Vanessa Feltz has said that every Jewish person she knows is “having... a conversation” about whether the UK remains a safe haven for Jews.
Feltz made the comments in an interview with the Telegraph. “It most definitely is a conversation that everyone Jewish that I know is having,” she said when asked if she has been deliberating it herself.
“I can’t bear to believe it’s a conversation we need to have,” she added.
Feltz, who told the newspaper she “feels... British to [her] bones and soul”, said: “I read English at Cambridge. I specialised in Chaucer. I broadcast to London on the day of 7/7, and have lived in London all my life. I love it.
“My children and grandchildren all live here, and I would hope that this blinkered, knee-jerk, brutal kind of antisemitism is something that has come to a head and will pass.
“I can’t bear to believe that it’s something that people have been feeling and thinking all along.”
She added: “If I am not [British], what am I?”
Feltz has been the target of several incidents over the last few years.
In May, while presenting on Channel 5 after the Golders Green stabbing, she shared abuse she received on the programme’s social media accounts.
One, according to the Telegraph read: “The most entitled people on earth”, and another read: “She’s vile isn’t she? Just like the rest of her ilk!”
Last July, Feltz spoke on her LBC show about an incident where she was targeted by anti-Israel protesters who shouted at her on a megaphone as she headed home.
She said she was singled out because she is “known to be Jewish”.
“I was walking to get to the tube station when suddenly I heard very, very loudly, ‘Vanessa Feltz, Vanessa Feltz, fascist Zionist scum’,” she said at the time.
“I wheeled around and there was a guy, he looked like a white guy to me, not that I know what his origin was, and he was chasing me, screaming into a megaphone and chasing me shouting ‘fascist, Zionist scum’.
“I’m a grandma. I'm 63 years old [now 64]. I've never been an athlete. I was wearing wedge shoes and carrying a handbag, and I thought, ‘Oh my God, I can't run and if he catches me what will you do to me, is he going to beat me up?' And also are other people going to join him, what's going to happen to me?”
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