The past year has felt relentless at times for British Jews, and CST’s latest report shows why. Antisemitic incidents barely let up in 2024, with the wave of anti-Jewish hate unleashed by the October 7 attack enduring throughout last year.
Before the Hamas terror attack on southern Israel, CST had only recorded monthly totals of 200 or more antisemitic incidents five times in 40 years of doing this work. Since October 7, there have been more than 200 anti-Jewish hate incidents recorded for every month bar one. It’s a statistic that confirms what most of us feel intuitively: antisemitism has become more common, more mainstream, and harder to avoid.
These incident figures are what enable CST to speak to government and police with authority. It contains the evidence we need to show university leaders that their institutions need to do more to protect Jewish students; and to persuade hospitals and NHS Trusts that the stories of Jewish patients and healthcare staff experiencing harassment and abuse are a sign of a deeper problem they must address.
This is why it is so important to report every antisemitic incident to CST, however small it may seem. As well as trying to get positive outcomes for everyone who suffers antisemitism, whether through the courts or by other means, collating all of these reports in one place gives us the best chance of understanding the scale and nature of anti-Jewish hatred today. Only by doing this can we force change.
Throughout all of this, the Jewish community has shown impressive strength and resilience. CST now has hundreds of newly trained and deployed volunteer security officers, including many young Jews who have decided to step forward and do their bit for their community. It’s encouraging and heartwarming to see, and it’s also necessary, because the number of events our community is organising has also increased.
While many Jewish people feel anxious about showing their Jewish identity in public or in their workplace, school or university campus – as a community, we are refusing to buckle.
We are also finding our friends. Last week I spoke to a rabbi in Manchester who told me about the regulars at the local pub near his synagogue, who greet him with warmth every time he walks past on his way to prayers. On Holocaust Memorial Day last month a neighbour, quite unprompted, turned up at our door with a bunch of flowers – “because this must be such a difficult day for you,” she said. There are so many of these small, personal gestures of support, which together provide a reminder that, outside the highly politicised, activist bubble and the online networks that cause so many problems, there are millions of people in this country who instinctively recoil from the extremism and hatred that underpin antisemitism today.
And yet, as the latest CST report shows, this ancient prejudice has found a new foothold over the past 15 months – and it had been rising gradually for several years before that. This is partly a reaction to the conflict in the Middle East, but the longer-term growth of antisemitism also reflects deeper trends in society, with division and extremism, especially online, harming social cohesion in general. Jews never do well in such periods of history.
This is the good and the bad, the glass half full or half empty, of the Jewish story in Britain right now. Our challenge as a community is to show the strength and self-confidence to ensure that the next 2 months are better than the last.
