The Guardian’s deputy opinion editor, Toby Moses, says he will no longer correct people who take him as Jewish, although he does not consider himself to be so.

In a column on the paper’s website, he explained he did not want it to appear that Jewish was a label to be ashamed of at a time of rising antisemitism.

Mr Moses said Judaism had never been his part of his identity because, although his father’s parents had been Jewish, they had never practised it.

“There wasn’t any of the cultural aspect in my childhood, no Friday night dinners or happy Chanukahs to remember,” he said.

But the past couple of years had made him “question why I felt the need to push back so hard whenever someone told me I was Jewish,” he admitted.

He had once believed the idea of widespread antisemitism far-fetched and Jews were not a group that needed protection any more. “That itself was a form of prejudice – I believe it’s at the heart of why so many on the left are resistant to the idea that it exists among their cohort,” he said.

But in the wake of the “shocking” rise of antisemitism, he said he was “not going to correct people who insist that I’m Jewish any more. I don’t consider myself Jewish, but I would hate for anyone to think I saw it as a label of which to be ashamed.”

An appropriate response to antisemitism could never be to say,“‘I’m not even Jewish.’ Because if, in the act of correcting people, it sounds like a rejection of the label, an embarrassment to be shrugged off, I’m doing a disservice to my Jewish friends and Jews suffering due to antisemitism around the world, not to mention the memory of my own grandparents.”