A Corbyn Win Would Make British Jews Feel Like Second-class Citizens

What makes a country safe for a Jewish community?

At any point of history, right up until our grandparents' lifetimes and even, in some cases, our parents, the requirements were pretty basic. As long as they don’t kill us, let us work for our livings (even if some professions were blocked or restricted) and allow those of us who wish to worship according to our traditions to do so, we could survive, and even prosper.

These conditions exist now pretty much in every place where a Jewish community exists. The last places where a Jewish community was physically threatened were in the Arab countries of North Africa and the Middle East in the 1950s. Under Communism in Eastern Europe, Jews were forbidden to worship and organize communal life up until the end of the 1980s.

Jews have been targeted and murdered in recent years in the United States, France, Belgium and Denmark. Plans to carry out more murders were foiled in other countries, including Germany and Britain.

But in none of these cases was the state involved in the killings. In fact, almost everywhere today, the state actively protects Jews.

This is more than our grandparents in most countries could have ever hoped for. But today Jews expect much more.

Fifty years ago, when my father was at Manchester Grammar School, there was an old teacher who would regularly say things in class like, "There weren’t any Cheetham Hill Jew-boys on the Somme." It may be unimaginable today, but in the British education system in the 1960s, a teacher could say stuff like that without being sacked.