The Great British Disenfranchisement of the Jews

This op-ed was originally published on October 25, 2019.

Choose your poison. The anti-Semitic populist left or the racist, illiberal populist right?

You’re a British Jew. Who would you choose between a political camp which consistently dismisses and delegitimizes complaints of anti-Semitism and actively interferes with official investigations into them, or a political camp which glorified a crude, nostalgic nationalism, whose leader ridicules minorities?

If you had to choose between the mainstream left party leader who doubted whether Jews could be sufficiently culturally acclimatized to appreciate Britain’s tradition of irony, or the mainstream right-wing politician who accused the Illuminati and George Soros of interfering in U.K. politics, which way would you go?

If you had to choose between a leadership circle soaked in the foundational anti-Semitism of the U.K.’s militant left, whose revolutionary ardor embraces Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, Putin and Assad, or a leadership circle running after the votes of the U.K.’s anti-immigrant nativist nationalists, playing footsie with mentors of the U.S. alt-right, what would you do?

>> Why Anti-Muslim Hate Is Back With a Vengeance in the U.K. Conservative Party >> Victory for the Jew-baiters: How Corbyn Destroyed Britain’s Labour Party

What if you, like two thirds of U.K. Jews, voted against an isolationist Brexit, but had to choose between a Conservative administration determined to leave the EU at any cost, and a Labour party led by an ideological opponent of the EU, whose Brexit policies have been a stammering joke?