This was supposed to be a piece about how to talk to antisemites: to make them hate Jews less, that is, not more. But it might be a piece about how not to speak to antisemites; or how not to speak to them at all.
My first anecdote: I went to a “pro-Palestine” (though functionally pro-war) protest in Penzance, where I moved ten years ago to escape the culture wars. Unfortunately, they followed me. The native Cornish are decent – they know what is real, and what isn’t – but the Frome/Hackney diaspora live here too. Here is an ever-present truth: beware of bad artists with time on their hands.
Why do I go to these things? Because sitting in my house alone, one of the five and a half Jews of west Cornwall, is worse. Because I like stealing their signage, which they sometimes leave lying around, and putting it in my recycling bin. Because I want to know how afraid I should be; and when my son, the only Jew in his school, will be reminded of how Jewish he really is. Antisemites will mock my fear, because they refuse to accept that rhetoric makes life. They treat antisemitic violence as a firework, a surprise, something without context. It fell near them, and on us. They don’t read history books. I’m not stupid: I doubt I will be beaten up by Quakers. But I believe in the horseshoe theory. The Quakers and the far right they despise are not at poles. They are twins, and if you tell them that, they get angry and that is pleasing, if not useful.
So I went, and I met a woman. She looked like an expert in crochet with a resentment against hairdressers. They all do, the women at least. The men look like humanities lecturers at former polytechnics, or people who live inside bushes. I asked her – why are you here? Because, she said, Israel has killed all the Palestinians. I asked a supplementary question: all of them? Surely I would have heard? Is it not you who has killed all the Palestinians, and in your head? She clarified her position to: Israel wants to kill all the Palestinians. I accused her of blood libel. She did not know what that is. I told her: born in Norwich in 1144, a child called William, etcetera. She did not listen but walked off saying, “You’ve made me very angry [and on a Saturday].”
I am a bad advocate, because I am quick to anger too. Perhaps I could have converted the woman reading The Librarian of Auschwitz by the sea last summer. She was reading it because, she said, she “loved” reading about the Holocaust. This, surely, was opportunity. I could have converted her from Holocaust tourist to Holocaust memorialist. Instead, I asked her if she had heard of Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, Zalman Gradowski, or Tadeusz Borowski. I patronised her. I assembled ghosts to chide her. I asked her: have you read This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen? It didn’t work, except I made her very angry [and on a Thursday].
All my interactions are like this. I fall to culture war. I take it with me. I have fallen out with the “progressive” half of the village: the Frome/Hackney diaspora. Online, I made a woman roll back from Jewish to Quaker with a Jewish husband. It was funny, but she didn’t hate me less for it. Andrew George, our local Liberal Democrat MP, has blocked me on Twitter. I won’t say why: he is devoted to his dignity, and sensitive. At Westminster magistrates court I gave a man from the Palestine Solidarity Campaign [PSC] the double finger as I walked away. I doubt he believes in the instruments of the state, but he called the police on me anyway. They were nice. (“I was born in Wimbledon, it is part of my culture,” was my defence). Even so, this never happens to Ephraim Mirvis.
I once wrote a piece about the female right to vulgarity, which I cherish. What about the Jewish right to rage? Now, as we await murder in our sacred places, are we allowed anger? Does my fury, which presents as facetiousness – I put your signage in the recycling bin, Pippa – serve me? Does the fat, middle-aged woman shouting about Jean-Paul Sartre in Penzance – “it is the antisemite that creates the Jew!” – have purpose?
In some ways, yes: those that cannot anger, cannot heal. (Therapy cannot heal the world, because the world cannot afford it). In other ways no: we must make our case, because no one else will make it for us. Yesterday my son, who is 12, asked me if he should advocate for Jews online, after he got an antisemitic message on TikTok. I said no, but – and he has done this many times in his life – he shows me the way. I cannot afford fury or laughter: for some the defenestration of British Jews is entertainment. I am good at fury. On what to do, I have less.
I am writing a book, of course. Who isn’t? But I do know this. The balance is not held by the double-finger victim from the PSC, or the fool who “loves” reading about the Holocaust because morbidity is her ecstasy, or the MP who goes to Jewish vigils to gather content for his social media in which he chides us, or the pretend Jew who is really, hilariously, a Quaker. (In this she exposed herself. For her, Jewish identity is fiction, to be shrugged on and off). The balance is held by the barely interested. Forget the rest, though they are interesting, in the way that corpses are interesting. But a corpse can’t tell you anything.
It’s hard arguing for your right to safety in this world, because we shouldn’t have to, and because the accusation is still, at heart, witchcraft, against which there is no rational defence. But we must. I can’t speak for Europe. But Britain stood alone against fascism in 1940 and pride in that runs deep. British people – the older ones at least – know that whatever horrors come for Jews come also for their freedoms; and that political extremism and antisemitism have the same ending, which is fire. That is our battleground and it is, happily, based on similarity, not difference. Tell your non-Jewish friends, if you still have them: it is not our struggle, it is yours.
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