The veteran New York politician Dov Hifkind urged Jews to be “proud, strong and unapologetic” in the face of “scary” levels of antisemitism in the United States and Europe.

“Let’s be tough Jews who are not afraid,” he told the Limmud Festival, adding, “We hope for the best but we need to remember the past”.

A Democratic representative in the New York Assembly for almost 36 years until he stepped down at the end of 2018, he had once been in the militant Jewish Defence League before embarking on his political career.

Two years ago he founded Americans Against Antisemitism after witnessing an outbreak of Jew-hatred “like we’ve never seen before”.

Mr Hikind, who is 71 and the son of Holocaust survivors, said, “I’m not afraid of the future. I see what is going on and it is scary. And it is something we should be concerned about.”

Incidence of antisemitism had reached “historical levels” in Europe and the USA, he said.

As examples, he cited the fatal shooting in a New Jersey kosher store in 2019 and the stabbing of several people in a rabbi’s home in Monsey during Chanukah the same year, as well as the recent assault in London when a man reportedly said he wanted to “find a Jew to kill”.

A third of college students in the USA said they had experienced antisemitism on campus, while in another poll two in every five American Jews said they had changed their behaviour as a precaution.

He had hosted a young man and his fiancée at his Shabbat table the other week, he recalled. “He told us that when he goes into Manhattan… from his home in Long Island, he takes off his yarmulke. This is America – and this is a very, very common thing that is going on.”

But Mr Hikind had told him, “You cannot do that… You don’t take off your yarmulke for the antisemites because then you are giving the antisemite a victory when you start running away from who you are.”

On Tiktok, a mother had posted a video of her son putting on tefilin in order to educate people only to receive “an avalanche of hate” in response.

Mr Hikind said that since most people did not report incidents to the police, the incidence of antisemitism was much worse than the recorded figures.

But antisemitism did not receive enough serious attention and was generally “not treated in the same way as attacks on other protected groups”.

He also wondered whether perpetrators of attacks paid a price as it was “almost unheard of that anybody goes to jail” in the USA.

He denounced the BDS movement and claimed that moderate Democrats were not speaking out against antisemitism for fear of antagonising the radical left who were now “running the show” in the party.

If education to counter antisemitism had been effective, he wondered, “why are things worse
than ever before? Mabye there is something wrong with what the message is, I don’t know.” But he agreed that “we don’t give up.”

Americans Against Antisemitism was bringing out a visual curriculum which “is like no book than anyone has ever seen before,” he said.

Ten years ago if he had been asked to question the future of Jews in Europe and the USA in a a forum such as Limmud, he said “they’d laugh me right out of the room”.

It would be “crazy”, he said, if people were not considering emigration among their options. No alarm bell would ring six months in advance to warn it was time to go.