Dave Rich has worked for the Community Security Trust since the 1990s, when the principal threat to British Jews still came – quaintly, it now seems – from a hapless rump of far-right would-be rabble-rousers, and the present apocalyptic flood of what one may call “righteous antisemitism” was a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand. Few have been better placed to see it coming, to track its patterns, or to offer conceptual and practical remedies more viable than “build an ark”, which has lately felt like the solitary option.
Dr Rich also has, self-evidently, an academic background. His new book is published under the aegis of the recently established and much needed London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism. Academia has been the nursery and the engine of antizionist Jew hate in the West. One pictures the LCSCA as a kind of Alamo or Fort Zinderneuf, an encircled outpost one hopes will not suffer a similar fate before the relief column arrives.
Rich has two qualities that offer some encouragement. One is that, while far from being a Pollyanna, nor is he a pessimist. You might argue it is his job not to be. But you could equally point out that talking up the menace to Jews – not that one needs to, in light of both evidence and experience – would be an effective way of shaking the CST collection tin. So his measured reading of the situation, and his refusal to offer a counsel of despair, does him credit. The other is that he does not write like a stereotypical academic. He has the knack, common to the best analysts and exponents of ideas, of keeping things as simple as possible while making them as complex as necessary.
The conclusion I arrive upon is that From Be’eri To Bondi, a collection of essays and talks rather than a unified volume, is the most lucid and coherent summary of the present state of Judeophobia you will read. The question, though, is: will anyone else read it? Rich addresses the sense that we are very much on our own. Where any other minority facing down a tsunami of prejudice would correctly expect to find allies – that is, within what we still call, for want of a less ironic term, the liberal left – Jews will find, for the most part, enemies, enablers, apologists, gaslighters, supercilious both-siders, and anything-for-a-quiet-life bystanders training a studied gaze in every direction but ours.
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