JustASC

I’ve been reading some grim reports about anti-Semitism in Britain and the rest of Europe. The ADL yesterday declared a “pandemic” unleashed by the war in Gaza. The BBC is reporting on figures suggesting 2009 is on course to become the worst year on record for anti-Semitic abuse in the UK, and interviews a 32-year-old man attacked last month in London’s heavily Jewish  Golders Green community. Playwright Caryl Churchill has written this appallingly one-sided playlet about the war in Gaza.

The stats don’t give me a clear picture of what it feels like to be a Jew in England these days, so I called my old friend Winston Pickett, who is director of the European Institute for the Study of Contemporary Anti-Semitism.  He is helping to organize next week’s London Conference on Combating Antisemitism.

Winnie is an American, but has lived in Brighton with his British wife and kids for almost 10 years. I asked him to relate his experience in England to what he remembered of life in the United States.

Q: You’ve lived there — what, 10 years now. Help me understand what it feels like to be a Jew. The ADL paints a dismal picture.

Winston Picket: I would be remiss if I didn’t say, and not simply on a level of self-interest, that “something is happening and you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones.”

The atmospherics, the atmosphere and the situation on the ground. Anti-Semitism has risen drastically especially over the last number of weeks in particular in response to Gaza. It’s the highest rate in 25 years. Okay, some say, “Gaza was a big operation and got a lot of media and what do you expect.” And there is always an ebb and flow, peaks and valleys after incidents or conflicts in the Middle East. But according to the Community Security Trust, the major organization that has been clocking these statistics since the 1980s, the current spike is never like you’ve seen before.

On the other hand, Jews never had it so good. There’s a burgeoning cultural renaissance. There are more people involved in Jewish education, more Jews who are coming out of their shell, who are more expressive. You see more kippot, more Jewish educational stuff. A robust nonprofit Jewish sector.

And yet there is a sense of being a real minority – even the Sikhs out number us 2 -1; we’re only 280,000-300,000. And the media is not the same as in the United States. They always take the left wing line and almost always see Israel as the aggressor. When you turn on the media, and listen to the chattering class, it invokes a sense of siege.

So there’s a dissonance. Economically and socially Jews have the good life like everybody else, now less so thanks to the economy. But then there are the incidents on the ground – higher than on record. There is a kind of a whiplash effect. Our antennae are always working overtime.

Q: Is the government on your side?

WP: Leading into this conference, the UK government has done more to meet the concerns of the Jewish community here. After the UK’s [All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry into Antisemitism] in 2005, its chairman, Dennis MacShane – not Jewish by any stretch of the imagination — declared “we were shocked at the degree at the degree of hostility.” Now you have this conference of parliamentarians trying to find straight answers by using the UK model.

In addition, in the wake of the Macpherson inquiry (into the death of black teenager in 1993), anti-Semitism is right up there with other hate crimes. There are more incidents being counted because we are more vigilant.

Q: And beyond the physical attacks?

WP: On campuses kids feel a lot under siege because of the intelligentsia and Palestinian activism. It crops up time and time. Generally speaking – if you are on campus there’s a real chilling effect.

Most of the time you feel it when you open up the newspapers. But we have the commonwealth and local government [Government's Department of Communities and Local Government (DCLG), which is a co-sponsor of the London Conference on Combating Antisemitism, along with the Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO)] backing this conference. All good indices.

Q: What do you guys tell critics who say Jews are too quick to cry “anti-Semitism” when it’s really criticism of Israel?

WP: “Us guys” — I’m a one-man think tank!

I say we should be able to live as free and open members of society without getting harassed or beaten up. People are always going to be blogging and wearing their heart on their sleeves and prone to play the anti-Semitism card – to see anti-Semitism behind every critique. But that doesn’t account for or excuse the dehumanization of Jews, or calling Israel a Nazi state. You have to differentiate between what you may call an argument and what is far too often a vilification whereby Jews themselves are under attack. People getting hit going to shul because they were identifiable by wearing kippot, simply because what happens in Israel. Imagine blacks being attacked because of what Mugabe is doing, for crying out loud. You feel it on a daily basis.

Personally Fiona and I made a pact that after 7/7 [the 2005 London bombings] — no kippah on the train, not out in the street. It’s not fear, it’s practical. The minority status is much more pronounced here.

But again, on a high level of government, they get it. That’s one of the other reasons for this conference.

Q: Do you think some of the American defense groups paint an overly grim picture of anti-Semitism in the U.K. and Europe?

WP: Sure – they see Europe as living in a graveyard, and have a stake in defending their own lives in America. But we’re doing our job here. We’re fighting back. Pulling together a conference like this here is a big deal. We’re putting the issue on the map. We’re not taking it lying down. On the contrary — it’s good to be in the fight.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 13th, 2009 at 11:24 am and is filed under JustASC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.