On dates we took the L train at Halsey Street or Myrtle-Wyckoff and rode west into Williamsburg or the East Village, with their hip bars and coffee shops. But on the ride home, I noticed a gradual but seemingly inexorable shift: the transplants — college-educated 20- and 30-somethings who use the city as a playground — would get off one stop later each year. And later, and later.

And in this barely remarkable transformation lies the secret to the political changes sweeping Gotham. The city’s turn to the outré progressive politics of Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the Democratic Socialists of America isn’t just political. It relies upon a remaking of the cultural fabric: how it feels, how it works.

Board the train in Manhattan, and the ride is mostly transplants; continue east, and they thin out, stop by stop, until what is left is the rest of us: the construction workers, the doormen who service the Manhattan co-ops, the immigrant families, the locals, me. But a year ago, my wife and I took the train home, and the train was packed all the way to Ridgewood. Everyone was going to one of the bars that had opened a few blocks from the house I grew up in. I stood the whole way. I could not get a seat in my own local spot. 

Ridgewood sits on the seam between Brooklyn and Queens: brick rowhouses, German and Eastern European at first, working class without exception. Its public square was a restaurant, Zum Stammtisch. The name means “the regulars’ table.” Decades later, the Germans made way for Hispanic and Coptic families, who opened their own shops like Rico Pollo or Aghapy Deli. My parents, refugees from Egypt, rented here. Later, on the salaries of two teachers’ aides, they managed to buy a house. There was nothing trendy about the place, but it was safe and stable; I was grateful.

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What happened to my neighborhood is the ordinary course of gentrification. The hipster was invented in Williamsburg around the year 2000, when the rents were cheap and the neighborhood was unsafe. That, in turn, gave people economic incentives to move in and experiment with coffee shops, new restaurants, thrift stores, and art studios. 

The development spiked property values and brought an influx of capital to Williamsburg. The average rent in the neighborhood now is about $5,000 a month, up from shy of $900 at the turn of the millennium. It has a Whole Foods. Naturally, then, those same creative and artsy types moved eastward to Bushwick, whose former industrial areas were rezoned as residential and commercial. But over time, Bushwick rents exploded, given the spread of specialty coffee shops, bars, and electronic-dance-music clubs. Rents exploded to an average of above $3,500, up from under $900 two decades earlier. That’s an exorbitant figure to anyone working outside of finance, tech, and law. 

Then, in the mid-2010s, the transplants came to Ridgewood. The change announced itself in an explosion of notable restaurants. Along Forest Avenue, a residential street off Myrtle Avenue, a dozen places have opened in six years, putting Ridgewood on the culinary map. Rolo’s, located in the base of a row house, is considered the best restaurant in Queens. Hellbender, two blocks up, draws the same clientele.

Two years ago, Time Out New York named Ridgewood the fourth-coolest neighborhood in the world. You can browse Instagram for the best restaurants in the Big Apple, and you will often find multiple Ridgewood options listed among them. And, on top of it all, our very own Whole Foods is coming to the old bank I walked past every day. These places, which I now enjoy with my wife, mean I don’t have to take the train to enjoy city amenities. But the change also means I have to make roughly thrice as much as my parents did to afford their home.

Two storefronts on Myrtle Avenue tell the whole story. One is Joe & John’s, a slice shop that serves as a staple of the neighborhood. When the Knicks played, Joe & John’s hosted giant watch parties for the whole neighborhood. Across the street is Topos, a Left-wing café and bookstore that locals studiously avoid.

Walk into Topos, and a poster of Mamdani greets you, flanked by his slate of now-victorious House nominees. A mood board offers the week’s options: an anti-ICE flyer, a women-against-imperialism meeting, a zine calling for the violent overthrow of the government. Keffiyehs are for sale. Young women wear oversized watermelon earrings (a reference to the one-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict); the espresso machine is peppered with magnets blaring “Free Palestine.”

The music might be Australian lesbian techno-pop or spoken word criticizing America or Lebanese. On the shelves: Abolish Rent, In Defense of Looting, The End of Policing. To the right of the register is a small children’s shelf containing works like Mamdani Walks New York City and Sex Is a Funny Word, billed as an introduction to sex positivity for youngsters. The children’s shelf is tucked away because there are few children. There are only transplants, performing politics fluently for one another.

Standing there, I understood what my neighborhood was becoming: a college town. The tight ring of restaurants, the ideological cafe-bookstores, the absence of families — it all comes together. The Ridgewood transplants are forming an adult campus, their own ecosystem to mimic the liberal college experience.

So like a small college town, there is a spectrum of political involvement, but no objection to the Left-wing ideological system. And underneath this ecosystem is the working class being pushed out by skyrocketing rents and narrowing affordability. The transplants virtue-signal for affordability and call for “decolonizing” the United States, but they are the cause of unaffordability, and they are actively colonizing my home. 

When I visited this week, I found a zine called “a new heaven and a new earth” by chariot wish, a self-described transsexual anarchist (capitalization rules are for the oppressor classes). One poem opens: “I wake up every morning in this killing machine called America, and I’m carrying this rage like a blood filled egg, and there’s a thin line between the inside and outside.”

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This poem, located in this bookstore, in this block that I walked thousands of times near my local pharmacy and my local pizza shop: I cannot help but feel the absurdity. But rage and nihilism toward America form the ideological core of the Ridgewood College ecosystem. Even support of Palestine is done implicitly because Palestine is the tip of the spear in opposing the American imperialist project. The Ridgewood system, and the heart of the DSA itself, represents the nullification of the American way that nurtured me and my family. These ideas gain traction in Ridgewood because of the sheer concentration of transplants, who have a shared restlessness about living in America — perhaps because of their rootlessness. They also have a sense of entitlement created by their artistic and educational attainments, and can’t escape financial stress, notwithstanding their expensive degrees. Hence, they fuel the rise of Mamdani and the DSA.

Claire Valdez, who just took the Democratic nomination for the area’s congressional district — unseating a moderate progressive — is the type exactly. She studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, worked service jobs, and came to New York around 2015 to make art. She did not grow up in Ridgewood and doesn’t, beyond a nominal sense, belong to it. She will soon represent it because the transplants now turn out stronger than everyone else in the Democratic Party. Hers is no longer a congressional seat for a neighborhood, but a congressional seat if the students of Columbia could elect one. 

I learned how far the opportunism runs during this year’s nurses’ strike. My wife was on the line; I stood with her in the cold. The corporate Democrats said publicly they wanted workers to achieve a favorable contract but behind the scenes were mostly beholden to the bosses. Given this, the DSA — with Mamdani, Valdez, etc. — seemed like a good partner for the striking nurses. But upon closer inspection, from the point of view of the DSA, the long-term solution to the nurses’ pay crisis isn’t greater bargaining power or stronger contracts, but the dismantling of capitalism itself (with a side of anti-Zionism). This is almost certainly not what the actual working-class nurses want, but when you’re stuck between two opportunistic parties, you go with the one that’s at least with you, even if opportunistically.

That is the pact the DSA has made with my neighborhood and with the Democratic Party. Ridgewood is a staging ground for an ideology its transplants intend to export. For the DSA, it presents an ideal place to organize, run candidates, and enjoy life largely insulated. They will fight for affordability while actively causing the issue: they aren’t interested in managing gentrification but, again, dismantling capitalism. And when the neighborhood is fully gentrified in 10 years, they will blame capitalism while continuing to serve as its agents, and they will move on to the next neighborhood.

In its own way, each of these events has served to unite the country’s disparate Jewish community. Yet they came, too, after months and years of division — focused on Israel’s conduct during its bloody war in Gaza. For some British Jews, this has triggered deep unease, even pushing some to fundamentally reconsider their relationship to the Jewish state. All the while, as the Manchester attack so vividly shows, the specter of antisemitism is rising back home too.

For now, says Dave Rich, author of Everyday Hate and the policy director of the Community Security Trust (CST), which provides physical protection for Jewish communities, the splits have started to heal. “The weather,” he says, “has definitely changed.” Even so, these divides are far from eradicated, and depending on what happens in the Middle East, they may re-emerge, with consequences not just for Britain’s beleaguered Jewish community, but for anyone interested in this country’s foreign policy. 

There has always been an anti-Zionist Jewish Left. Organizations such as Na’amod consider Israel to be an apartheid state while Jewish Voice for Labour stood by Jeremy Corbyn while he was party leader. But the tensions that have emerged since October 7 were within the large Jewish majority that would call itself broadly Zionist: between those who had hitherto seen Israel as both refuge and inspiration, a light unto nations. Yet two years on from the Hamas massacre that sparked the war in Gaza, leading British rabbis were claiming that Israel’s operations conflicted with fundamental Jewish principles — a claim met by angry, vehement denials from people they’d long considered friends.

Outside the Jewish community, the rift is underreported, but I observed it close to home. Like many Jews, I absorbed a belief in Israel as part of my upbringing, and joined a Zionist youth group in my teens. I vividly remember the collective shock the last time an attack took place on Yom Kippur — in 1973, when Israel was invaded simultaneously by Egypt and Syria with support from a further 10 states, and at first seemed destined for oblivion.

A year after the Yom Kippur War, in 1974, my father co-founded the New North London Synagogue, now a thriving, progressive Orthodox institution with over 3,700 members. Last year, it was wracked by internal dispute when one of its rabbis, Lara Haft Yom Tov, wrote an essay that described Israeli politicians as “war criminals”, prompting resignations and claims that such statements “inflame antisemitic hysteria”.

The synagogue decided not to sack Yom Tov, but another crisis emerged in July this year. Head Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg joined more than 1,000 religious leaders both in Israel and across the diaspora in signing a letter that was highly critical of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. He too faced strong criticism — though also received , as a man who has led his synagogue for 37 years, warm support.

Amid these verbal battles over the future of the Middle East, tensions had long been rising elsewhere. As Rich says, Jews were facing antisemitism long before Manchester, especially on university campuses and in and around schools. There were over 100 antisemitic incidents against Jewish schoolchildren in the first six months of the year, compared to fewer than 75 over the same period in 2023. Along with the apparent tolerance of extreme anti-Israel discourse, Rich tells me that this explains why an increasing number of British Jews began to wonder whether they still had a future in the UK, even if they were unsure where else they might go. Others, however, experienced a different type of insecurity, affecting their inner relationship with the Jewish state.

In the aftermath of October 7, most British Jews reacted instinctively, offering whatever support they could to its victims, and backing what they saw as a righteous military response. The attack awakened collective memories of the Holocaust, while many are connected by bonds of family and friendship to the victims. Others have relatives in Israel’s citizen army, which has been repeatedly mobilized over the last two years.

At first, the almost-immediate protests by pro-Palestinian activists against Israeli military strikes appeared to cement this unity. According to Jonathan Boyd, executive director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research (JPR), which carries out frequent surveys of Anglo-Jewish opinion, there was a “natural tendency to circle the wagons, to seek out solidarity”. Many Jews chose to spend far more time with others from their own community.

A recent paper by the American trauma therapists Miri Bar-Halpern and Jaclyn Wolfman suggested this process was intensified by the long-recognized condition known as “traumatic invalidation”. Psychologically wounded by the Hamas attacks, British Jews discovered that instead of expressing care and compassion, their non-Jewish friends and colleagues were exhibiting “a stunning mix of silence, blaming, excluding and even outright denying the atrocities of October 7”. Struggling to cope with shock and bereavement, they were told their feelings were invalid or inappropriate, “often by influential figures or groups” on whom they thought they could rely.

Yet as the war dragged on, Boyd says, these same feelings began erupting within the Jewish community itself. “The divisions exist within families and friendship groups,” he explains to me, “and they raise difficult questions.”

Rich believes the breakdown in British Jewry’s pro-Israel consensus can be dated to the end of the last ceasefire in March, and Israel’s decisions to cut off aid from international bodies such as the UN. This corresponded with the fraying of unity in Israel itself. With no clear end to the killing in sight, Rich adds, it seemed the country was “no longer unified” behind the war, as demonstrators demanded an immediate ceasefire and the release of hostages at all costs.

Polling data from the JPR supports Rich’s analysis. In a survey timed for the first anniversary of October 7 last year, only a minority of British Jews thought Israel’s prosecution of the war might conflict with Jewish values. This year, the figure was above 50%. Since 2022, meanwhile, the proportion of Jews who identify as anti-Zionists has increased from 8% to 12%. The biggest shift has taken place among the Jewish youth who, of course, weren’t alive for the 1973 war which posed an existential threat to Israel, instead witnessing Israel through numerous rounds of conflict between Israel and Hamas, which have seen high Palestinian casualties.

At the same time, says Rich, British Jews know that the IDF is “made up of their cousins and their friends’ kids, and they know they’re not baby killers”. Yet by late spring 2025, it was also “quite obvious that terrible things were happening in Gaza”. This imposed an unbearable dilemma: “How do you express this in Britain when there are so many people out there who think Israel is the new Nazi Germany, and that if you even care remotely about Israel, you’re some kind of fascist?”

Faced with such questions, in the months before the ceasefire, some Jews found they could no longer agree to differ, let alone compromise, even if disagreement and debate have defined Jewish culture for many centuries. First came the rabbis’ letter signed by Wittenberg and more than 40 of his British colleagues. It condemned the “nihilistic” brutality exhibited by Hamas and supported Israel’s need to battle these “evil forces”. But the rabbis also said they could not condone the scale of civilian casualties, or, most controversially of all, what they claimed was “the use of starvation as a weapon of war”. They said the limits Israel had placed on humanitarian relief “contradict essential values of Judaism as we understand it”, especially the sanctity of human life and the requirement to exercise “mercy and compassion”.

To Israel’s defenders, both there and in Britain, this statement was based on lies. According to Netanyahu’s government, the UN’s claim that it had caused a famine in Gaza was fabricated. Israel’s supporters said it amounted to a “blood libel” — a modern version of the ancient calumny that Jews use Christian children’s blood to make unleavened bread at Passover. I asked one rabbi who signed the letter what he made of this. He said he felt he had had no choice but to speak out, and that if he hadn’t, his silence might make gentiles imagine that Judaism is a “terrible religion”.

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On 10 August, these bubbling frustrations spilled out in public, at the end of what was supposed to be a “national march” in support of the hostages. Outside the gates of Downing Street, in front of hundreds of people, two senior rabbis were booed offstage. Charley Baginsky and Josh Levy, the joint leaders of Britain’s Progressive Judaism movement, had spoken of their horror at the October 7 atrocities. Their hecklers were fellow Jews, in whose eyes the pair’s sin was to call for an immediate end to the war, the resumption of unlimited aid into Gaza, and the creation of a Palestinian state. After the rabbis were hustled away, another speaker was loudly cheered when she praised the crowd for ejecting them. According to Baginsky, “there were moments when I thought we were literally going to get lynched”.

The incident triggered shockwaves. The Board of Deputies, British Jews’ main representative body, called the rabbis’ treatment “disgraceful”, and a statement by more than two dozen Jewish organizations warned it would “give strength to our enemies”. And if that implies there is a link between commenting on Israel and the safety of Jews here in Britain — without, for a moment, denying the agency of antisemitic attackers themselves — Baginsky says she has been warned that by criticizing Israel, she encourages hatred of Jews, as if “the only response to antisemitism is to support Israel unequivocally”.

If the rabbis’ letter represents one end of Jewish opinion, Jake Wallis Simons represents the other. The former editor of the Jewish Chronicle and author of a new book on Western antisemitism is one of Britain’s more strident pro-Israelis, saying that even measured criticism of the Jewish state is liable to “become ammo for the other side”. (Full disclosure: I worked for Wallis Simons at the Jewish Chronicle.)

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Wallis Simons is unsusprisingly forthright in denying that Israel did cause a famine in Gaza. “So far as I’m aware,” he tells me, “all the pictures of people starving have turned out to be of those with congenital issues or health problems like cancer. Before the war, there was death or starvation in Gaza because it’s run by jihadis and there was no proper welfare program for poor people.”

In his view, the Trump-brokered ceasefire underlines something most of the West has forgotten — “the virtues of strength”. Now, he says, democracies “need to embark upon a soul-searching of their own. How can it be that almost every single leader allowed himself or herself to be brainwashed and gaslit by Hamas and its international sympathizers so that all the pressure and condemnation was directed at Israel?”

Nevertheless, Wallis Simons is willing to criticize broader Israeli policy, arguing that Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir, Israel’s two far-Right cabinet ministers, have done “huge damage” — because they have “given Israel’s haters exactly the words and so-called evidence that they need” to accuse it of genocide.

If all this is now, what of the future?

As far as UK antisemitism is concerned, Rich is optimistic that the universal condemnation by British political leaders not only of the Manchester atrocity but also the banning of Maccabi fans is a “pivotal moment”. The Government, he thinks, is very serious about combating antisemitic violence. To be sure, some Maccabi fans have expressed racist views and clashed with rivals, as seen in Amsterdam when their team played Ajax last year. But as he points out, most of the Israeli fans were victims, not instigators of violence. Moreover, there have been English clubs with aggressive supporters too. Somehow or other, the police have usually managed to deal with them.

In Rich’s view, then, “the ban is an absolute disgrace, but at least it’s being seen for what it is: extremists getting to say who can watch football. The police are either saying they can’t police the streets because they have lost control, or that they don’t want to for fear of upsetting them.”

That leaves the question of British Jews’ future relationship with Israel. If, under the terms of Trump’s peace plan, Hamas really does disarm and abandons its hopes of power, the dilemmas and divisions of recent months will likely vanish. But if, as many fear, the war restarts and Israel renews its onslaught, they are far more likely to sharpen.

In such circumstances, Israel’s progress towards international pariah status would probably continue, affecting everything from the country’s participation in the Eurovision song contest to the close cooperation in intelligence and security between Israel and allies such as Britain. Historically, the UK’s Jewish community has played a significant role in influencing British government policy, not only over the Israel-Palestinian conflict, but on issues such as Iran. Arguably, this influence has already weakened, as shown by Keir Starmer’s decision to recognize a Palestinian state, although, for now, no such things exist — a move Starmer himself long resisted, and one condemned by many Jews as a “reward” for Hamas. If the community becomes seriously divided again, this influence would further diminish — even as the Government looks anxiously at the challenge of organized political Islam in Labour strongholds.

For many British Jews, the past two years have triggered a psychological readjustment, which has made something that once seemed unproblematic more challenging: balancing their British and Jewish identities. Then again, as Rich points out, “few Jews alive today know what it is to live in a world without Israel, and the Manchester attack is a reminder for everyone, whatever they think about the war in Gaza, of why Israel exists”.

Two years after the October 7 massacre, Britain’s Jews feel more vulnerable than they have for many decades, yet are united in wanting to give peace a chance. Their misfortune is that, over the short term, its prospects largely rests with others.

The synagogue was named for the philosopher and physician Maimonides, who led the Jewish community here in the 12^th century, when Cairo was the most important Jewish centre in the Middle East. The building was nothing but a roofless shell, but I discovered a work crew laying planks in one of the rooms, up to their knees in fetid water. It turned out that the Egyptian government — the same regime that took possession of much of the property of the 80,000 Jews who’d been forced out of the country two generations earlier — was engaged in a restoration project.

A polite young engineer on the site showed me the location of the stand where the Torah scroll was once read. Another man, in civilian clothes but with some vaguely military authority, told me not to take pictures.

There couldn’t be anything bad about the restoration of a synagogue, could there? It was hard to explain why none of this felt right; why I preferred to see the building left to rot, rather than see it made up like a corpse at a wake. I had the same feeling when I saw other journalists refer seriously to the “Jewish community of Cairo”, quoting a woman who was its “President”.

There was no community, just a regime-approved simulacrum designed to allow everyone to pretend that an ethnic cleansing hadn’t taken place, and that something dead was alive. It was Weekend at Bernie’s. At the time of my visit, the Egyptian Government was trying to get one of its officials elected to a top cultural post at the UN, an effort hindered by this same official’s past support for burning Hebrew books. A synagogue renovation couldn’t hurt his cause! The real Jews were long out of Egypt, but their imaginary avatars were still hard at work serving the narrative needs of others.

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In Cairo, and at similar sites I’ve visited elsewhere in the Middle East and Europe, I’ve felt — in the words of the author Dara Horn — an “unarticulated sense that despite all the supposed goodwill, something was clearly off”. Horn has now articulated that sense, and many other important and elusive senses, in a superb new essay collection, People Love Dead Jews. (I should mention that I spent a summer with the author on a youth programme three decades ago, and have remained in touch.) Horn comes at her subject with a deep grasp of history and a personal commitment to the living Jewish tradition, with an acerbic sense of humour that pops out now and then — and also, refreshingly and necessarily, with anger.

One memorable essay recounts a bizarre trip to several “Jewish heritage sites” in Harbin, China, near the Siberian border. The city is known for its vast Ice Festival every winter, and also for being founded by Jews who were sent there by Tsarist Russia as part of a railway project, but were then dispossessed and driven out by a mix of imperial Japanese occupiers, White Russian bigots, and rapacious communists of both the Soviet and Maoist variety. (Horn quips that “Jewish heritage sites” — a benign term used in many countries for the purpose of multicultural branding and drawing Jewish tourism — sounds better than “Property Seized from Dead or Expelled Jews.”)

The author visits “the largest Jewish cemetery in the Far East”, which turns out not to be a real cemetery at all, but just gravestones on empty ground. The original cemetery was re-zoned years ago and the Harbin municipality moved only the markers, not the bodies, which now seem to be under an amusement park.

The names of those Jews have inevitably been forgotten. A very different posthumous fate befell Anne Frank, the subject of another essay in this book, who, in the decades since her murder at age 16, has been turned into a global brand. Horn is cutting about the way her famous diary has been used as a feel-good story that flatters readers in the same way that a renovated synagogue flatters the multiculturalism of the Egyptian state.

The book’s most famous sentence — “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart” — is something we all like to hear. But it obscures the obvious truth of the text, which was written a few weeks before Anne was turned in by Dutch neighbours to die in a German camp. No one was good enough to save her. “It is far more gratifying,” Horn writes, “to believe that an innocent dead girl has offered us grace than to recognise the obvious: Frank wrote about people being ‘truly good at heart’ before meeting people who weren’t.”

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And it’s easier to love a Jewish girl who can no longer express her potentially uncomfortable conclusions about her own life than it is to tolerate her annoyingly living co-religionists. In 2018, the Anne Frank museum in Amsterdam, located at the site of the house where she hid with her family, wouldn’t let a Jewish employee wear a kippah, explaining that this violated the museum’s “neutrality”. The directors changed their mind only after four months of deliberations, Horn observes, “which seems like a rather long time for the Anne Frank House to ponder whether it was a good idea to force a Jew into hiding.” A similar observation might be made about a place like Belgium, which also has nice Jewish museums and memorials, yet just passed a law banning kosher slaughter, a necessity for those living Belgian Jews who would like to practice their religion.

Looming over Horn’s essay collection is the place that is now home to the largest number of living Jews, the state of Israel. Israel is the ultimate demonstration of Horn’s thesis, though she mostly, and wisely, steers clear of the topic. Many people eager to venerate their vanished Jews are simultaneously uncomfortable with the ones who are still alive in the tiny corner of the Middle East where they fled after most other places on earth became unlivable.

Horn skirts close in one moving essay about a group of Yiddish actors and writers in the Soviet Union of the 1940s who were exploited for propaganda, then killed when they were no longer useful. The communists could tolerate Jews, she writes, “provided they weren’t practising the Jewish religion, studying traditional Jewish texts, using Hebrew, or supporting Zionism” — meaning that nearly all of Jewish life was out of bounds. “The Soviet Union thus pioneered a versatile gaslighting slogan, which it later spread through its client states in the developing world and which remains popular today: it was not anti-Semitic, merely anti-Zionist.”

This differentiation, which outlived the Soviets and is increasingly popular on the Western Left today, is largely lost on the plurality of Jews who are Israelis, and on the vast majority who think a Jewish state is a good idea. Older people here in Israel still remember how in the Yom Kippur War of 1973, just 28 years after the concentration camps closed, the same liberal countries of Europe that were expressing pious regret for the recent extermination of their Jews wouldn’t allow desperately needed American resupply flights to land in their territory en route to Israel, which had just been attacked by two Arab clients of the Soviets and was struggling to recover.

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And in 2021, young Jews can still see how countries like France, Germany, and the UK lay solemn wreaths at Holocaust memorials while participating in the isolation of the Jewish state at the UN, where the Human Rights Council, to give just one example, has condemned Israel more times than all other countries on earth combined. They can also observe how activists in places awash with Jewish heritage sites and Holocaust museums are energetically promoting a boycott of “Zionists” with telling success.

Horn doesn’t go there, in part because she doesn’t need to; her inspired essays say enough. But it is that kind of hypocrisy that’s at the heart of her argument. People Love Dead Jews helps explain the acute anxiety of many Jewish citizens of Western countries in 2021, who feel the ground shifting as old forms of thought reappear in public on both the Left and the Right — and as it becomes clear how few lessons have really been learned.

It began badly when Black Lives Matter UK tweeted: “As Israel moves forward with the annexation of the West Bank, and mainstream British politics is gagged of the right to critique Zionism, and Israel’s settler-colonial pursuits, we loudly and clearly stand beside our Palestinian comrades. FREE PALESTINE.”

As Israel moves forward with the annexation of the West Bank, and mainstream British politics is gagged of the right to critique Zionism, and Israel’s settler colonial pursuits, we loudly and clearly stand beside our Palestinian comrades.

FREE PALESTINE.

— #BlackLivesMatterUK (@ukblm) June 28, 2020

Here is a libel about disproportionate Jewish power. No one is “gagged of the right” to critique Zionism. This is nonsense. The Shadow Foreign Secretary Lisa Nandy has called for sanctions against Israel if the annexation of the West Bank proceeds. That is fair criticism, and no one called it anti-Semitic, because it isn’t.

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But this tweet was. It places all Zionists from liberal to insane in the same space. It excludes liberal zionists from so-called progressive movements. This, considering what Jews have contributed to progressive thought — the creation of Communism, for instance — is what Jeremy Corbyn might call ironic.

Because inside this FREE PALESTINE slogan there is no answer to what should happen to the Jews of Israel when Palestine is free. The question is not even asked. It is as if it does not matter.

I asked BLM UK for details because I think their cause is essential: what does freedom for Palestine mean to them? Are BLM UK for two states in Israel / Palestine, or one? What is the goal of their activism in Israel / Palestine? What do they seek?

They did not answer. Why should they? Why should support of a cause, long denied justice, be dependent on a caveat: that Israel must, as Martin Luther King said, exist. I would answer that it should matter to Jews, morally and practically, that we support victims of murderous racism, in which we have so much experience; but we should also be allowed to support self-determination for Jewish people without being named murderous racists.

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It should matter to BLM too. Some Jews among the young ultra-Orthodox of New York City protest with them. Other Jews and allies fear BLM because they think it calls Israel an illegal state and imperils Jewish life.

None of this will surprise Jews, for whom the price of admittance into progressive spaces is denunciation of Israel in any form. And so, if they proceed, they protest with only half themselves. This is long a dilemma of the Jew in the secular world: a holding back of something. Jewish lesbians were thrown off the Chicago Dyke March for holding a rainbow flag painted with a Star of David. Women’s march leaders praised Louis Farrakhan, who calls Jews “satanic”.

Almost no one on the Left acknowledges that the UN voted for partition in Israel / Palestine in 1947 and the Jews said yes and the Arabs said no; or that Jordan and Egypt swallowed much of the Palestinian state after 1948 and they are not damned because they are not Jewish states; or that more that 800,000 Jews left or were expelled from Arab lands after 1948 and they cannot go home. These Arab Jews are erased from this conversation: what is that but racism?

There is a strong moral case for Israel within its 1967 borders, but you will not hear it: demonisation is preferred. In 2016, BLM affiliated groups called the occupation a genocide. It is unjust, and regularly murderous, but it is not a genocide. Zionism is called a 19th century invention, when it is, in fact, a Bronze Age invention: ignorance then, the foundation of all racism.

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There is more anti-Semitism within BLM activism, and it looks further back than Israel for inspiration. The American rapper Ice Cube published the infamous Mear One mural on Twitter — the anti-Semitic Monopoly game in which Jews oppress the world that caused Corbyn so much agony — as part of his BLM activism. So did BLM Oxford, although it apologised; it had not realised it was anti-Semitic. This does not surprise me, because the discourse on Israel / Palestine on the Left is an affront, and idiotic, full of insinuations, omissions and performative lies.

This week, DeSean Jackson, an American Football star, posted a false quote attributed to Adolf Hitler on Instagram: “because the white Jews knows [sic] that the Negroes are the real Children of Israel and to keep Americas [sic] secret the Jews will blackmail America. They will extort America, their plan for world domination won’t work if the Negroes know who they were…” He has since apologised too. But Stephen Jackson, a former basketball star and BLM activist, defended DeSean Jackson, saying, “He’s speaking the truth”.

This is a libel, but there is light too: after the DeSean Jackson affair African Americans began to address their communities on anti-Semitism. Zach Banner, an American Football player, said: “I want to preach to the black and brown community: that we need to uplift them [Jews] and put our arms around them just as much when we talk about the BLM and we talk about elevating ourselves. We can’t move forward while allowing ourselves to leave another minority race in the dark.” It was a humane intervention into a schism that threatened to become a tragedy; and there have now been many others.

Zach Banner is right, and that humanity should go both ways. Jews have a responsibility to support his kind of BLM. If you would educate yourself about racism you should educate yourself about all racism. They rise ever together, and, if you don’t know that, you’re a fool.