pleasance, then it is time to fear for the freedom of our funny. The point of a Fringe is that it does not align with anything.

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All of which would be depressing enough, but the situation has been exacerbated by the complicity of comedians themselves. Many acts at the Fringe now fall into the category of what the Spanish call “cuerpo oficial de cómicos del Estado” (official body of comedians of the state). These “regime comedians” are aware that success in their careers is dependent on echoing the dogma of our times, one that has been promoted consistently by successive Conservative and Labour governments. These are the fools at court who have forgotten that their job is to criticize the king.

It was not always this way. Back in 2006, when Tony Blair’s government attempted to oppose amendments passed by the House of Lords that limited the scope of the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill, comedians were outspoken in their dissent. Had the bill passed, any vexatious complaint about a show that mocked religious belief would have resulted in its suspension pending a police investigation. Acts have just over three weeks at the Edinburgh Fringe to recoup some of their losses; they simply can’t afford to waste time being interrogated by the Star Chamber.

But whereas there was near unanimity among comedians in 2006, by the time Markus Meechan (aka “Count Dankula”) was prosecuted for a joke video in 2018, there were few speaking out. Whereas they once understood that “the right to offend is far more important than any right not to be offended” — the phrase used by Rowan Atkinson during the 2006 campaign — they had now subscribed wholesale to the core woke belief that words and violence are synonymous and that suppression of free speech is essential for the preservation of a cohesive society. Where once comedians fought censorship, now they were defending it.

Up until relatively recently, punters would have been sorely disappointed at a fringe festival that offered a series of interchangeable comics all aiming their barbs at similar targets. When Scott Capurro took his show Islamohomophobia to the Fringe in 2013, and was depicted wearing a transparent burka in the publicity materials, nobody took offense or called for his deplatforming. A little over a decade later, and police are contacting a venue in London because of accusations that Capurro might be “homophobic”. Perhaps the investigating officers should have asked for evidence from his husband.

For the humourless and the doctrinaire, comedy will always be a dangerous phenomenon. Take George Monbiot, who recently produced a piece for the Guardian in which he argued that jokes are the equivalent of gateway drugs to the far-Right. “Dominant powers have for centuries used clowns to express their deepest, most unmentionable urges,” he writes, forgetting that the antics of clowns have always been the most effective tool to undermine authority. Citing jokes by Lewis Schaffer, a comedian whose every utterance is guaranteed to bewilder the congenitally literal-minded, Monbiot concludes that “Humorous suggestions of violence reveal and embolden real desires,” that they “soften us up for violence and misrule” and that “it’s the clowning that kills us”.

In this, Monbiot appears to be channelling the spirit of William Prynne, the puritanical firebrand who, in his Histrio-Mastix (1633), railed against the capacity of stage comedies to “empoison, endanger, and deprave” the audience. The elegance, wit and popular appeal of these shows, Prynne reasoned, had the effect of acclimatising the public to “adulteries, fornications, rapes, love-passions, meretricious, unchaste, and amorous practises, of lascivious wicked men or heathen idol-gods”. The claim that jokes lead to violence is often asserted but never proved. It is eternal cry of the sanctimonious and the philistine.

Monbiot’s logic is identical to that of the officers who last week arrested Jon Farley, a protester at a pro-Palestine rally in Leeds, who had been holding a placard bearing a cartoon from the satirical magazine Private Eye. The cartoon mocked the Government’s proscribing of Palestine Action as a terrorist group. Fully on board with the notion that comedy and satire are potentially toxic forces and can incite real-world harm, the police swiftly handcuffed Farley and detained him for nearly six hours. This is what happens when freedom of speech is no longer valued by the ruling class, and the ideology promoted by the likes of Monbiot becomes institutionalised.

No doubt this authoritarian attitude will persist at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe. Innately subversive comedians will continue to self-censor, and those who do risk the ire of the establishment will doubtless pay the price. We can expect increased conformity while activists insist that “nobody is being stifled”. Genuine fans of comedy would be advised to avoid the Fringe, at least until its gatekeepers learn that laughter is more satisfying than nodding along to the approved creed.

I like Top Trumps. I like its cataloguing of assets. It’s a straightforward, uncomplicated way of assessing something. But there will come a point when I will have to explain to my boys that this way of trying to understand the world is silly, misleading, and sometimes downright dangerous. You cannot plot all differences on a common scale. Some variables just don’t map. Apples and Oranges. Black and Jew.

I like Diane Abbott. She is a proper fighter for the causes she believes in; she is fun and adds hugely to the gaiety of the House of Commons. I suspect she gets more nasty, racist shit from the public than anyone else in public life. I like her because she often seems so vulnerable, and it is this vulnerability that enables her to be so sensitive to the lived experience of many of her constituents. That’s why she was so great on assisted dying.

But sometimes she gets things spectacularly wrong. And I don’t mean drinking mojitos on the tube, or stumbling in a TV interview. I mean by conjuring up what amounts to a Top Trumps of racism. Black people, she claims, have it harder than Jews.

In an interview earlier this week, she doubled down on earlier comments she had made about race and prejudice. “I just think that it’s silly to try and claim that racism which is about skin color is the same as other types of racism,” she said. “I don’t know why people would say that.” Certainly, both Jews and black people will have their own distinct experience of prejudice. But rating either according to who is more wronged is nothing more than a children’s game — and a dangerous one at that. On this, if little else, I’m with Keir Starmer. He might not have half the moral seriousness of Diane Abbott, as he attempts to triangulate his politics through a continual assessment of party management and public opinion. But he was right to say that Abbott deserved to be suspended — again.

On the substantive issue, Abbott wants to claim a kind of priority for racism against people with darker-colored skin. This all dates back to a letter she sent The Observer, in 2023, in which she appeared to equate antisemitism with the kind of prejudice that people with ginger hair experience. There’s a difference between the lived experience of black people and Jews, she argued, because Jews “are not all their lives subject to racism”.

But it’s important to have a little context here. Abbott had written to the newspaper in response to an article by Tomiwa Owolade, in which he was considering the idea that white people cannot experience racism. He wrote about a girl at his sixth form who told him that “white people can’t be victims of racism”. Racism is about power and privilege, she told him. “White people have power and privilege. Black people and Asians don’t. This means that only the latter group can be victims of racism; racism is the exercise of power and privilege against people of color.”

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Owolade then niftily dismantles this argument, insisting that racism is a more complex and varied phenomenon. As David Baddiel argued in Jews Don’t Count, being white or wealthy wasn’t much help to those Jews who were carted off to Auschwitz. Indeed, if you were to take the argument of Owolade’s sixth-form friend to its logical conclusion, the Holocaust cannot have been a program of racist extermination because European Jews are overwhelmingly white and “white people can’t be victims of racism”. In her letter, Abbott appeared to be siding with Owolade’s sixth-form friend — and this is where her comments get very dark and troubling. She didn’t literally say the Holocaust wasn’t racist; but she pretty much did, by implication.

On the 100th anniversary of the publication of Mein Kampf, Jews are again the targets of hatred, blamed for a “genocide” in the Middle East that many of us would consider a very nasty war of existential self-defense. But whatever one thinks of the current situation in Palestine, it is certainly the case that many of those who have long harbored antisemitic instincts are now able to dress them up as morally virtuous condemnations of the State of Israel. To Starmer’s credit, he understands that the Left is on weak ground here. His party’s former leader, Jeremy Corbyn, who is making something of a comeback, liked a tweet of a mural which depicted Jews as greedy financiers and agents of global capitalism. The Left has a certain fondness for these tropes — and Abbott’s comments were of a piece with that historic antisemitism.

Jews, she remarks in her letter to The Observer “were never required to sit at the back of the bus on pre-civil right America”. To which Daniel Finkelstein has replied that, in Germany in the Forties, they weren’t allowed on the bus or the train at all. As he pointed out, it was an irony not lost on many as they were crowded into tram cars and cattle trucks to be taken to their deaths.

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But the problem here is that Abbott is using the African-American experience as paradigmatic. Across the Atlantic, Jews and African Americans have had a long, complex and sometimes difficult relationship. Both James Baldwin and Martin Luther King cited the animosity of American black people towards Jews as originating in landlord-tenant relationships, where Jews were, if not the landlords themselves, then often agents for landlords. Baldwin, in his complex article of 1967, “Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White”, argues that African Americans regard Jews as white, and thus a part of the structure of oppression: “The crisis taking place in the world, and in the minds and hearts of black men everywhere,” he wrote, “is not produced by the star of David, but by the old, rugged Roman cross on which Christendom’s most celebrated Jew was murdered. And not by Jews.”

Owolade himself understands this complexity. In his book This is not America, he insists that we shouldn’t attempt to see race relations in the UK through a US lens. Things are different in the US. But Abbott’s misplaced observations about the Jewish and Traveller experience of racism can all too easily be read as the falling into the trap Baldwin describes: that white people are the oppressors and thus can’t be the object of racism. It’s offensive rubbish.

Playing Top Trumps with race is a dangerous business. There should be no hierarchy of bigotry. Diane Abbott got it badly wrong in her letter to The Observer. And she has got it wrong again. This time there should be no return. As the Campaign Against Antisemitism has put it: “two yellow cards make a red”. Starmer shouldn’t let her back.

The garden parties I don’t want to attend are those where vast crowds sway and sing-along in thrall to the same music, swept up in the frenzy of that like-minded togetherness Freud called “oceanic”. I can’t go to a football match for the same reason. A goal is scored or a penalty is missed and one half of the crowd rises as though impelled by a force beyond its control and becomes a single, unindividuated mass. Cricket doesn’t lose its mirth in this way. “Barmy Army,” cry the more vociferous of English fans, thereby making fun of fandom even while expressing it. Oh, for a Barmy Army at Glastonbury. But that would shatter the trance. The anthems that would agglomerate diverse thousands into a single mass can no more abide an ambiguity than their audiences can get a joke.

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It’s the agglomeration that should worry us more than whether or not the BBC should have pulled the plug or the police should take action. How do you take action against however many thousands were complicit — not by their silence but by their enthusiastic collaboration in Bob Vylan’s call for death to Israeli soldiers? And it’s those complicit thousands we should worry about. Is there any expression of hate they wouldn’t accede to once the festival madness is upon them?

In their submission to the authority of the performer on the stage, in their arm waving and obedient chanting, are they not reminiscent of the crowds that filled marching squares and beer halls not that many years ago? I say no more than “reminiscent”. I don’t claim that Glastonbury is Munich. And I don’t even say that what crowds will sing about euphorically one day, they will put into murderous effect the next. But music and crowds are a lethal mix, carrying us away, taking us out of our shivering individual selves into the warm arms of comrades who feel and believe as we do. Sacha Baron Cohen’s endearingly racist Borat famously persuaded a group of drinkers in an Arizona bar to join him in singing “Throw the Jews down the well”. For all the bemused discomfort some of the drinkers clearly felt, they were unable to resist Borat’s appeal. Who wants to be a party pooper? History teaches that the impulse toward individuation was a long time coming; it further teaches that it takes no time at all for that impulse to go into reverse.

Whether or not Borat’s singalong resulted in any immediate harm to Jews in Arizona, I have no idea. But then that was 20 years ago. Words like Israel, Zionist, Jew were not quite so dirty then. I have already heard it argued that no harm will come to any Israeli soldier on account of Bob Vylan’s chant. They operate too far from Glastonbury Tor. But this fails to acknowledge how lies are spread and how hate is augmented. It is said that a music festival should give voice to controversy, but in the sense of expressing new thoughts or asking us to see familiar things differently, there was nothing remotely controversial about Bob Vylan’s words. You can hear them every weekend in marches through London and every day on university campuses across the Western world. Hence, you might say, the uncomplaining assent they were given by the Glastonbury crowd. It knew the words. This version of uneducated, unthinking, received unwisdom, has been normalized to the point of being commonplace. Who doesn’t wish ill on Israel now? And so it starts. Not to join in is to put a damper on the day.

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By David Mamet

An entertainingly lightweight weekend presenter on LBC to whom I sometime listen before bed, though not on the subject of the Middle East if I can help it, offered the view that the furore over Bob Vylan and Kneecap was a sort of snobbish denial to the populace of the artistic license unquestioningly granted to literature or the stage. Such remarks as “Death, death to the IDF” he suggested, would pass unnoticed in a West End play. Which, I wonder. Somewhere along the way, our presenter has confused the freedom to speak hate with the freedom to make art. I cannot think of a play where it would be acceptable, legally or aesthetically, for a character to walk to the front of the stage mid-action and ask the audience to join him in calling for “Death, death” to anyone.

In fact, there is a marvelous play on in London at present — Giant, in which the Jew-obsessed children’s writer Roald Dahl is given enough rope to hang himself 10 times over and manages it even more than that without trying. He delivers far more bitter diatribes against Israel than Bob Vylan and Kneecap manage because he has more words. What makes the play art as opposed to propaganda is its dramatic form, questioning, testing, playing this off against that, weighing all that’s said in the light of the speakers’ psychic compulsion to say it. When Dahl’s self-destruction reaches its apotheosis in a riff of violent Jew mania that makes the Glastonbury lot sound like kindergarten name-callers, the audience audibly gasps. Gasps.

I take great comfort from that gasp. Somewhere, what is shocking still shocks. Somewhere, the individual heart still refuses the blandishments of the mob. Unfortunately, terrifyingly, that somewhere isn’t Glastonbury.

                                                                       Tom Lehrer, 1945

Lehrer wrote the song during his sophomore year at Harvard, mocking the (in his estimation), effete school’s pretensions to a football team. I saw him regularly in Harvard Square in the Sixties during my employment there, clerking at Schoenhof’s Foreign Books. They had dictionaries in 250 languages, and I had to have sufficient knowledge of the stock to direct the seekers after knowledge.

In the late Eighties, I moved from Manhattan to Cambridge. Part of the impetus was the appointment of the late Bob Brustein as head of Harvard’s American Repertory Theater. Bob was an important theater critic, theoretician, and director. He’d brought me to the Yale Rep in 1977 as a CBS Writing Fellow, and put on my feet my first pair of Bass Weejuns.

He left Yale for Harvard in 1979 to run their American Repertory Theater, and sent to me that invitation longed for by any artist: “Come and do whatever you want.” I did. We staged the world premieres of many of my plays — Oleanna, Boston Marriage, The Cryptogram, and The Old Neighborhood — at the school’s Hasty Pudding, and later moved them to New York.

We disagreed absolutely about aesthetic philosophy; and I am in his debt for many years of unconditional support on the order of that of the Chicago cops for their partners: “Fuck it, you’re right; and if you’re not right, fuck it anyway.” Bob was the quintessential Old-School Liberal, who’d “defend to the death my right to say it.”

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By David Mamet

We premiered my play Oleanna at the Pudding in 1992 with Rebecca Pidgeon and Billy Macy. At the dress rehearsal an audience member, a student from Brown, said, “Don’t you think this play is politically irresponsible?” It was the first time I’d heard the phrase.

I had an office in Harvard Square for 15 years, among the dour proto-elites. For, other than the perpetually soused jokesters of the Harvard Lampoon, no one seemed to be having any fun.

The Lampoon folks were the leaven in that self-satisfied atrophy. Doug Kenney and Michael O’Donoghue took the Lampoon commercial with the National Lampoon, and its inspiration of Saturday Night Live. May Harvard be remembered for them, and for Tom Lehrer; and for Bob Brustein, traditional liberals all. And may the school be disgraced in perpetuity for its anti-liberal, disgusting antisemitism.

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By Jacob Howland

When Harvard was ordered to revert from “Affirmative Action” to merit-based admissions in the Sixties, they magicked up a policy of “Geographical Representation”. The then-dean of admissions explained that too many of the successful merit-based applicants came from the “doughnuts” around American cities; a Jewish student replied, “They aren’t doughnuts, they’re bagels.”

Harvard, once laudable as the cradle of Abolition, persisted into the 21st century in sophistry: excluding Jews by alleging the probity of admissions’ policies of “personality”. Yes, they acknowledged race-based admissions were now illegal, but the school was free to exclude applicants whose “personalities” (read race) were deemed unsympathetic.

Now, though, they openly support Jew-hatred, abiding anti-Jewish riots. What are the students actually “protesting”? If it is Israeli national policy, why target and vilify fellow students?

Claudine Gay, disgraced ex-president of Harvard, explained that the call for murder of Jews was not hate speech, per-se, but must be considered in context.

Yeats wrote, “How can you compete, being honor-bred, with one who, were it known he lies, was neither shamed in his nor in his neighbor’s eyes?” Gay knew no shame, and, though deposed, her pitiable and despicable shamelessness remains the school’s policy. For, ordered to observe not only school policy, but US anti-discrimination laws, they first refuse then extrude a “task force,” and then sue the government which seeks to enforce compliance.

Harvard’s pathetic response to the violence has been the creation of a “task force.”

1) What “task force” has ever accomplished anything? 2) No “task force” is required, just enforcement of the school’s policies, and compliance with anti-discrimination laws.

The school’s response that they are defending the rioters’ free speech is one with the disgraced Gay’s “it depends on context”. “From the river to the sea,” and its like, are calls for the murder of Jews. Incitement to violence is not free speech. Harvard broke and continues to defy the law, pandering to radicals.

Why would Harvard do so in contravention of law, custom, decency, and their supposed mission of education?

For money.

They have had a bloated endowment, tax-exempt status, and income from the full-fare foreign students. Harvard, finding all at risk, turns on the government, and insists on its right to abandon Jewish students and retain exchange students whose criminal behavior invalidates their visa status

Harvard is dead and stinking to high heaven, and will not consider apology, let alone reform. It should be stripped of support, both governmental and individual. Affronted students, Jew and non-Jew, should resign and look elsewhere. What could one possibly learn at such an institution, after having learned it does not believe in human dignity?

Historically, Ivy League schools flogged the prestige of their diplomas as a luxury marque, supposedly a fungible indication of status, independent of further utility (e.g. education).

Now, I, like many, view an elite degree in the “soft sciences” (read “froth”), as a mark against a job applicant. Thorstein Veblen’s The Higher Learning (1914)), observed the universities’ degeneration into mere merchandising. His book was originally subtitled “An exercise in depravity.”

We were a mile away from the place where, a few days earlier, some Jewish kids had been attacked by older teenagers at a subway station because of their religion — one of them had been kept overnight in the hospital. It was a couple of weeks since the murder of two people outside a Jewish event for young diplomats in Washington, and a few days before eight Jewish people were hospitalized after being set on fire at a hostage vigil in Colorado — in both cases the assailants were “pro Palestinians”.

Sitting with us, unspoken, at the dinner table that night were the quieter, less violent stories of contemporary antisemitism we were all too aware of: in schools, universities and in the NHS, the Israel-obsession of the unions and the arts organizations where Zionists are increasingly being told we are Nazis. And Nazis deserve to be hurt, don’t they?

As Greta dusts off her keffiyeh hoping to land in Gaza (I hope they give her the same welcome they’d give me), pro-Palestinians are burning synagogues in Australia, shooting at Jewish schools in Canada. In Poland, a community event with Holocaust survivors was attacked, while in Berlin the police chief admits the city is not safe for Jewish people. Even America — once the golden medina for diaspora Jews — holds no promise of succor. And so, there is Israel. Despite the terrorists, the almost daily Houthi missile attacks and Iran threatening nuclear annihilation: antisemitic anti-Zionism only makes us more Zionist. Will we all have to move to the Jewish homeland because we are so unwelcome elsewhere?

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By Nicole Lampert

Debate is what Jews are best at. Our earliest texts are filled with Abraham, Moses, Jeremian and Job arguing furiously with God. As former Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote: “In the Mishnah the rabbis argue about Jewish law and in the Gemara they argue about the arguments of the Mishnah. In the 12th century, Moses Maimonides did the most daring thing of all; he wrote a code of law with all the arguments removed. This generated more arguments than any other text for the next 800 years. Other people have conversations. Jews have arguments.”

But our arguments have become increasingly shrill and painful. There are those who want to denounce Israel and those who want to protect it, and those who want to protect it by denouncing it. They are, like the ongoing divide in the Middle East, intractable. Rows have broken up families and friendships, divided synagogue congregations, and even shattered the unanimity of the normally staid Board of Deputies of British Jews.

And in the background, increasingly the foreground, drowning out our pain and fanning the flames of anger, a chorus of anti-Zionism gets louder and louder. Things have hardly been easy since the October 7 massacre, but Jew hatred seems to be reaching terminal velocity — the likelihood of more violence only a matter of time. There has been an avalanche of public letters since war broke out, three only last week by lawyers, writers and actors, each aimed at outdoing the previous one in its ramped-up rhetoric. The most self-important people of the lot, the actors, stated dramatically that “290,000 children are on the brink of death — starved by the Israeli government for more than 70 days. They cry until they can’t cry anymore — until hunger takes even their voices.” This is a dangerous new libel, exceeding even the lie of UN’s Tom Fletcher that 14,000 babies would die in 48 hours if humanitarian aid wasn’t let in. But the new normal is lies.

The rhetoric is being fanned by a compliant media who willingly parrot Hamas propaganda and only ask questions of Israel — which wants to ensure all the right checks and balances are in place before it gives a confirmed reply — later. As President Trump’s press secretary pointed out this week, the BBC started Sunday telling one story and ended with another. The headline, “At least 15 killed in Israeli fire near aid center, says medics” was changed to “26 killed in Israeli taken fire near aid center, medics say” then “medics” were changed to “health ministry” and then to “Hamas-run health authorities” until, at the end of the day, you had the Israeli denial of the attack. While live reporting often involves changes, this is the first war where the word of a proscribed terrorist organization is taken as gospel.

It doesn’t help that the Israeli government is remorselessly providing the haters and the casual bystanders with ammunition. The Zionist dream echoes the biblical demand of Jews to be “the light among nations”, yet our nation is feeding the fire. Innocents are being killed. Yes, because there is a war and, yes too, because Hamas hides behind and below civilians, but also — it is still killing children. It may be the only democracy in the Middle East, but it is also one that is led by a coalition involving genuine and unashamed racists. Israelis have long boasted that the IDF is the most moral army in the world, but the IDF is still made up of humans, some of whom are criminals. Should I feel shame (just as I would if this was the British army)? Sometimes I do. I am also scared.

We all are. So backwards and forwards we go, like a tennis match, with these debates in our siloed WhatsApp groups where we can drive each other to distraction, posting stories of antisemitism, all while tears and the rows get ever fiercer. You can both want Israel to let Western journalists in and also see why the excuses not to — it is dangerous urban warfare and journalists could also unwittingly help out the enemy — also make sense. You can both see why the Netanyahu government, after letting in extra aid during the ceasefire, had attempted to force Hamas to a better ceasefire deal by forcing a siege and also see it both as morally unconscionable and a terrible PR move. You can feel the horror of the dreadful images coming out of Gaza, while also reminding yourself that all war is awful and that this one could be stopped by Hamas. You can feel for the hostages and the people of Gaza. You can hate the extremistsSettler movement and the free reign they are given, you can hate the venality of Netanyahu in his determination to keep power — but also understand that until Hamas is deposed from power in Gaza, Israel will never have peace. On and on, round and round. It sends us mad, and leads to sleepless nights. And, still, there is no right answer.

As diaspora Jews, we feel uneasy, queasy, untethered from our moorings — feeling despised in the countries we call home. But Israel, devastated not only by the 1,200 killed on October 7 and the 58 hostages still being held in Gaza, but also the 420 soldiers killed since the ground invasion of Gaza, is torn too. It is split by those who hate Netanyahu and believe he is prioritizing his coalition over the hostages and ending the war, and those who believe the war has to continue until Hamas is fully removed from power. All seem to agree that there is no viable plan for what Gaza might look like in the future. And meanwhile the problem of Iran — which has threatened to annihilate Israel once it can get its hands on nuclear weapons — is a real and present threat.

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In Hostages Square in Tel Aviv, where I stood at a rally a few weeks ago, the sharp anger towards the government was palpable. At one point all the names of the hostages were shouted out with the crowd screaming “bring them home NOW”. While posters of the hostages are still all over Israel, some, on the Right, have crossed out the word “now” as beating Hamas is seen as the first priority.

And amid all of this, Hamas just rejected a new ceasefire deal. The terrorist group is the ghostly spirit of Gaza, not once mentioned in a single one of those letters denouncing Israel. Their “resistance” might be celebrated on weekly marches in cities across the world, but what happened on October 7 is, they say, “a false flag”. In this world of fantasy terrorists and conspiracy, they believe that Israel chose to kill its own. The Palestinians are never given their own agency in this war. That they fight and kill, and are still fighting and killing Israelis: this is never mentioned. That Hamas is also killing its own people who dare to rebel against these fascist Islamists goes unreported by most Western media.

For neither the people of Gaza nor the world’s 14 million Jews, now living in a new age of violent antisemitism, there is no end in sight. Just debate, death and hatred. It is exhausting. One day the war will end — I hope it is one day soon — but for diaspora Jews in this new age of antisemitism it may be too late. The genie is out of the bottle. Conspiracies merging medieval antisemitism of “bloodlust” with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion descriptions of Jewish power and Soviet era libels of the enemy within have merged with today’s obsessions so that the Jew, maligned for millennia and murdered in our millions within living memory, have become the ultimate white supremacists and the most evil colonialists. And, once again, as we have throughout our long history, we are wondering: is there anywhere in the world that is safe for us?

Of the tortuous and tragic conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians, Lineker has chosen to see neither the tortuousness nor the tragedy. “People say it’s a complex issue,” he has declared, “but I don’t think it is.”

What then does Lineker see that others don’t? Or is it a question of what Lineker doesn’t see that others do? Either way, he has consistently promulgated an unwaveringly unsubtle pro-Palestinian, anti-Zionist position, for which he has doughtily refused to apologize. Why should he? Wherein has he sinned? It is not as though he is an antisemite. Has not truth alone — truth at its most simple and unvarnished — been his guide?

But to go to war armed only with simplicity is to go to war naked. Not everyone will notice. Those whose nakedness you retweet certainly won’t. And in your own eyes, there is no knowing what richly-attired heroism you see. But in the eyes of those who believe, with the poet Donne, that on a huge hill, cragged and steep, truth stands, and he that will reach her about must and about must go — the once prolific goalscorer looks ill-equipped to be a traveler among the rocky uplands of veracity.

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“A rat, a rat!” Not a real rat, but an emoji. There, unashamedly wagging its tail for all to see, in the body of another of Lineker’s retweeted pro-Palestinian posts. “An antisemitic trope so brazen,” in the words of The Sunday Times commentator Matthew Syed, “that I shan’t insult your intelligence by explaining why this is so.”

Brazen it might be, but Lineker misses it. Doesn’t see it. Doesn’t get it. Knows nothing of the long history of the rat in the iconography of Jew-loathing, a motif of particular appeal to the Nazis who could depict their ambition to wipe out the Jews as hygienic, since rats, as we all know, spread disease.

Which matters in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict why? Because whoever would talk of Zionism should know a little of what it was invented to save Jews from.

It isn’t difficult to see why the post in question initially excited Lineker’s interest. “Zionism explained in two minutes,” it promised. A bit long, given Lineker’s refusal to see complexity, but the explanation when it comes takes only two seconds. “They take the land claim that it’s theirs.”

Gross enough as history without the rat emoji, with it there can hardly be any doubt, unless you’re Lineker, about the status of this two-second “explanation”. The rat, so potent a symbol for the Nazis, has a new home in Arab propaganda. The Jew is once again the object of exterminationist ambition.

Whatever causes Lineker to realize at last what he’s put his name to — he a man, remember, with no malice against the Jews — he deletes the post and apologizes. Bish, bash, bosh. No harm done. He didn’t know, that was all. Maybe all he saw was a cute mouse, wagging its tail. Credit where credit’s due. He acted. And said sorry. Sorry, sorry, sorry.

But sorry for what exactly?

For being found out? For not recognizing one of the Nazis’ most infamous images? For briefly seconding the words of a Palestinian with whom the idea of the Jew as vermin sits easily.

None of us are as educated as we should be. And Lineker’s ignorance matters only because he charges into the fray of a bitter conflict without knowing, or wanting to know, anything of it apart from what can be gleaned from a two-second video produced by a party to one side whose only aim is to debase the other.

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Lineker shouldn’t have needed the rat to tell him that the thing he “shared” was odious. But you never know what form enlightenment is going to take. So listen to the rat, Gary. This is what it was trying to tell you. Dislike Zionism in its present iteration all you like, but to comment on what or why it is when you have scant knowledge of the murderous hatred that made it necessary — the desperation of exile and longing for home that finally brought it about — is like passing judgment on Black Lives Matter unaware there was a slave trade. You feel for the agony of the Palestinians, you say. Your compassion is admirable. Though compassion with understanding would be more admirable still. To be silent is to be complicit, you say. That is not a free pass to froth and fulminate all you like. To be ignorant is to be complicit too.

And now that you have admitted and apologized for what you were unaware of on this occasion, what about an apology for all those earlier know-nothing interventions you have made? Close your eyes and imagine a rat waving its tail at the bottom of every page you’ve posted. That’s a thousand sorries you owe us, Gary.

Oh, and put some clothes on.

***

A version of this piece first appeared on Howard Jacobson’s Substack, Streetwalking with Howard Jacobson.

Trump’s supporters have been repeating a series of arguments which seem, at first glance, perfectly reasonable. Harvard, they point out, has an endowment of more than $53 billion. Why does it need government subsidies? And if the university does need outside funds, why can’t private enterprises provide them? Isn’t it hypocritical for Harvard to take government money while refusing any government oversight, especially when the university faculty and student body lean so very heavily to the Left? Finally, doesn’t the government have a responsibility to withhold funds when the university lets antisemitism run wild on campus?

But like many superficially reasonable arguments, these are all in fact incorrect. If they have been widely accepted in US public opinion, it is in part because until this year universities like Harvard never needed to explain to the public how they operated. The basic system of research funding had been in place for decades, for the most part quite uncontroversially. And, since January, the universities have been caught flat-footed, uncertain whether to negotiate with the administration (as Harvard initially tried to do), or to defy it, even while trying to apologize for and staunch the very real spread of antisemitism on their campuses over the past year. Harvard arguably has quite a lot to answer for, but not in the way the Trump administration thinks. The administration’s actions are both unlawful and destructive.

Consider the issue of government support. It’s correct that Harvard, the wealthiest university in the world, doesn’t need “subsidies”. But the research funding that it receives is not a subsidy. For many decades now, the US Congress has held that it is in the national interest for the government to invest in long-term scientific research. It has mandated, through legislation, that federal agencies, most importantly the National Institutes of Health (NIH), allocate research funds for the purpose of investigating issues such as cancer, infectious diseases, cardiac disease, aging, drug addiction, and the like. Each year, Congress appropriates funds specifically for these purposes, and charges NIH and other agencies with choosing the best research projects, and then monitoring the results. In other words, Congress, working through the agencies, is paying universities to carry out research in the national interest. It is not handing over funds that the universities can use for any whatever purpose they choose; these funds are more akin to fees paid for specific services.

It’s true that in addition to the direct funding of research, the NIH also pays hefty “indirect costs” to universities to cover expenses shared between many different individual projects, including infrastructure in particular, as well as some equipment and labor costs. This is a long-standing practice that the agency has negotiated with universities, in large part to avoid having to split the expenses in question among many individual research projects. In the past, universities abused the “indirect cost” system, but more recently NIH has established much closer oversight.

Could private companies take over the role currently played by the federal government? In some cases, yes, but in most, not. The research Congress and agencies like the NIH fund is the sort that private companies will likely shy away from, because the discoveries in question might not generate revenue for decades — or the payoff might come in the form of improved public health, rather than in monetary form. Understandably, companies want a return on their investment.

Could a university like Harvard pay for the research itself out of its endowment? For a time, but only with difficulty. Like most universities, Harvard’s endowment is not a single pot of money, but a collection of thousands of different accounts, most of which have been donated for specific purposes: financial aid; an overseas study center; a professorship etc. At most elite US universities, no more than 15% of the endowment is “unrestricted” — legally capable of being used for any purpose. And these universities also consider it their fiduciary responsibility not to spend down the endowment, but only to use the annual return, which can average out to as little as 4%. In other words, even if Harvard decided to use all the returns from its unrestricted endowment to fund scientific research (starving other areas of the university in the process), it would be unlikely to come up with much more than $320 million a year. This is a lot, but it is much less than the sum the government is currently paying Harvard to conduct research in the national interest.

In any case, this spending has been mandated by Congress — a democratically elected body. The sole responsibility of the government’s executive branch is to ensure that Congress’s stated goals are being pursued in the most effective manner possible. Congress has never required that scientific research needs to accord with the president’s ideological agenda, and it has not given the president, nor the executive branch he oversees, permission to cut funding arbitrarily.

But surely universities need to accept government oversight if they take government funds? Indeed — and they have done so, for decades. This oversight was established by Congress in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which states that universities accepting federal funds cannot knowingly allow the civil rights of their students, faculty and staff to be violated. If other forms of government oversight are to be imposed beyond this, it is for Congress to do, not the president.

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The Trump administration knows this, and so it has justified its actions by referring to the Civil Rights Act. It has accused Harvard of violating Titles VI and VII, which forbid discrimination on the basis of race and religion. And it points to student protests that in many cases undoubtedly did cross the line between criticism of Israel and antisemitism, and made many Jewish students fear for their safety. Just this week, Harvard released a report that portrayed the university struggling to contain expressions of hatred and intimidation that frequently crossed far over the blurry line separating anti-Zionism and antisemitism. (A companion report found that 47% of Muslim respondents at the university did not feel physically safe on campus.)

But the Civil Rights Act also lays out a procedure for the federal government to follow if it believes that Titles VI or VII have been violated. It must start a formal inquiry, produce a formal report, and give the university a chance to respond. If, after the conclusion of this procedure, the government finds against the university, then it can withhold funds — but only to the parts of the university in which the violation took place.

The Trump administration has not followed any aspect of this legislatively mandated procedure. It has not produced a formal report, nor has it given Harvard a chance to respond. It has above all cut off funds to Harvard Medical School, which was the site of virtually no protests or antisemitic incidents. Moreover, the list of demands it sent to Harvard in mid-April did not only include addressing issues of campus antisemitism. As noted, it called for Harvard to overhaul its governance, disciplinary mechanisms, admissions procedures and hiring procedures. It called for steps to be taken to ensure “viewpoint diversity” on the campus — meaning the hiring of conservatives to offset the faculty’s overwhelmingly liberal political stance.

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Now, there is a case to be made that Harvard could use a greater degree of viewpoint diversity than it currently enjoys. Its faculty indeed lean pretty far Left, and the intellectual climate could benefit from less groupthink, more real debate. The university also needs to squelch the sort of horrid antisemitic activity that took place last year. It needs to ensure that the harassment and intimidation of Jews described in this week’s report are ended, along with the harassment and intimidation of Muslims. If President Trump wants to urge Harvard in this direction, fine. But he should do so in a lawful manner.

And, in any case, while the Harvard faculty and student body do lean pretty far Left, that does not mean that the entire university is somehow in thrall to “woke” ideology, as Trump’s supporters seem to believe. Harvard is a massive operation. It has schools of medicine, dentistry, engineering, and business — none of them known as bastions of wokeness. They barely featured in the report, and yet they will still be penalized.

Indeed, the destructive effects of Trump’s actions will fall most heavily on the least political parts of the university. It will be hard for Harvard to replace the funds that the federal government is taking away, and even harder for institutions with smaller endowments. The result is that research programs that have contributed immeasurably to scientific knowledge, technological advancement and public health will be pruned back or shut down altogether. Harvard and other leading universities will no longer attract some of the best minds from around the world. Thousands of people at Harvard alone — people who had nothing to do with the protests — could lose their jobs, while companies that supply equipment to university researchers could go bankrupt. This level of harm is wildly disproportionate to whatever faults the university allegedly committed, and it is not lawful. Even if you think “Harvard had it coming”, the Trump administration’s assault is not the answer.

Today, with nearly half a million of the nation’s teachers in its ranks, the NEU (capitals allowed) is the biggest education union in Europe. It is also the most powerful. During the pandemic, it was sufficiently influential to close Britain’s schools. For such services, Mary Bousted, its leader at the time, was made a Dame in this year’s New Year honours.

Under her replacement as general secretary, Daniel Kebede, the NEU has remained a campaigning organisation, lobbying on gender equality, racism and LGBT rights. But in recent years, it has dedicated itself to one cause in particular: Palestine.

One might wonder what a British teaching union has to do with a geopolitical conflict 3,000 miles away, but the question would be moot. Every year — excepting wars and pandemics — the NEU subsidises two propaganda trips to the Palestinian Territories, while its magazine Educate frequently denounces Israel. In one recent editorial, Kebede wrote: “As educators whose instincts are humanitarian, members are appalled by the willingness of political leaders to let this situation go on. Why do arms sales continue? Why has the verdict of the International Court of Justice not restrained their behaviour?”

To understand this obsession, one need only attend the NEU’s annual conference. Even before the conference, different branches were thinking up novel ways to attack Israel. Natasha Brandon, a Jewish secondary school teacher based in North London, was surprised to find it top of the agenda for the LBGT+ division when they got together ahead of conference.

“One motion attacked Israel for its LGBT+ positive policies which it called ‘pinkwashing’,” she tells me. The motion said: “Pinkwashing is used by many countries, including Israel, to detract from their human rights abuses and deflect attention away from other discriminatory practices.” It insisted: “Conference instructs the executives to publish a statement condemning countries who target the LGBT+ tourist market through pinkwashing whilst violating human rights of other oppressed groups.”

Natasha wrote to the organisers to express her discomfort with the motion. “The idea that queer people in Israel are somehow a ploy to distract from other things is both antisemitic and homophobic,” she said in her letter. Her complaints were ignored.

At the conference itself, held just before Easter in Bournemouth, there wasn’t just a fringe meeting on Palestine — there’s one every year — but also a standing ovation for its star speaker: the Palestinian “Ambassador” Husam Zomlot. He told the audience that his presence was indeed “a statement of support and solidarity” as “you have been the strongest supporters of Palestine historically”. He gave a special thanks to Louise Regan, who doubles as both the chair of the Palestine Solidarity Committee (PSC) and the NEU’s Executive Member and Chair of International.

Incredibly, Louise is one of four of the PSC’s 14 directors — the group which organises London’s almost weekly anti-Israel demonstrations — who also have roles within the NEU. The others are NEU trustee Bernard Regan, NEU Bolton’s International Solidarity Officer Julia Simpkins, and Northumberland NEU district secretary Alex Snowdon.

After Zomlot’s warm welcome came the motions about Palestine. One claimed that “Israel’s hard-right, racist government is the main driver of conflict, violence and war in Palestine and Israel”. Having reaffirmed “support” for the PSC it also chillingly agreed to circulate educational resources to “increase understanding” of Palestine and Israel.

All of this was achieved with a confidence normally reserved for student union politics. During an amendment debate which committed the NEU to campaign for the abolition of the government’s Prevent anti-extremism programme, one delegate, Mat Milovanovic, proudly insisted: “Are we not allowed to show our students what is right and just?” He told the audience that he and his colleagues in Ealing had been expressing solidarity with Palestinians by “wearing lanyards, badges and taking group photos calling for an immediate ceasefire” — even though they were aware the school could face possible investigation “on the grounds that we do not meet our obligation of political impartiality”.

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During another debate attacking the UK and other countries for withdrawing funding from UNRWA after it was discovered some of their workers had joined in on October 7, Peter Block, 75, a retired Jewish primary school teacher from London, asked to speak. He’d already learned that a younger Jewish teacher who was due to debate one of the motions had pulled out. “He was so intimidated that he was afraid for his own safety,” recalls Peter. “The whole of the executive group were wearing Palestinian keffiyehs and it was intimidating. But I felt I had no choice but to speak because of all the half-truths and downright lies that were being spouted.”

Peter started his speech with a message of peace — “Shalom” — but the mood swiftly soured. “It was a febrile atmosphere and the noise and the cat-calling started almost immediately. I couldn’t even finish my speech.”

The NEU told me that it has “condemned without equivocation, the actions of Hamas on October 7”, adding: “The call for a ceasefire is now imperative in the face of the destruction and loss of life in Gaza,” and insisting: “it is legitimate for the NEU to speak out, alongside bodies such as the TUC and the UN, to stand up for the urgent protection of children and teachers in Palestine.” But is there something darker at play?

Last July, the NEU hosted an event in London called “How to talk about Palestine in our schools”. “There was a whole bookshop of pro-Palestinian literature,” says Peter, who attended. “The conference had speaker after speaker going on about the evil of Israel. After lunch they broke up into groups and I went into a smaller room where they were meant to be discussing antisemitism. Except they weren’t. It was all about Israel. So I stood up and pointed out that we were supposed to be discussing antisemitism. But I was told I needed to sit down — because the other people were ‘threatened’ by me”.

Kate (not her real name), another Jewish teacher from London, attended the same event, only to discover one of her colleagues from school discussing how he used “every opportunity I can to share my views” on Palestine, including bringing the topic up when covering war poetry. He also boasted that he had set up an after-school “human rights group”, which he was using to tell children how evil Israel was. Although she wrote to her headteacher to complain, nothing was done. He still runs his after-school club.

The union is also a linchpin of the anti-Israel demonstrations taking place in our cities. Data taken from 41 major PSC protests between October 2023 and the end of November last year shows that NEU had 23 official speakers — nearly twice as many as the next union, the RMT. Other times they sponsor the demonstrations; for a February one in Leicester, the NEU’s symbol was next to extremist Islamist groups 5 Pillars and CAGE International.

Following the motion to circulate “educational material” on the conflict, Natasha says she is aware that one proposal is to “paint Israel as a colonialist endeavour” while Peter has been shown discussions about material which “seeks to say Jews have no history in the region”.

Last month, the NEU joined the call for Palestine Day of Action. In November 2023 this led to a series of school walkouts with children singing pro-Palestine songs. This year, the NEU told teachers in its North London branch: “Our plan is to wear red and green or keffiyehs, a fundraiser for Medical Aid for Palestine and a vigil in the park with floating lanterns.” Only a last-minute Government intervention — reminding teachers of the policy of the neutrality — scuppered some of the plans. Only a few teachers openly broke the rules. Never mind, the NEU is likely to figure at the heart of the next demonstration for Palestine later this month.

Faced with this sort of behaviour, a group of Jewish teachers met with Kebede last year to ask for a more balanced approach to the conflict. They are not holding out much hope; Kebede is a long-time admirer of Jeremy Corbyn who once claimed the former Labour leader’s critics were being offered “30 pieces of silver” — an ancient antisemitic trope. While he later apologised, the following year, at an anti-Israel rally, he issued a call to “globalise the intifada”. An NEU spokesperson later claimed that it was merely “an expression of solidarity and support for civic protests”.

How such “solidarity” manifests in the classroom is often anecdotal, but it certainly isn’t making schools safer. One parent at the Norwood School in South London told me about two incidents in which she felt children at the school were being subtly educated against Israel. Her 14-year-old son brought home teaching material which had been passed out in a “citizenship class” about refugees, which had an incorrect map of Israel and erroneously claimed that “since 1948 more than five million Palestinians have been displaced” — when the 1948 war displaced 700,000 Palestinians (the five million figure comes from the number of their descendants). At another school, in West London, a substitute teacher asked her eight-year-old primary school pupils to put their hands up if they were Jewish. When a couple put their hands up, the teacher told them: “I’m Free Palestine.”

For Jewish parents this is a difficult time. According to the CST, which monitors anti-Jewish hate crimes, instances of antisemitism affecting schools continue to rise, with 162 incidents in just the first half of last year. Sometimes anti-Jewish bullying has been so bad in schools that parents have felt forced to remove their children.

Meanwhile, as the NEU continues to focus on a war on the other side of the world, problems the union should be looking at barely get a look in. “I know I am not the only one who wonders what all of this obsession with Israel has got to do with a teaching union when we have plenty of problems at home,” says Peter. “We have a huge problem with teacher retention, with violence in schools against teachers, with crumbling schools — but all they want to talk about is Palestine.”

Jay Rayner’s parting shot as he announced his departure from The Observer after 28 years tops off a turbulent few months at Guardian Media Group (GMG). Next week, indignant journalists will be striking in protest at the sale of the paper to Tortoise, an online media organisation. The Scott Trust, they claim, is betraying its commitment to The Observer — a  feeling reflected by The Observer’s former editor, Paul Webster, who lambasted the deal as a betrayal when he retired last week.

Rayner also expressed concern at the sale, claiming that “The Guardian has told me they will terminate all our contracts if they can sell The Observer to Tortoise”. Perhaps he was also anticipating this cost-cutting by the new owners as he resigned. But his strongly worded statement about the failure of the Editor in Chief, Katherine Viner to deal with antisemitism struck a chord.

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Rayner is not the first big name to have publicly accused Viner of not handling controversial issues as she should. In December 2020, Suzanne Moore jumped ship, having been the subject of a complaint sent to Viner, signed by over 300 “colleagues” after she was finally allowed to write about the gender wars.

Moore was followed by Hadley Freeman in November 2022. She resigned because she was unable to write freely about the “gender issue”. But in her resignation letter she disclosed that she had been warned off writing about Israel “from her perspective as a Jew” describing the paper as “internally dysfunctional”.

I’m no fan of Rayner: it often feels like his ego is bigger than his appetite. A decade ago, I made a joke about his attitude on Masterchef, and received a nasty, vitriolic email in response, despite having never corresponded with him in the past. Nevertheless, I believe him when he says there are antisemites at the paper — because I have encountered them myself. Once upon a time, before I was slowly cancelled from every section of the newspaper, I would go to parties there, and I recall one particular member of staff saying the most outrageous things about Jews under the guise of anti-Zionism.

I first met Viner when she was editor of The Guardian’s Weekend Magazine; it was a great newspaper, and The Observer the best Sunday around. I would write the occasional column to fill in for Julie Burchill and Viner was a joy to work for. When she was appointed the first female Editor in Chief, in 2015, my feminist crowd were pleased, because she had long prioritised women’s issues, and in particular the campaign against male violence.

She had also defended me in 2004, when the paper had come in for an almighty kicking after publishing my “Gender bender beware” column — the one that first got me labelled a transphobic hate figure. I remember when I filed the piece, she said “We are going to get shit for this you know?”, only to send me back a very light edit. When I was nominated for Stonewall Journalist of the Year in 2008 and I got word that I would be greeted by a 200-strong picket outside the venue, Viner came with me, offering support. I respected her immensely.

There were moments, though, when her nervousness about certain issues showed. One example was when, back in 2006, I pitched a piece about the phenomena of so-called grooming gangs operating in former mill towns in the north of England.  As we now know, a sizable majority of the perpetrators were of Pakistani Muslim origin, because that was the demographic of young men in those towns.

She said: “We’ll be seen as racist.” I explained that I was writing as a left-wing feminist who had never been accused of racism, but she wouldn’t commission me. So I took the story to The Sunday Times, where it was published in September 2007, four years before The Times ran its first piece (in January 2011) by Andrew Norfolk, who was credited with breaking the story. Norfolk had been given five months to research the phenomenon and it turned into the massive story I had suggested, way back in 2006; Viner, though, had seemed more concerned with being labelled “Islamophobic”.

Still, Viner commanded respect among feminists. But by the time she became Editor, the trans train had picked up speed. Two years earlier, in 2013, The Observer had removed a column by Julie Burchill defending Suzanne Moore from allegations of transphobia, with the commissioning editor admitting that the newspaper had “got it wrong” by publishing it.

It is true, though, that while Viner is Editor in Chief of both The Guardian and The Observer, the latter has managed to be more open and honest about the gender issue. But many of the journalists on the latter have told me they are appalled at the censorious, often anti-feminist atmosphere at The Guardian. And when Webster retired, some admitted they were nervous about whether Viner would merge the editorial line into that of The Guardian. But given Rayner’s objection, the rot seems too deep. By failing to confront the ideologues, Viner has betrayed the principles of liberal, open-minded journalism.

I predict Rayner leaving in a storm of controversy will change nothing. His allegations will be denied. And the sale — described by Webster as a “discreditable conclusion to a damaging episode in the company’s history” — will go through. But I do think that rather than preparing to strike, the many decent, sensible people still at GMG should take a good look at the discreditable state of their journalism. Instead of going along with the ideological madness that Viner has allowed to flourish, they should, instead, demand that she is replaced by someone who has the courage to stand up for the similarly brave journalists.

Laughing for the camera. An unintentionally pointed preposition. I think I meant only to say at, but what if it was performative, either in response to a cameraman urging the women to vandalise a photograph of an unknown and possibly already slaughtered Jew, or an act of bravado on the women’s own parts? You never know for sure what you are looking at on film or how it came to be there. But the brief scene was unforgettably hateful in its callous insolence, however one interprets it. Scrawling with a marker — a marker bought for the occasion? — over the face of someone you don’t know. Someone in desperate trouble. A small act of terror in itself, I thought. And then, in tearing it off the wall, as though to say “may you never be found’, a smiling act of collusion in the abduction, the disappearance and, perhaps ultimately, the murder. A message to the family who invested hope in that poster: may you be eternally disappointed!

I have wondered — sitting this past year in the cowardly sanctuary of my London apartment, listening to the warlike whirr of the helicopters and the scarcely less warlike yells of the weekly peace protest — whether the women have ever seen that footage of themselves. And, whether they have or they haven’t, if they’ve regretted it. They did what they did very soon after the massacre, while the smell of blood and rumour lingered still in the air, when every charge was met by denial, and it was all too easy to read events according to the rigidities of one’s politics. Even the evidence of our eyes became handmaidens to falsehood. Rape? What rape? Rape didn’t suit the prepossessions of the hour. But is it not possible, now that time has passed and certainties have been shaken, that the women recall what they did with shame and maybe even reproach each other with it? “It was your idea.” “No it was yours.”

What if — while we are wondering — they wondered, when they saw pictures of released hostages, whether one of them was their hostage? Would that have made them feel better? Or what if, when they saw pictures of murdered hostages, they wondered if one of those was theirs? Would that have pierced their carapace of mirth? Or was the original defacement an expression of inexpugnable loathing?

Which brings us back to what is for me the greatest mystery of all: how the slaughter and, in some cases, dismemberment of innocent Israelis, men, women and children can have delighted educated people around the world to the point where there was no further violence against them — not even genocide “in context” if we read Harvard’s President correctly — that they couldn’t countenance with joy?

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Is this the end of Israel?

By Howard Jacobson

Yes, it was hysteria and many of the more publicly hysterical have since rowed back a little on their frenzy. But why, at any stage of the massacre, was there irrationality on this scale? We were back in the Middle Ages, some said, when the Jew was in league with the devil and hatred of him was unquestioned and contagious. But wasn’t that hatred begat from ignorance? Can we regress half a millennium just like that? And if we can, what value the education we prize so highly?

To the two grinning women I ask this question: what did you hate so much about that hostage? That he or she was a Jew? That he or she was a Zionist? I am going to assume you will say that towards Jews, as Jews, you entertain no animosity. You are not racists. What is it about Zionists, then, that you will tear at their faces and call for their obliteration? Their colonialist endeavours? You look educated; you will know, in that case, of Zionism’s origins in 19th-century thought (the novelist George Eliot was an early advocate), that it was a movement to help a beleaguered refugee people achieve self-determination not unlike that sought by Palestinians today and supported by you, and who, to begin with, had no colonial or exploitative ambitions. Yes, there were exceptions. Pioneers might not be colonists but that doesn’t make them saints. Nor are refugees above fighting dirty to grab a better life. But a minority of overweening, hard-hearted Jews does not a Zionist Empire make, any more than Hamas makes a Palestinian People.

I harbour no ill will towards Palestinians, so when I say that they made life hard for the first Zionists, I am not blaming them. I understand why they feared for the future of their land when largely European Jews, however weakened and peaceable, began their return to a country they — not without the justification of history — considered theirs too. In answer to Palestinian fears and resistance grew Zionist fears and resistance. Why apportion blame? We wouldn’t have the word “intractable” if we didn’t need it to describe conflicts with no simple solutions. And this is one of them.

There are bad Zionists. There are bad Palestinians. I am a Jew and on the side of Zionism, which doesn’t make me an enemy of people who aren’t. I understand Zionism’s original necessity. Any student of history should. But I do not seek the obliteration of Palestinians because they opposed Zionism almost from the start, waged continuous war on it, and butchered every Zionist they could lay their hands on one year ago.

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Why I'm sticking with Joe

By Howard Jacobson

All right, October 7 was Hamas’s doing. You didn’t look like Hamas to me. And you might or might not have been Palestinian. But you too revelled in the destruction of a Zionist who was unknown to you and of whose political beliefs you were ignorant. He might, for all you knew, have been a passionate advocate of peace. There are many such Israelis. But every Israeli was a Zionist to you and every Zionist a devil. Explain that to me. What does it feel like to hate so irrationally, to so relinquish your independence of judgement that you will hate on someone else’s say so and make an enemy of a poster?

See if you can find that clip. It might have originated as a selfie, so you could just have it on your phone still, along with your holiday snaps. Or you could have confused it, after the event, for a fashion shot. Voguish outfits, voguish opinions. If you do find it, take a long look. I can’t recall whether the incident took place in the course of a peace march, but if it did, ask yourself how it might have contributed to the peace, how it might have saved a single life, not of a Zionist (since you hate Zionists and so don’t care), but a Palestinian.

You may choose to accuse me of Jewsplaining. Fine. Better that than having my face scratched off. Understand, however, that it is not only as a Jew but as everything else I am that I ask you to acknowledge the barbarism of what you did. To hate without knowing who you hate, to de-person a stranger, is to let ignorance be your tutor. And once ignorance rules, darkness descends on everybody.

I don’t say this lightly: Israelis, in their seventies like me, have been through the food rations and the Sinai battles of the Fifties; the Six Day War in the Sixties; the near fatal Yom Kippur War of the Seventies; the Lebanon War and the First Intifada of the Eighties; the bus bombings and the Rabin assassination of the Nineties; the Millennium decade of suicide bombings and the second Lebanon War; and the second decade’s rise of Hamas and Hezbollah with their terrifying rocket barrages. It was more of the same in the third decade until the same morphed into the unimaginable on October 7.

A pogrom on our land, the lone sanctuary for an ancient people. And thus the painful cycle of Jewish history returned and our illusion of security was shattered. But Israel will survive. Not merely because we have a powerful military, a system that rewards innovation and creativity, a highly adaptable citizenry, or a deeply interconnected populace that can act like a dysfunctional family at nine in the morning and a band of brothers by noon. We have something else in addition.

Necessity has taught us to be the masters of uncertainty. Our Jewish faith has inscribed not knowing into our collective unconscious. We’ve made a religion out of it.

Today and tomorrow we’ll recite these well-known, solemn verses from the Rosh Hashanah liturgy:

Who shall live and who shall die,
Who by water and who by fire,
Who shall be at peace and who shall be pursued…
And who will maintain the mundane when you don’t know what will be next?  

Yes, who maintains the mundane when you don’t know what will be next? My son and three sons-in-law are in the army, so their wives defend the home front. In a time of insanity, they are the sacred guardians of The Routine. The kids make it to school on time in clean clothes. At the end of the day, the toys and games return to their bins and boxes. Meals materialise at the appropriate times and the homes appear remarkably suburban. When the sirens screech, they hurry the children into the bomb shelters. Bags of treats greet them in their protected rooms.

So we maintain the mundane, but vulnerability is still inevitable. You can compartmentalise fear, just not hermetically. It leaks out when you least expect it. I learned that lesson at a family gathering two weeks ago.

It was a pre-bar mitzvah ceremony for one of our grandsons, a picnic on a grassy knoll facing the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem. An hour into a meal filled with joyfulness and love, my stoic daughter-in-law, Tal, reads a speech. She raises her eyes to glance at the 50 or so family members and friends. The children laugh and shout as they run through rows of sprinklers. She refers to the war and the hostages. Her voice remains steady until she speaks about Aaron — her husband, my son, the father of the bar mitzvah boy, the soldier about to return to his unit — and then she bursts into tears.

Tal is the master of self-control — the antithesis of gloom and despair. But it’s moments like this when we all cry, including her husband, the warrior, the man who four months ago spoke before a group of Americans and said, “I hate war but it’s what we must do.” 

It’s what we must do. When you face an enemy who wants to obliterate you, you have a simple choice: either act like prey, frozen in terror, or become a warrior on the battlefield, in the bomb shelter, or in the living room. This is the mentality of a people under siege. For much of the West, war is merely an abstraction. Afghanistan doesn’t border on the United Kingdom. You don’t hear the booming of rockets fired from Gaza or Lebanon or Yemen or Iran. You don’t run to your bomb shelters. You don’t have to live with the certainty of not knowing what’s next.

Each of us is a heartache away from trauma and grief, but life goes on — even when you know someone who’s been murdered, taken hostage, wounded, and fallen in battle; even when you’re terrified that the next knock on the door might be from an IDF officer informing you that your son was killed in battle.

Black humour helps. I recently saw a video clip about a workshop for war widows. Two widows of tank commanders are seen chatting together. One says to the other: “It’s amazing how considerate and kind the unit is to us wives.” The second widow responds: “Hey, if your husband’s going to die in battle, then there’s no better unit in the IDF than the tank corps.”

It reminded me of a Holocaust joke about a prisoner who dies in Auschwitz and goes to heaven and tells God an “Auschwitz joke”. God says to him: “That’s not funny.” The prisoner responds: “Well, I guess you had to be there to understand.” That’s the thing. You’ve got to be there to understand how healing it is to laugh with tears in your eyes.

That’s why you don’t often see long faces, whispered tones, or solemn voices. Three weeks ago, on my son’s day off from the Army, we were in a lively restaurant. The beautiful kids carrying trays of food scurried around with smiles on their faces. Our curly-haired waiter took our order with a grin and a question.

“Where are you?” he asks my son, whose M-16 leans against the wall:

“Jenin,” he answers.

His wife, Tal, instinctively lowers her eyes. It’s a Hamas hotspot like Gaza. She keeps her fear and tears to herself.

“You’re busy?” asks the waiter who a moment earlier had told us he served in Gaza for four months. It’s a question without a question mark. No one has any illusions about what busy means.

“Yes,” my son answers. “A drop in the ocean.”

When you belong to the same club, you speak in shorthand. The web of words that separate us disintegrate when we’re fighting for our survival. We share the same pain.  It’s the pain of knowing you’re one click away from bad news but you click, nevertheless. You promised yourself you wouldn’t, but how can you stick your head in the sand when the bad news, which is yours and everyone else’s, is all around you?

So, you click, and you see a picture of six dead hostages shot multiple times by the same Hamas butchers the students at my Alma Mater, NYU, praise like they’re the Second Coming of Che Guevara. And then, because we Israelis have this deep need for self-flagellation, we turn toward one another with fiery dragon fingers and accuse. The Right curses the Left. The Left rages against the Right. And everyone blames Bibi. After all, we have a prime minister who’s like a beacon running on a 25-watt bulb, but let’s not forget who pulled the trigger.

And we’re left bereft, orphans in need of our Churchill, not a man who serves power and politics above integrity and responsibility. Actually — no, not Churchill. Our greatest leader spoke with a lisp, broke tablets and burned gold. He was a reluctant leader. Principles not power guided him. He faced God and argued on our behalf when God threatened to destroy the Israelites.

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By Michael Tobin

Yet here we are, 4,000 years later, acting like ungovernable kids straight out of The Lord of the Flies. The absence of leadership creates desperation and fear. Desperation and fear lead to polarisation and amnesia. Amnesia creates confusion.

One year later, we act like adolescents fighting over an either-or solution. Some of us say: “We can’t let the hostages stop us from destroying Hamas. The road to victory ends at the Philadelphi Corridor with Yahya Sinwar’s head hanging by a noose.” Very few Israelis will celebrate victory knowing that the hostages were murdered. Others fight back: “No, we must do everything possible to get the hostages back even if it means Hamas remains in power.” 

I know that story well. In 1992, my son-in-law’s brother, Elchonon, was stabbed to death close to his home by a Palestinian terrorist. The Israeli government traded Elchonon’s murderer — along with a thousand other Palestinian prisoners, including Sinwar — in exchange for one Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit. That kind of deal most Israelis pray will never be repeated.

So, in the meantime, what can we do?

Well, we can send a message to their pagers and walkie talkies. We can watch when they brush their teeth. We can once again stand tall and pray that our government has found its sense of purpose.

But there’s something else we can do. We can make babies. Yes, Israelis, whether secular or religious, continue to make children.

You might ask: “What does that have to do with anything? You’re living in a state of existential dread. 100,000 Hezbollah rockets are like stallions at the starting gate ready for the gun to go off and Iran’s a few grams of uranium from a nuclear weapon.”

Well, it has to do with everything. Because babies mean we believe in a future. And if we believe in a future, we have hope, even when despair and helplessness appear to dominate. Because making babies means we’ll safeguard them like bears protect their cubs. Because it means we will survive and thrive. We have been here for thousands of years facing obliteration in every generation.

Yet here we are, agents of living history creating another iteration of the Jewish story.

In theory, this is because of the art — the hard-hitting, big-statement, generously-funded art. It’s supposed to be a celebration of excellence, an opportunity for countries to showcase the heights of their culture. But what happens when this is no longer the case?

With this year’s theme, “Foreigners Everywhere”, the cultural status quo of the last few years became crystallised. Identity politics and decolonisation ruled above all. The Spanish pavilion showed a Peruvian artist who spoke about historical colonialism; the American pavilion featured a First Nations artist who used Native American performative rituals as the basis for his work. Each was applauded more than the last — except in the case of Germany.

In the German pavilion, there is an artwork called “Light to the Nations” by Yael Bartana, an Israeli artist living in Berlin. It is an installation of a Sixties-style model spaceship, suspended at the top of a dark room, floating like a distant solar system in a mist of mesmerising light patterns. The title refers to the Book of Isaiah, when God tells the prophet that Israel’s outward mission will be led by the principle of light. It is about the future of the Jewish civilisation assuming the worst has already happened, posing the haunting question: where would Jews live if they were unwelcome everywhere on Earth? 

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This was my favourite artwork of the whole Biennale; and, one night, over proseccos in Dorsoduro, I confessed as much to the Emerati pavilion gallerina. I watched as the blood rushed to her face: “That kind of artist shouldn’t have a platform,” she replied. “With everything that’s going on right now, how could any country promote an artist like her?”

Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised by her response. Since October 7, art galleries across the West have faced criticism for spotlighting Israeli artists. And since the Biennale opened in April, there have also been anti-Israel protests outside not only the already-closed Israeli pavilion, but also the German one. 

What was peculiarly ironic in Venice, however, was that under the logic of identity politics favoured by the Biennale, Germany’s decision to spotlight a Jewish artist was entirely fitting. Isn’t the whole premise of this ideology to shift “the culture” away from those who have “held the power” historically? Why is a German attempt at cultural reparations to the Jewish people not valid, when most other pavilions were essentially a cultural apology to their oppressed peoples? 

The answer, I suspect, lies at the start of almost every artist’s career — at art school. Even before October 7, the popularity of the BDS movement in universities, particularly among the coolest art students, was obvious. After October 7, however, more overt anti-Jewish sentiment became firmly embedded in the universities, falling in line with the trends of wider society. 

At art school, this is even more pronounced because, on an educational level, the bare minimum is expected from you. I remember from my time applying to art schools how difficult it was to find a course that taught electives in both academic and practical subjects. I was lucky to find a course which doubled as a history of art degree, as one of the only things I was taught on the art side was “artistic research”. Here, lecturers told us that, as artists, walking around a park is as valuable as reading a book. More than anything, they prized transgression for transgression’s sake. Yet transgression has its limits.

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The anti-Israel cartoonist dividing Britain’s art crowd

By Rob Lownie

For Ben, an Israeli artist and student at a London art school for the past year, the repercussions of this became all too apparent following October 7. Having lost a close friend at the Nova music festival, and one of the only Israelis in the school, Ben (not his real name) felt it his duty to have a conversation with a fellow student about the anti-Israel banners she was hanging around the university, including ones that depicted the state of Israel eliminated from a map of the Middle East and which called for an “end to our university’s research, commercial and institutional partnerships with the ‘Israeli State’”. Concerned by their presence on campus, Ben sent her a polite message, hoping to open up a channel of communication. The activist declined. Ben didn’t push, and assumed that was that. 

A few weeks later, however, Ben was summoned by the university. He was told that the activist had filed an official complaint against him for bullying, and was instructed to attend a meeting about his “harassing” behaviour. He was also warned that its outcome could affect his ability to graduate. Eventually, the claim was dismissed, though the university still issued Ben with an “official warning”: if he ever contradicted the student again, his time at the institution would immediately be terminated. Luckily for him, it was his last month before graduation, and he obviously has no plan to return for more. 

Ben’s experience is far from unique. Noa, a London-based artist who is exhibiting at Frieze for the first time this year, is also Israeli. A few months ago, a British friend she used to be close to told Noa (also a pseudonym) the reason she’d has stopped talking to her. “I was worried you might be a Zionist,” she said. Her evidence, she explained, consisted of the fact that Noa followed a Jewish art collector and actress Amy Schumer on Instagram — both of whom had posted about the Israeli hostages. Of course, this is something that works both ways. I felt a deep sense of betrayal too when artistic colleagues of many years, in the wake of October 7, started posting about the need for “Palestinian resistance”, or shared a conspiratorial infographic about the impossibility of being antisemitic because “Jews aren’t semites”.

In an industry where being trendy is the most precious commodity, galleries have been equally nervous about taking on Jewish artists. “It’s a big risk for any gallery to take on a Jewish artist right now,” says Sarah, a Jewish artist with gallery representation in London and also speaking to UnHerd anonymously. “As fucked up as it is to say, I feel lucky. It could be much worse.”

Even with Sarah, her Jewishness was a cause for concern. When she joined the gallery, she was asked if she planned “on becoming an online activist”, despite the fact that another artist on their roster is an active pro-Palestine protestor online. At one point during her induction to the gallery, she was told: “We’re going to downplay the fact that you are Jewish.” 

In such a climate, it’s perhaps not surprising that many Jews in the arts feel the need to hide their identity. It is striking, after all, that everyone I spoke to for this article insisted on remaining anonymous; all of them fearing the negative impact that speaking freely might have on their careers. One artist told me: “I would love to be open and use my name for your piece, but I can’t risk being dropped by my gallery.”

For some, like Maya, an emerging curator, seeing this has not only been heart-breaking but also discouraging. The pseudonymous artist decided to leave London and move back to Israel. “I miss my friends and family a lot,” she told me. She’d found it exhausting to deal with the relentless anti-Jewish sentiment during her MA in London over the past year.

I understand this. October 7 marked a change in my life, too: I was no longer able to live in a world with so many painful barriers in front of me, so I took several months out, returned home to Madrid, and focused on building myself in other ways. After overhearing artists in my studio talk about how the “Jews control the media”, I wanted to make sure I had skills beyond the art world. I needed to be prepared, just in case, like countless other Jews this past year and throughout history, I am forced to pack up and leave.

There is a broader tragedy here, too. Art dies when there is only one right way to understand and react to the world. It comes alive, however, when it touches on something we can’t quite understand, or something which remains unspeakable. And so, I am reminded once more of Bartana’s work. Standing in that dark room with pounding techno reverberating through the walls and inside my chest, with the plumes of gaseous CO2 unfurling onto the floor, I craned my head towards the light.

The festival, founded in 2013, will also be showcasing Mohammad Sabaaneh, whose work is alleged to contain antisemitic tropes. UnHerd has learned that one former LICAF board member, Peter Kessler, resigned from his position in July over Sabaaneh’s involvement, as well as over what he considered to be the board’s decision not to challenge the artist’s previous work.

Earlier this year, LICAF invited Sabaaneh to co-curate an exhibition on Palestinian comic-book art, alongside the writer and comic book expert George Khoury. But during online discussions with festival director Julie Tait in June, Kessler expressed concern about Sabaaneh. Citing images in which the Palestinian artist depicted Israel as an octopus in control of the global financial system, and as a locust with an oversized nose, as well as one showing a Jewish concentration camp internee in 1945 transforming into an Israeli settler, he claimed that “in putting [Sabaaneh’s] work on display, and in allowing him to speak, I’m concerned that we are giving a platform for a racist”.

Kessler added that the images in question were designed “to stir up racial hatred in the viewers” and recommended seeking advice from the British Council, which is both co-organising and contributing £15,000 towards the event. In an email response at the start of July, Tait denied that Sabaaneh was a racist and argued that “his ‘job’ is to question, to challenge […] a wide range of ‘targets’ to convey a message”. Tait added that the Palestinian artist is “a brave man, a humane man and his only ‘crime’ is his relentless pursuit of what he sees as justice for Palestinian people”. In the same message, she stressed LICAF’s “duty to uphold freedom of speech”.

Later that month, on 11 July, six members of the LICAF board, including Tait and Kessler, convened to discuss the festival’s response to Sabaaneh’s appearance. In a presentation delivered during the meeting, Kessler argued that “Sabaaneh should attend LICAF and speak at his session, but with the conditions that he is questioned about his antisemitic material and that he doesn’t use the festival as an opportunity to attack what he sees as Israeli propaganda”. Kessler added that “there is severe danger to LICAF’s reputation both in cancelling [Sabaaneh] and in allowing him to continue as planned”.

After this proposal was rejected, Kessler resigned from the LICAF board and wrote to the British Council explaining what had happened, attaching some of Sabaaneh’s more contentious cartoons. He stated that he felt inviting the artist “without addressing this more controversial aspect of his work would be tantamount to ignoring hate speech”. The next day, Paul Thompson, chair of the British Council, replied, agreeing that the images — which do not feature in the LICAF exhibition — contain “some extremely distasteful tropes”.

Scott McDonald, the Council’s chief executive, then informed Kessler that senior staff were now investigating the dispute. Kessler claims that during a later phone call, McDonald revealed how Council members had undergone trial antisemitism training sessions — but that he was unsure how successful those sessions had been. McDonald also reportedly said that the cartoons shared were antisemitic.

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In his last communication with Kessler on 19 August, seen by UnHerd, McDonald concluded that the Council “will continue to provide input to the LICAF team to support them in ensuring the safeguarding of all speakers and audience members, and providing a respectful safe space for dialogue”. In a statement, the British Council told UnHerd that “we have supported this year’s Lakes International Comic Art Festival (LICAF) by helping to fund an exhibition of work by twelve Palestinian comic artists. We are aware of concerns that have been raised regarding a selection of political cartoons previously produced by one of the curators. These cartoons do not form part of the exhibition at LICAF, which aims to highlight the unique creativity of Palestinian comic art.”

For the past decade, LICAF has been funded by Arts Council England (ACE), receiving an annual grant of £240,000. On the same day that Kessler first contacted the British Council, 19 July, he also emailed ACE to draw attention to what he viewed as a “grave failure of governance, breach of policies, and misuse of public funds”. He accused the remaining members of the LICAF board of “breach[ing] basic principles of good governance by preventing full and free discussion of a highly sensitive issue relating to race discrimination”.

ACE chief executive Darren Henley responded by saying that his organisation would investigate the claims. UnHerd was told this week by an ACE spokesperson that “Arts Council England is not a regulator, but we have comprehensive processes in place if concerns are raised with us about an organisation we fund, and we can look into whether they are in breach of their funding agreement with us”. They added: “While we cannot share details of confidential concerns that are flagged to us, we have robust processes in place to make sure organisations address them.”

Then, on 16 September, an ACE official contacted Kessler to say that the investigation was complete and that he had written to LICAF with “conclusions and recommendations”. In an email seen by UnHerd, the representative stated that “we did find minor breaches of the terms and conditions of their current funding agreement with us, relating to the organisation’s policy about handling complaints, and we are now satisfied with the actions proposed by LICAF to address these issues [sic].” The message made no direct mention of Sabaaneh, his work, or racial discrimination more widely. 

Kessler responded that he was “flummoxed”, and that ACE had “investigated something that I hadn’t actually complained about”. In a further email to Henley and the organisation’s chair, Nicholas Serota, he concluded that ACE’s handling of his complaint was “not just woefully insufficient. It borders on complicity.”

Sabaaneh is currently scheduled to appear at two LICAF events, one alongside Khoury and another in which he is set to discuss freedom of speech in comics with Russian graphic artist Victoria Lomasko. During an interview with the New York Comics & Picture-story Symposium in May, Sabaaneh said he wanted to use his involvement with LICAF to “dismantle the Israeli propaganda, dismantle Israeli discourse when they describe the Palestinian people as human animals”. Speaking to the Washington Post at the end of last year, he claimed that “my main mission is to rehumanise the Palestinians”; earlier this year, he argued online that “antisemitism has become a tool of anti-free speech and censorship. Israel uses it against anyone who criticizes it.”

The artist — whose work has been exhibited in Britain, America, and across Europe — was previously imprisoned in Israel. Arrested by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank in February 2013, Sabaaneh was kept in solitary confinement for two weeks and jailed for a further five months. The reason given for his internment was that his artwork appeared in a book about Palestinian political prisoners written by his brother Thamer, who has been accused by an Israeli military court of being a Hamas member. 

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Sabaaneh was also targeted in 2015 by the Palestinian Authority for allegedly depicting the Prophet Muhammad, a charge he denies. Earlier that year, he had marched in Paris in support of the right of artists to mock and criticise Islam, following the Charlie Hebdo shooting in the city. He has previously said that Hamas “hates” him. 

Sabaaneh did not respond to a request for comment, though a LICAF board member informed UnHerd that the artist was aware of the disagreement over his appearance and Kessler’s ensuing resignation. They also made clear that Sabaaneh will defend himself against charges of racism “coherently and persuasively at the festival”.

This week, Tait told UnHerd that the current LICAF board is “fully supportive of [Sabaaneh’s] attendance”. She also stated that LICAF had been in contact with the British Council about “safeguarding all groups at the festival”. Kessler, for his part, told UnHerd that “when you see racism, it is your responsibility — especially as a publicly funded organisation that inspires others — to call it out”. 

According to its equality policy, “LICAF aims to create a safe and welcoming atmosphere for everyone. We will ensure that all people are treated with dignity and respect and will challenge all forms of discrimination.” Yet speaking to UnHerd, Kessler attacked the festival’s attitudes towards discrimination: “It is not right to conceal [racism], forgive it, or deny its existence. But this is what LICAF is now doing.” 

Where Kessler believes that LICAF is promoting an antisemite, the festival board maintains that Sabaaneh is categorically not a racist and stresses the importance of upholding artistic freedom of speech. For all of the British Council’s reassurances about “providing a respectful safe space for dialogue”, next weekend’s events risk being overshadowed by the dispute.

I was recently invited to a presentation by IDF veterans wounded in Gaza after October 7. The organiser, a friend who taught at West Point, brought several of his cadets to hear the stories too grim to make the news, from the soldiers they might soon be fighting alongside. There were other guests; they were older Los Angeles Jews, like me.

When the floor was opened for questions, there was little more for the veterans to say; they fought to protect their country from savagery, and they were wounded. The questions, in any case, coming from Jews like myself, were predictably statements. They were expressions of outrage, followed by suggestions: the state of Israel must be helped by “Changing the Narrative”, which invariably meant “changing the minds of others”.

I don’t know how one changes the minds of others. Through 50 years of writing, I’ve regularly heard that film and drama should be enlisted in the service of good works; but no one has ever had his mind changed by a play or movie. That’s not how they function — they’re entertainment, with as little ability to alter one’s thinking as does a meal. Exodus no more reduced antisemitism than tacos clarify the border crisis.

All the guests at the presentation were enraged at the eruption of American and international Jew hatred. The World Court, whatever that is, had indicted the Israeli Prime Minister as a war criminal; our President and Vice President pointedly insulted him on his visit to Congress; the administration withholds the release of arms voted by Congress for Israeli defence in contravention of the Constitution; and so on. The affronted Jews each proclaimed what he considered a solution, but which I understood as cries of anguish.

Islamists at home and abroad have been demonising the Jewish State since 1948: why would a bunch of septuagenarian Jews in Hollywood conclude they could be defeated by “changing the narrative”? The answer: they did not conceive of them being defeated, they merely wanted peace, which, to their minds, might be achieved, rationally, without war, through mere dialogue, as if murderous savagery were the result of misunderstanding.

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The proximate solution to Jewish vulnerability — which I saw but did not say — was not in persuading others to think differently, but in so-persuading oneself. The problem that day was not to be found in “world opinion”, but in that room. We Jews, without a country for 2,000 years, have always been second-class citizens, where we were not “guests”, which is to say “visitors on suffrage”. The assimilated successful German Jews of the 19th century embraced reform de-accesionism (divestiture of language, observance, and tradition) and assimilation, which included an indictment of the other: their poor co-relgionaries in the East, whose arcane practices, they agreed, explained much of the hatred leaching over onto “Civilised Jews”. They offered their reasoned betrayal of their brothers as part of the initiation fee into the liberal world, a process we find repeated today. (See: Noam Chomsky, George Soros, Bernie Sanders, Tom Friedman, Anthony Blinken.)

We American Jews, traditionally, vote for the Democrats, since we look around and see social ills — and believe it is the job of the government to eradicate them. But this concern with social justice is a warped understanding of the Biblical injunction to do justice. The Bible admonishes us not to respect the claims of the rich, nor of the poor, but to pursue justice. It can be pursued, we learn, only through application of previously determined rules: set by, for example, the Torah, the Talmud and the Constitution.

“Social Justice”, though, is the appeal to the sentient to assert that the rules are insufficient, and that “surely there must be a better way”. But there is not. A dedication to law, as untidy and indeed absurd as it may sometimes be, is the firewall between peace (even precarious peace) and anarchy.

“You cannot spill a drop of American Blood without spilling the blood of the whole world,” wrote Herman Melville in 1849. “Be he an Englishman, Frenchman, Dane or Scot… We are not a narrow tribe of men, with a bigoted Hebrew nationality — whose blood has been debased in an attempt to ennoble it, by maintaining an exclusive succession among ourselves.”

Melville might have stuck to his whales, but he also trots out his antisemitism, turning his proclamation of an American Brotherhood into an oxymoron. Jews are despised for enforced separatism and for attempted assimilation; as we are loathed as a minority up until the moment when minority status is preferred but is denied us, and we concur that that’s fine, too. Our problem is not public opinion — but denial.

Today, the Democrats have become the party of antisemitism. Obama and Biden’s policies have given money and arms to Iran, and withheld congressionally mandated military aid to Israel — and yet Jews vote Democratic. Charles Schumer, the Senate Majority Leader, is a Jew, representing a significantly Jewish constituency. He pointedly insulted Prime Minister Netanyahu, on his visit to Congress, refusing to shake his hand. For whom was Schumer performing his discourtesy? Who does he think he is, and what does he think might defend him, and his constituents, should the Caliphate come knocking?

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The self-delusion of secular Jews

By David Mamet

Kamala Harris, as Vice President, is President of the US Senate. It was both her responsibility and her honour to preside over the Joint Session of Congress convened to hear Netanyahu. Instead, she chose to attend a reunion of her college sorority. Can one imagine a more appallingly calculated slight? Her absence announced that, under her administration, the United States will abandon Israel. And yet American Jews will support her.

I believe that a Jew who votes for the Democrats is a damned fool. I know that no one ever acts for any reason other than “it seemed like a good idea at the time”. What is the idea good enough to induce Jews to side with antisemites? It may be called liberalism, but it contains the unavowed fear of demonisation. The good news is that the Jew need not worry, as he has already been demonised.

As Rebecca West writes in her masterpiece, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: “There are better things in life than fighting, but they are better only if their doers could have fought had they chosen.”

While the maligned figure of the Jew has historically been an all-purpose scapegoat, one thing seems clear enough. Western antisemitism is now primarily fuelled by identity politics, a cultural version of Marxism that analyses injustice not in terms of class, but of race, sex, ethnicity and religion. For the radical avant-garde of 2024, the revolutionary agent of global justice is not the proletariat — the united workers of the world that Marx expected to overthrow capitalism and birth the Communist utopia — but Hamas. And yet, today’s cultural Marxists nevertheless recapitulate the moral and intellectual deficiencies of the master’s philosophy. They, too, reject the central teachings of the Bible, twist and debase its narrative of salvation, and embody the fratricidal spitefulness against which it repeatedly inveighs.

Start with the perverse elevation of brutal terrorists with roots in Nazism. Most people recognise evil when they see it. Marx muddies the waters by locating evil not in individuals, but in society. While he disdains capitalists and Jews (two groups he regards as virtually identical), he rejects the pre-modern consensus of Hebrews and Christians that man is by nature a depraved animal. In this, he follows Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Comparing miserable 18th-century Europeans with the “noble savage” of his imagination, a happy and compassionate being whose existence he inferred from reading anthropological accounts of native Americans and Africans, Rousseau concluded that men and women are by nature as good as Adam and Eve on the day of creation. But institutions like the division of labour and private property, cornerstones of Western civilisation, have made them servile and vicious.

In suggesting that civilisation is a source of withering illness, Rousseau sowed the seeds of late-modern revolutionary nihilism. For if civilisation makes us sick, why not just tear it down? More immediately, his gauzy idealisation of human nature greatly encouraged the French revolutionaries, who struck directly at what they took to be the roots of the sickness. Seeking to wipe away the old ways so that they might reconstruct society according to abstract principles, they slaughtered priests, peasants, nobles, and royalty, watering the soil of liberté, égalité, and fraternité with rivers of blood. It was DEI with guillotines.

Marx framed Rousseau’s seminal ideas in economic terms, producing a sweeping material history to rival the Bible’s sacred one. He argued that evolving modes of production determine nothing less than the systemic organisation of societies and the form and content of their predominant opinions. His apocalyptic vision of salvation through revolutionary liberation from injustice is a secular adaptation of the book of Revelation. Here, too, the faithful are saved, but fundamental values are transposed. While the heroes of old — Macauley’s “brave Horatius, / the Captain of the gate”; Beowulf, slayer of Grendel, a monster of “Cain’s clan” — defended civilisation, Marx cemented in the popular consciousness the romantic idea of the anti-hero, who tears it down. The seeds of radical chic, epitomised in Che Guevara T-shirts,  were planted in the Communist Manifesto.

Observing the Dickensian wretchedness of English factory workers in the first half of the 19th century, Marx argued that capitalism oppresses workers by alienating them from their labour, its products, their historically malleable “species being”, and, through class antagonisms, their fellow human beings. These injustices corrupt and debase all social classes, from the high and powerful — the owners of capital — to the Lumpenproletariat, the lowest of the low: a “social scum” of criminals and vagrants who function as “bribed tool[s] of reactionary intrigue”. Only one class, the proletariat, is an exception to this rule. Mind-deadening labour and grinding poverty strips these workers of health, education, security, sobriety — everything but the delusion of religion, the “opiate of the masses”. Yet, Marx insists, they differ from all other social classes under capitalism in one decisive respect: because capitalist society has given them nothing but misery, they have zero interest in its preservation.

The proletariat, Marx maintains, is the only class capable of acting not in its own particular interest, but that of humanity itself. This “universal class” offers salvation for mankind — but only if it remains faithful to Marx’s radical catechism, which calls for the global revolution of the united workers of the world. This bloody Armageddon will birth the Communist society, the earthly paradise that is the “solution to the riddle of history”. That would be the riddle of injustice, whose permanent and final “solution” (a mathematical term later echoed by fascist revolutionaries in regard to what they called the Jewish Question) was believed by our more patient and moderate ancestors to be known only to God.

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Marxism turns the Bible on its head. The proletariat are the oppressed who will end oppression, the downtrodden who will inherit the earth — not by meekness, but by self-assertion. Jesus overturned the tables of the Temple’s moneylenders. Marx takes more pointed and vicious aim, not at the corruption of a sacred space, but at the Jews themselves. He repeatedly associates the people of Israel with hucksterism and capitalist oppression. “Money is the jealous god of Israel,” he wrote in On The Jewish Question, “in face of which no other god may exist.” After the revolution, he predicts, Jewish particularity will have disappeared, to be replaced by universal humanity. The earthly paradise will not be merely classless: it will be Judenrein.

Marx, whose grandfather was a rabbi and whose father converted to Lutheranism, also drew on the Hebrew Scriptures. The prophet Isaiah calls the Jews a people chosen by God to be “a light unto the nations”. But Marx’s Chosen People are neither Jews nor Christians, younger siblings who claimed to be the new bearers of the light. They are the proletariat: ignorant, destitute, atomised labourers who nevertheless, Marx supposes, feel no envy or vengefulness. So good and pure are they, he predicts, that they will give up their revolutionary dictatorship after a time and let the state “wither away”.

In romanticising the proletariat, Marx ignores the fratricidal enmity elicited, since the days of Cain and Abel, by those whose sacrifices God has favoured. With demonic frenzy, Hamas raped, tortured, murdered and dismembered Israelis on October 7. These berserkers seem to bear in their bones the outcast’s envy of civilised order and happiness, and in particular the rancour of their ancestor, Ishmael. Cast out by Abraham and passed over by God in favour of Isaac, progenitor of the Israelites, Ishmael grew to be “a wild ass of a man— / his hand against all, the hand of all against him”. Yet he never hated Abraham or Isaac the way Palestinian Islamists hate the Jews, with a hatred that is surely increased by the fact that they are doubly exiled, inasmuch as no other Arab and Muslim lands will have them.

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But competition for the exalted status of Chosenness has been a source of antisemitism among Christians as well. Late in life, Dostoevsky embraced a messianic vision of the end of days, when a great battle would unfold between the spirit of the Russian people, destined to save mankind with “self-denying unselfishness”, and that of the tyrannical and self-serving Jews. God, he wrote, promised the Jews: “thou art the only one before God; destroy the others or enslave and exploit them.” This interpretation paves the way for contemporary antisemitism and anti-Zionism by perversely making the people of Israel the first among nations in moral darkness.

Dostoevsky maintained that the suffering of Russian peasants before the elimination of serfdom exceeded any misery the Jews had ever experienced. His elevation of the Russians and demotion of the Jews reflects the zero-sum logic of the victimisation sweepstakes, in which every winner entails a loser, every plus a minus. Identity politics involves a similar logic. The theory of intersectionality recycles Marx’s idea that all forms of injustice are systemically interconnected. This means that no single category of oppression can be eliminated unless all are. And as with capitalists and the proletariat, opposed groups epitomise both injustice and its antithesis, sacrificial suffering in the cause of human liberation. A popular diagram explaining intersectionality contrasts categories of “Privilege” with those of “Oppression/Resistance” — a phrase that suggests noble opposition to tyrannical injustice. The diagram lists among the privileged those who are “white”, “European”, “credentialed”, “upper and upper-middle class”, “anglophones”, and “light, pale”. Most Jews in the West, where intersectionality originated, are all of these things, while almost all Palestinians are none of them.

This analytical framework binds the people of Israel with the Palestinians in a fateful struggle. Other Western groups (e.g. Episcopalians) are by the measures of intersectionality also highly privileged. But none threaten the Palestinians’ attempt to be seen by Westerners as the new proletariat — the Chosen People of cultural Marxism — as do the Jews, whose ancient claim to divine election has subjected them to endless persecution. This is why Hamas finds it necessary to deny both the Holocaust and the Jews’ historical connection to the land of Israel — a denial echoed in the charge of “settler-colonialism” that is falsely and uniquely level against the Israelis.

With calls to “globalise the intifada” echoing on the campuses of the West, it’s become clear that today’s cultural Marxists are playacting in the only drama they’ve been taught by their radicalised professors. Unburdened by knowledge of the past, unfamiliar with the sacrifices laid by so many on the altar of freedom and ordered liberty, unacquainted with any but anti-heroes, these anarchists, schooled in the likes of Herbert Marcuse, Edward Said, and Frantz Fanon, have learned to regard civilisation as little more than a set of unreasonable constraints on their appetites. Their feverish imaginations transform perpetrators of unspeakable evil, washed not in the blood of the lamb but that of slaughtered Jews, into innocent martyrs in the cause of human liberation.

And it’s not just Hamas that benefits from this demonic alchemy. Marx’s knowledge that he belonged to the “small section of the ruling class [that] cuts itself adrift and joins the revolutionary class”, and that he effectively called the proletariat into being as a revolutionary agent by endowing it with class consciousness, must have considerably assuaged his bourgeois guilt. Hamas’s supporters, including many students and faculty at expensive, elite universities, are buoyed by a similar knowledge as they attempt to launch the “intifada revolution”. (Perhaps some of them, having embraced antisemitic conspiracy theories, figure that if any cabal controls society, it should be them.) Glamping undergraduates who complain that “finger painting for Palestine is cancelled; these people are animals!” — a remark recently overheard at the University of Texas, as police broke up a demonstration — have taken the torch from jihadis and are trying to set the world aflame with it. In doing so, they confirm the truth of Marx’s observation that “history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce”.