When her Welsh spouse shared his fears of rising Jew-hate affecting their children, Charlotte Marcus* realised she could no longer opt out of being Jewish
November 13, 2025 16:59
I’d always thought of myself as “technically Jewish”. Yes, both my parents are Jewish – my father is from north London and my mother from Leeds – but they both left the trappings of Judaism behind when they left home. My brother and I were brought up in Sussex, and although we would visit our grandparents for some Jewish holidays, and occasionally saw the inside of a synagogue, we were sent to a CofE school, celebrated Christmas and had family meals that frequently featured bacon and prawns. Once I was old enough to make decisions for myself, I turned my back on it (except for the food, Evelyn Rose has always had a place on my bookshelf.) It wasn’t that I had anything against Judaism per se, I just didn’t really believe in the concept of any organised religion. I essentially saw it as a load of outdated rules about what you could and couldn’t eat, when and with what, that seemed no longer relevant in the face of modern-day refrigeration.
And so being Jewish became a part of me that silently existed, but I never really thought about. But October 7 changed all that. Until then, the rise in antisemitism had been a peripheral concern. I wasn’t oblivious to it – I never have been – but I never really felt that it was likely to affect me or my family. After all, I’d married a blond-haired, blue-eyed Welshman, and despite my dark hair and olive skin, our two girls, now two and four, looked like carbon copies of my husband. We live in south London where if my dark looks give anyone pause for thought, they usually assume I’m Spanish or Italian. I don’t wear the Magen David my grandparents gave me as a child. As my non-Jewish husband would never wear a kippah, we’re unlikely to be easily identified as Jewish, or targeted.
But the reaction that I saw to October 7, coupled with the rise of the far right across the world, has made me increasingly uncomfortable. I realised that while I might think I’d opted out of being Jewish, my genetics, and those of my children, very clearly said otherwise. If push came to shove, it wouldn’t matter to the antisemites that I was one of the bacon-eating Jews who hadn’t had a bat mitzvah. I was Jewish.
For my (Presbyterian on paper but brought up atheist) husband it’s been a steep-learning curve. And it’s possibly because he’s so keen to understand this aspect of our children’s heritage that I’ve had to confront it. I remember us discussing the rise of antisemitism when our first child was not yet two and him saying to me with tears in his eyes, “I can’t bear that someone would want to harm her just because she’s Jewish.”
It was him that pointed out to me the dad who picks up his child at nursery wearing a Palestinian football shirt, him who said to me earlier this year, “I’ve been thinking about where we could go if we needed to leave.” And me who stared at him aghast, realising I wasn’t just being paranoid, he – someone I consider to be utterly rational – was really concerned.
It was my blond, blue-eyed husband who pointed that the dad who picks up his child at nursery wears a Palestinian football shirt"
It was him who bought us tickets to see Giant, the play about Roald Dahl and his antisemitism, in a bid to better understand my ethnicity. But it was me who watched, in floods of silent tears, as Dahl’s character spits: “I used to think they were separate things – Israelis, Jews – but now, now I see it’s the same bag: the clubbing together, the assertion of influence, the outraged defence: you’re imagining things! It’s in your heads! Then bam! Right there, running rings round us.” I know exactly why that particular line hit so hard. Because that lumping together of Israel and the Jews was increasingly my own experience.
Nobody’s called me names, or defaced my property, the antisemitism I’ve felt has been more insidious – and all the more chilling for that. Even among friends who I consider largely educated and liberal, antisemitism seems to be a blind spot, the last acceptable form of racism. I watched Giant just days after I’d watched footage of the Glastonbury crowd shouting “death to the IDF” and following that I’d had to explain to a friend of a friend on Facebook that although nobody was shouting “death to all Jews”, in the context of what has happened in the past, you can’t blame Jews for feeling that they might as well have been.
In the same way, some months later, I had to explain to a friend on a WhatsApp group that her wearing a Free Palestine badge and, in her own words “not caring who she offended” bothered me.
As I pointed out, in the wake of October 7, before any retaliation, I didn’t see the wave of condemnation across social media that I have seen following other terrorist attacks. It’s hard not to put two and two together and make four. Her response? She didn’t feel that Israel needed her support. “Jewish people have power and political status,” she told me. As another friend who witnessed the exchange commented to me privately, “She just stopped short of saying you had gold coins and big noses.”
More worrying for me was that this WhatsApp group had almost 40 people in it – people I’ve known for decades and count as friends, people who saw me go on to say that, as a family we’d been talking about where we could go where we would be safe, in the same way that Jewish families in the 1930s had.
Four people got in touch with me to ask if I was OK. Four. When I’m feeling charitable, I think they don’t know what to say. When I’m not, it’s terrifying.
It made me think of an incident that happened around 20 years ago, when a Jewish woman I worked with was horrified when I said I didn’t have any Jewish friends. “But who would you trust if it happened again?” she asked. I thought she was mad. Two decades on, I don’t think that at all.
The truth is I don’t have close Jewish friends. There are a handful who I met at university and in the years since who I still see sporadically. They’re all practising in various ways and members of larger communities who I know would be open and welcoming to us. But I’m not sure that I want that. And, entirely selfishly, at a time when synagogues and places where Jews congregate are being targeted, why would I put my family in harm’s way?
But speaking to them and hearing them contextualise what’s happening now has been – to some extent – reassuring. The thing is, I’ve never met anyone like me and my brother – Jewish but not. I had friends who would say that they were, but then when we talked, I’d find out that as teens they “went to shul on a Friday night because all my friends did” and went to Israel in their gap year, and still have Friday night dinner with their families. I’ve never had friends who went to shul. I’ve never been to Israel. And I don’t feel any more inclined to now.
What I can say is that the current climate has made me more conscious of what it means to be ethnically Jewish. I feel I no longer have the luxury of being able to ignore it as I could before. And I’m not sure where that leaves me – neither Jewish enough, nor gentile enough. It’s complicated – but then, as a Jewish friend pointed out to me, all of this is complicated. For all that social media would like to have you believe in binaries, the history of Israel and the Palestinian people is more complicated. And yet several millennia later, we’re still here. Maybe I should take comfort in that.
*Charlotte Marcus is a pseudonym.
Identifying details have been changed
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