Three years ago, Jewish people were made to feel we had no place at Pride in London.
The groups who had marched for years, who had built queer Jewish life in this city brick by brick,
were effectively forced to withdraw. Organisers wouldn't guarantee our safety. They wouldn't put
their stewards through antisemitism training. And they seemed far more interested in pronouncing
on a conflict thousands of miles away than on the wellbeing of marchers walking down their own
streets. The following year, when Keshet UK asked them to sit down and listen, they wouldn't
engage in any meaningful way at all.
So we did what Jews have always done when the door is shut in our faces. We built our own room.
Jewish Pride was never a retreat. It was the opposite. It was a refusal to be quietly edged out of a
celebration that is supposed to belong to everyone. We decided that if we couldn't march, we would still be seen, not hiding in a basement somewhere, not whispering our identity behind closed doors, but out in the open, in the heart of Soho, in the middle of the very celebrations we'd been told weren't for us. We held to our values and we held our ground. We were loud. We were proud. We were unmistakably here.
And here is the thing nobody can take from us: it worked.
This year, things have changed, and changed for the better. A new leadership team has taken the
reins at Pride in London, and they have done what the last one would not. They have engaged. They have worked with us, properly and in good faith. Their volunteers are now doing antisemitism training. Our bloc in the parade is being given every bit of the security assistance it needs. We are not being tolerated at the margins, we are being welcomed back into the fold. This year, we march. And our annual Jewish Pride party has received unity funding from Pride in London itself.
I want to be clear about what that turnaround means, because it is easy to miss in the noise. We did not get back into the parade by softening who we are or by going quiet until the trouble blew over. We got back in by holding firm. By being visible when visibility was uncomfortable. By insisting, for two long years, that Jews belong in queer spaces as fully and unapologetically as anyone else.
The lesson is not that we waited politely and were eventually rewarded. The lesson is that we stood our ground, and the movement moved towards us. That matters, because the last few years have been brutal for those of us who live at the intersection of these two identities. Being gay and Jewish has rarely felt harder. Too many of us have been made unwelcome in LGBTQ+ spaces, asked, implicitly or explicitly, to leave one part of ourselves at the door. And so, once again, we built our own.
Sapphic Shabbat and the The Hineni Project did not wait for permission. They created the warm, defiant, joyful spaces where queer Jews could simply exist as their whole selves. The beautiful irony is that the very groups who were pushed to the edges are now the ones leading us back to the centre. The people told they didn't belong are the ones doing the integrating.
That is what Jewish resilience actually looks like. Not grievance, but building. Not retreat, but joy.
Because Pride, at its core, is a celebration, and that is exactly what this will be. This Saturday,
between 2.30pm and 6.30pm at Miznon in the heart of Soho, we will celebrate both sides of who we are at once. Jewish and queer. Proud of both, apologising for neither.
And I have to say something about you, the wider community. One of the most extraordinary things about our events these past two years has been watching Jews who are not themselves LGBTQ+ turn up anyway. Straight friends, parents, neighbours, people from shul who simply decided that our community does not abandon its own. That allyship has meant more than I can put into words. In a time when so much has felt like loss, it has felt like family.
So I am asking you to do it again. Whether you are LGBTQ+ yourself or an ally who believes that no Jew should ever have to choose between their faith and their identity, come and stand with us. Come to Miznon. Come and celebrate. Come and remind this city what it looks like when our community refuses to disappear.
We were pushed out. We built our own. And now we march back in – together.
Jewish Pride will be held on Saturday, July 4, between 2:30pm – 6:30pm at Miznon, 8-12 Broadwick Street, London W1F 8HW.
Max Royston is a co-founder and primary spokesperson of StopTheHateUK
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