It’s no surprise Azeem Rafiq hasn’t heard of Auschwitz

While it may seem unbelievable and hurtful to hear that Rafiq had never heard of Auschwitz, it is not beyond the realms of possibility that it might have passed you by if you have never had any interaction with Jews.

An hour in a history class is not enough. If anything is painfully clear from the antisemitism we have experienced in recent years, it is that teaching about the Holocaust and Jewish life and Jewish history is woefully inadequate in mainstream schools.

Ask any Jewish person who grew up outside the bubble of Jewish community institutions and they will list many examples of ignorance and misunderstandings.

What Rafiq’s admission brought into focus is a long-debated problem that plagues the Jewish community (in Britain) at least.

We need proud and confident examples of Jewish people across our society. We need them in mainstream schools, in wider social circles, in work places and in the groups people join in their spare time.

But if Jewish children are all in Jewish schools until the age of 16 — usually 18 before they go off to university — and if they stick together in tight cliques when they are there, where are people like Rafiq meant to meet us?

We send our children to Jewish schools to encourage and cement a connection to our identity and culture. But then we are stunned when people display woeful misunderstandings about who we are, because they haven’t met us.

Then there is the pressure placed on those Jewish people who do exist in mainstream spaces. Often they are the only Jew, often they are young and ill-equipped to be representatives and fountains of knowledge of the Jewish community and Jewish history.

They haven’t had the experience of a Jewish education or the confidence that affords, they aren’t the advocates they need to be. And even if they are, the environments are often already hostile due to the type of ignorance Mr Rafiq demonstrated.

Anecdotally, I find it is often those Jews in mainstream settings who are not given the support they need to be confident and proud advocates who turn to — shall we be kind — the less traditional Jewish groups who advocate for a misleading idea of Jewish identity and history.

I don’t think Jewish schools are the problem. If they are what you want, good for you. I am saying that communal organisations need to do more to encourage and support an alternative.

There are wonderful experiences and positive gains to be made for the Jewish community as a whole if we are proud and confident outside the Jewish educational setting.

I talked about this with my colleague Keren David, who told me that her most recent book about antisemitism, What We’re Scared Of, is often read by pupils in schools where there is little Jewish presence.

“At the end of talks I give about my book, I often get one or two kids come up to me to quietly tell me they are Jewish and they really liked the book,” she said. “I wrote it for them, as they are the ones who need it.”

Communal organisations must do more to support these people. We don’t want our young people to be too scared to out themselves as Jewish among their peers.

As a community, we have to do more to nurture Jewish identity — not just in Jewish spaces but outside them.