Etan Smallman
Unherd, Nov. 9, 2023
“If the initial concerns of Jewish students — busily covering their skullcaps and Jewish-themed tattoos — were brushed off, it soon became clear that, if anything, they had underestimated the anti-Israeli atmosphere on campuses.”
In my first year at university, in 2005, I vividly recall coming across a Guardian article by Luciana Berger headlined “Why I had to resign”. This was 14 years before she quit the “institutionally antisemitic” Labour Party; back then, she was merely a rising star on the NUS’s National Executive Committee.
In the article, she described being “spat at for being Jewish” at her first NUS conference, and referenced a speaker at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies saying “that burning down a synagogue is a rational act”. I naively assumed the piece had been published years earlier; there was surely no way this sort of bigotry and threat could be contemporary. Almost two decades later, a new generation of Jewish students is experiencing a similarly rude awakening.
Last month, a couple of weeks after Hamas carried out its attack on Israel, a flat inhabited by Jewish freshers at Nottingham Trent University was trashed and a note was left stating: “FREE PALESTINE. KYS TORY CUNTS.” (The KYS is internet slang for “kill yourself”.) Its authors were so confident in the righteousness of their cause that they even wrote their flat numbers in the corner of the A4 sheet, complete with two love hearts.
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