I grew up in what people call the London Jewish bubble, although at the time it didn’t feel like a bubble at all. It just felt like life.
Until I was eleven, everything around me reflected what Judaism looked like in the UK: my school, my friends, the spaces I spent time in. Even when I moved to a secondary school that wasn’t technically Jewish, it still felt the same. There were a lot of Jewish students, a lot of familiar faces, and it never really felt like stepping outside of anything. I didn’t grow up thinking my religion was controversial or something that people argued about. It was just part of who I was, in the same way you don’t question things like where you’re from or what you look like. There weren’t debates about Judaism in school, and there definitely weren’t conversations about Israel – it just existed. I never questioned telling a friend I was travelling to Israel for the holiday or if chose to post it on my Instagram. Looking back, I realise how sheltered that sounds, but at the time it wasn’t something I thought about. I just assumed this was normal.
I think that’s why what happened in Golders Green stayed with me. Not because it was the first time something like that had happened – it unfortunately was not – but because of how predictable everything around it felt.
At 1:45pm on Tuesday, my phone rang – a friend asking if I’d seen what had happened. Like I usually do, I went straight onto Instagram and checked Jonny Daniel’s profile. He’s normally one of the first to post any UK Jewish news. I expected to see something I recognised. Another attack, another headline where you read the location and think it’s uncomfortably close to home. But this felt different straight away. I messaged my dad assuming he’d already seen it, and even he hadn’t. Within an hour it was everywhere. And then everything else followed. The statements, the same language being used again and again, the same reactions online before the comments get turned off. I remember saying to my friend, almost without thinking, how long it would take before the government’s “thoughts and prayers” started coming in. It wasn’t even really a joke – it was just obvious.
That’s what made me start thinking about school again, and about Robert. Robert was the security guard outside my primary school, and before that, outside my nursery. He was just always there. He knew all of us, spoke to our parents, and stood by the gates every day like it was the most normal thing in the world. I started thinking about school trips where we’d all get on the train and go onto the London Underground, loud and excited like any group of eight-year-olds. The boys would be told to put caps on over their kippot. They’d argue like always about whose hat was better – the red Arsenal one or the blue Spurs one. It sounds ridiculous now, but that’s what we cared about. I remember one of them taking his cap off and being told straight away to put it back on. No explanation. He just did it. We didn’t question it. Like every other school we had fire drills, but we also had green triangle drills – a corner in the classroom we would go to if a different alarm went off, the one that kept us most out of sight. That didn’t feel strange either. It was just part of school.
It wasn’t until later that I realised any of that was unusual. I had a conversation with a friend at secondary school after we bumped into Robert and I told her who he was. She didn’t understand why a primary school would have a security guard at all. I remember being confused by her reaction. I think I’d assumed the difference between schools was just age, that younger kids needed more protection which was why my secondary school didn’t have tall gates or security guards. It only really clicked afterwards that it wasn’t that. It was the difference between Jewish and non-Jewish spaces. That was the part I hadn’t noticed.
And that kind of normal hasn’t really gone away. It just looks slightly different now. I remember one of my university friends asking where I was going one evening so we could walk together, nothing unusual about it. I told her I didn’t actually know yet, that I’d find out a couple of hours before. She paused and looked at me like I’d said something completely strange. I didn’t think anything of it, so I just explained that it was for security reasons, that locations aren’t shared until the last minute in case something is planned. I remember the look on her face when I said that –properly horrified. And I think that was the moment it hit me, not because I suddenly realised it was unusual, but because she did. To me, it still felt completely normal, it was just how things worked. The idea that you wouldn’t question it, that you’d just accept it as part of going somewhere, was something I’d carried with me without really noticing. Even now, it doesn’t always feel strange unless I see it through someone else’s reaction.
Unsurprisingly, these thoughts have crossed my mind a lot this week. I saw Robert in Sainsbury’s last year and stopped to say hello like nothing had changed. That’s what it felt like growing up –normal, familiar, safe. And I think that’s why I’ve been thinking more recently about what my childhood as a Jew actually looked like. About the high walls around buildings, about how quickly you can be security trained, about the number of provisions that go into something as simple as a university event. None of it felt extreme at the time. I loved growing up in the Jewish community. I didn’t question my safety, and in a lot of ways I still don’t. There are organisations like CST that exist to keep us safe, and they do. But recently I’ve started thinking more about why they have to.
Because my normal doesn’t actually look like everyone else’s. It means security guards outside schools, police wandering down Golders Green Road, events where you don’t know the location until the last minute and leaving in smaller groups so you don’t draw attention to the fact that there’s a Jewish gathering. It means that one of my first thoughts when I go somewhere isn’t just what the event will be like, but what the security will be like as well. And that isn’t something we’ve just quietly accepted. It’s something people talk about, complain about, push back on.
But the response never really changes: more security, more protection, more presence. And those things matter, they keep people safe. But they don’t answer the question underneath it all. Not what is being done to protect us, but why that level of protection is needed in the first place.
Lottie Cannon is 22 years old and a student at the University of Amsterdam
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