National Theatre director, Sir Nicholas Hytner, speaking at the London Jewish Culture Centre this week, was clear about his opposition to boycotts. When his institution embarked on collaborations with the Israeli theatre company Habima, he said: “None of my colleagues said, let’s not work with them.”

But he also revealed that as a young pupil of Manchester Grammar School, he initiated his own boycott – of the school’s Jewish choir, joining the non-religious one instead. “The standards were not high enough in the Jewish choir so I boycotted it on musical grounds.”