A tsunami of bad news has assailed Jews in Britain since October 7, 2023. Since then, it’s all gone from bad to worse to even worse to – somehow – even worse, with swells in awfulness around each anniversary of that awful day.
Even in the context of a vicious surge in antisemitism from the Islamo-leftist alliance, pouring out of extremist mosques and alive and frightening on the masked and Hamas-glorifying streets, a new and hideous low was hit with the Green Party’s Zionism = Racism motion.
But for three years now the hate has been surging through institutions including the NHS and universities, and, globally as well as domestically, the arts. Last month, the Venice film festival convulsed with pleasure over the perverse “documentary” Naza, a so-called dissection of what its Israeli film-makers assert is Israel’s targeting of civilians in Gaza.
And then there are the quieter manifestations of the turn against Jews. Those who suddenly aren’t invited to literary festivals, for instance. I have wondered more than once if my total absence from the festival circuit this year, to talk about my widely-reviewed, certainly “provocative” book Good Slut, published in March by Little Brown, could be to do with my public Zionist-Judaism. Writers far more famous than me have found their invites lost in the post.
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