I’m Jewish, but until last week I was afraid to admit it at work
“The world would be a better place if all Jews were dead”. Hitler’s bunker? Hamas HQ? A quote from my university bar in 2001.
Too shocked to respond, I swallowed the sound as if it hadn’t been made. Worse than the words was the silence of the crowd. Not the silence of shared shock. The silence of no-one standing up for the Jews. Or in my case, the Jew at the table. While the conversation moved on, it seems I could not.
That shattering moment would see me spend 20 years in the workforce too aware of my religion and others too unaware. Only when necessary and only with trusted colleagues would I quietly let the J word out.
Last week I dropped the cowardice. Not to my boss or team. To my entire professional network on LinkedIn. Spurred not by courage but duty to a people rocked by the largest loss of Jewish life in a day since the Holocaust. The post went viral.
The public support aside, most moving were the hundreds of private messages from Jews saying it spoke to them and for them. That before then, they had been afraid, but would unmask and speak up. Even more uplifting were the countless non-Jews – enlightened by news of our kindergartens to synagogues needing constant guard – who said their eyes had been opened to the tragic daily realities we face.
Others wrote from major employers whose timid, “balanced” responses to an unbalanced atrocity had left them alienated, while Jewish entrepreneurs used the words to inform staff susceptible to thinking the social media slaughter was somehow rebellious and rightful. There is a complex, painful, necessary path to peace with Palestinians ahead, but it starts with knowing that Hamas is more death cult than cult heroes. Their cause is immoral Jew hate, not moral cause célèbre.
In the week since my post, new chilling events and an exponential rise in anti-semitic incidents have sadly seen the warnings ring true.Schools vandalised, kosher restaurants attacked, and more, while abroad – in Berlin of all places – the Star of David daubed on front doors to mark out Jewish homes.
Indeed Jews face a special treatment of the wrong kind. Had any other community – and remember many victims are Brits – suffered its babies being murdered, girls and women raped, families burned alive, grandparents and disabled tortured, and hundreds taken hostage to face other horrors, our national broadcaster would call the perpetrators terrorists, and our football authorities show leadership with a lit Wembley arch. The routine absence of the right response is discrimination by omission.
Though we would take that absence of support over the alternative that followed. Namely our trauma being trampled on by mob marches with their genocidal message. Somehow a massacre of my people is met by a peaceful vigil on our part in contrast to protests baying for yet more Jewish blood. No calls from the latter to return our children from captivity or sue for peace. Instead they don mocking pictures of the paragliders that turned a music festival into a killing field.
Jews have forever lived with the undercurrent of anti-semitism, explaining why so many find it difficult to reveal their identity at work. When the hate pours forth like recent days, we can continue to obscure or we can stand and be counted. Because we do count. Yet what counts more than anything is the support of our colleagues and fellow citizens. You don’t need to be pro-X or anti-Y to do that. Just side with humanity.
We are at the latest seminal moment in the history of the Jews. When people look back on this time, they might question whether they could have done more to stop the delegitimisation of a country, of a people, of a race – and what that inaction meant for their peace-seeking, hard-working, family-centred neighbours. So now is the moment readers should be asking themselves, “what can I do today?”