Amjad Khan: ‘people need to speak up for the Jewish community for the sake of humanity’

Khan was speaking at JW3 alongside cricketing royalty – Mike Brearley OBE, three-time Ashes winning England captain, and Daniel Norcross, commentator on the BBC’s Test Match Special.

When asked by Daniel Lightman – who was hosting his fourth annual cricket night at the north-west London hub of Jewish culture – about antisemitism in Muslim communities, Khan responded that it “100 per cent exists” and that “the answer is parenting”.

“I was brought up in a Muslim family and was taught by my parents to love and respect all other people,” he said. “I think we need to teach the next generation about love and acceptance.”

The panellists during the event (photo: Ben Conway)[Missing Credit]

The fast bowler became more familiar with the Jewish community after his retirement from cricket, when he returned to his native Denmark and trained as a barrister.

He helped the Jewish community in Copenhagen with his legal skills when an “insidious and antisemitic” movement to ban non-medical circumcision, Intact Denmark, gained traction in the last decade.

“At one point, I actually thought they might succeed, which would have been the end of Jewish life in Denmark,” said Khan, who also represented Denmark internationally.

He became chair of a Jewish organisation battling against Intact and said that it “opened my eyes to a lot of things”.

“This form of hate surprised me. It is the oldest hate and quite structural in many ways,” Khan said.

“It’s also the way it affects my fellow citizens,” he continued. “Coming here [to JW3], we have to think about security, or if you can you wear your kippah on the way out. I didn’t know about any of these things. In a way, it was surprising and also not so surprising.”

Khan, who won his only England cap in 2009, said his first encounter with antisemitism was when the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks prevented him from joining up with England’s one-day squad in India.

Among the locations targeted by the terrorists was Nariman House, a Chabad centre in south Mumbai. Six Jews were killed there, including Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg, the couple who owned and ran the building.

The other panellists recounted tenuous anecdotal links to Judaism, albeit far happier ones.

Brearley, who thrice led England to Ashes glory, said he thought at one point that he might be Jewish as his mother was called Marjorie Goldsmith, although an ancestry test showed that his heritage was all from northern Europe.

He also said that he had “always had a certain liking for the difference between a synagogue and a church”.

“There’s always a sort of overt piety at a church,” Brearley said. “In a synagogue, you get people talking about football, marriage, children, sport, politics – all of it,” he said, much to the amusement of the audience.

And Norcross said that his mother used to pretend to be Jewish “because she thought Jews had all the best jokes”.

“There was a constant supply of Jewish comedy in our house,” he recalled.

The event was well received by the audience, which included the father of current England opening batsman Ben Duckett, and the panellists stayed behind at the end to chat to guests.

It came at the start of the inaugural Jewish Culture Month, which launched on Sunday and celebrates Jewish life in Britain.