This small book with a large purpose is one that I hoped I would never have to write. But then I never imagined that a British political party, with five members of Parliament, would pass a vote at its annual conference declaring the 80 per cent or more of us believing in Israel’s right to exist, would be declared “racist”. Still more unimaginable until now, that same party conference of the Greens declined – by a substantial margin – to protect Jews from being excluded from membership, should they have the effrontery to belong to a synagogue, deemed (by their Party) to have committed Zionism, which is to say, not wanting the only place where Jews can defend themselves to be wiped off the face of the earth. Admission to the Greens is now conditional on the acceptance of defencelessness. They thus join an historically long line of cultures and institutions that have assumed that this is a basic requirement for the toleration of Jews.
Who, exactly, are the racists here? Just last week, a distressed mother told me that her undergraduate daughter, minding her own business in a college cafeteria, was berated by a student for wearing a bracelet with a Hebrew letter khet (for “life’). When she confirmed this, he spat on the charm and on her. How naive we were to imagine, after the murder of six million of us, and all the (provisional as it turns out) wringing of hands, that this might never happen again.
Given the ceaseless barrage of abuse, verbal and physical, including the fire bombings of synagogues in Canada, the murderous assault in Heaton Park, and the massacre of Jews celebrating Chanukah on Bondi beach, our capacity for shock gets numbed. But, that’s OK since here comes another mindless moral atrocity to start it up again. On October 7 2026, the third anniversary of mass murder, rape, torture, mutilation and abduction, you will hear, courtesy of a student-organised march across London, the usual yells for Free Palestine – undisguised now as meaning the annihilation of the Jewish state and its people. You will also see, on this day of mourning, signs which superimpose the swastika atop the Star of David. Historical illiteracy does not, of course preclude the power to inflict pain.
In fact, the disqualification of Jewish grief is what gets your journeyman anti-Zionist up and going every morning. Hence the fun of calling us Nazis; hence the thrill of razoring away the faces of hostages, especially when they were the faces of children (many of whom were killed in captivity); extra points should a dumbfounded Jew protest at the inhumanity.
But I wrote this little book, not to vent, but to act; and to ask my readers – those within the Jewish communities of the world and those outside it – to push back against the monstrous demonization currently engulfing us. In its pages you will find the armoury for your counter-attack against the barrage of lies directed at us every day; above all the accusation of genocide pointedly directed at a people who suffered the extermination of two thirds of their European population.
Jew-Hatred: the Latest Edition is a primer for the restoration of historical fact, and with it the upholding of our civil rights; our collective dignity; the righteous pride in the endurance, culture, religion, history and humanity of the Jewish people.
Learning, we were told as children, is the highest of Jewish vocations, whatever way we might earn our bread, which makes witnessing the advance of the armies of ignorance especially painful. Hence my concern in these pages to dispose of the most dangerously fatuous products of that ignorance, prime among them the canard that Zionism has caused antisemitism. For anyone with a shred of knowledge it has been, self-evidently, the other way round. To the preposterous or disingenuous claim that antisemitism will vanish with the disappearance of Israel, millions of the Jewish dead, persecuted and murdered centuries, millennia before Herzl checked the proofs of Der Judenstaat, raise their ghostly voices in agonised contradiction.
I write with the grievous awareness that Holocaust memorials have not arrested the tide of Jew-hatred from its poisonous surge; that for some time hence we will need armed guards at the doors of synagogues and Jewish schools; and in some cases the shield of government to contain abuse and protect against harm. But to be Jewish is never to despair of education of which more, not less, is needed in the non-Jewish world, and not the kind of education which confines the story of the Jews to the Holocaust and the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Our tradition, our literature, our religion, our history, our back-and forth across the world; our argumentative complexity; is a glory that has no business apologising for its endurance. Let it shine and let the murk of lies shrink before the blaze of truth.
